Packing and Unpacking of Information in Academic Texts

Abstract

Academic texts are often considered complex in nature. Complexity is often a result of such linguistic phenomena as high lexical density and heavy nominalizations in which verbal processes are coded in nominal structures. Such texts are no longer dynamic in nature, but static. The language used has become grammatically greatly metaphorized. The effects of these processes on the readability of an academic text are obvious: the texts become cumbersome and difficult to decode. This paper looks at the linguistic processes of packing information into clausal structures and unpacking it in non-native academic writing in English. The aim of the paper is to shed light into these complex processes and to enable writers to control the ways they pack and unpack information in the texts they write through explicit knowledge of these linguistic processes