Review: Biber (2006) University Language: A Corpus-based Study of Spoken and Written Registers. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Abstract

This book, the twenty-third in the John Benjamins ‘Studies in Corpus Linguistics’ series, presents extensive analyses of patterns in university language use across ten registers. The linguistic foci include vocabulary use, lexico-grammatical variation, the expression of stance, the distribution of lexical bundles, and the co-occurrence of all of the features taken together in a multi-dimensional analysis. It provides descriptions of university language that incorporate broad frequency trends as well as detailed functional analysis. The descriptions presented would be useful for those seeking starting points for further descriptive or curriculum/materials development research. In Chapter 1, the author introduces the book by setting the research context, identifying the book’s purpose, summarising some previous research and outlining major assumptions. The findings reported in the book come from the TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language Project (T2K–SWAL) funded by the Educational Testing Service. The project entailed the development of a corpus representing many registers of university language, a description of that language, and the development of tools to relate the linguistic characteristics of the corpus and assessment materials to each other. While Chapter 2 is devoted to explaining the development of the corpus, the rest of the book is organised primarily by the unit of linguistic analysis (Chapters 3 to 7), and the author does not truly begin to synthesise the findings until Chapters 7 and 8. The primary purpose of the book is to describe the linguistic characteristics of, and functional relationships among, linguistic features of ten university registers. It does so by comparing the many structural features within and across registers rather than by focussing on how individual features are used within a specific register.