A Corpus-based Multi-Dimensional Analysis Of The Register Features Of English Academic Spoken And Written Discourse

In the past,most of the researches were on written academic English.There were relatively few studies on spoken academic English and even fewer studies on the comparative register of the two.Multi-dimensional analysis of register can effectively present the stylistic features and comprehensive influences of a text,and can simultaneously observe and quantify dozens of linguistic features.And it has been widely recognized and applied by researchers at home and abroad.This study uses multi-dimensional analysis(MD)to compare the British Academic Spoken Language Corpus(BASE)and the British Academic Written Language Corpus(BAWE)to reveal the differences in the different dimensions of academic spoken and written English among native English speakers,the specific linguistic features of these differences and the reasons for the differences.Through comparative analysis,it is found that academic spoken English has the features of high involved production,non-narrative,explicit reference,high persuasion,low abstraction and high on-line informational elaboration.On the other hand,academic written English has the features of high information,non-narration,high explicit reference,low persuasion,high abstraction and low on-line informational elaboration.In terms of internal linguistic features,academic spoken discourse tends to use more subordination features,emphases,personal pronouns and verbal features to express personal opinions.It is more concise in its use of reference with more WH clauses.It is more direct in its persuasive discourse,using more conditional subordination and prediction modals.It tends to simplify the language by using features such as abbreviations and pronouns IT.And it often uses demonstratives to supplement the fragmented information in the text.The academic written English tends to use more noun-related features such as nominalizations and phrase coordination,with more precise referential information and a higher density of textual information.The tense changes are more complex,and more passive structures are used.Persuasive discourse is more implicit,with a preference for necessity modals,split auxiliaries verbs,etc.This thesis is beneficial to help Chinese students grasp the characteristics of academic spoken English and better express academic spoken English.This will change the situation in which Chinese students tend to apply academic written language in spoken discourse and will offer some useful information to English for Academic Purposes(EAP)teaching in China.