This chapter is concerned with the different features and aspects of language that contribute to what we know as ‘academic style’. We will consider this at different levels through different forms of analysis. We shall then look at a feature of academic language – cautious language, covered by ‘hedging’ or ‘vague language’. Finally, we shall look at more general aspects of style, and some implications for teaching.

Subject-specific language, and its organisation, has been subjected to various types of analysis over a long period of time, starting with register analysis, followed by discourse analysis and, more recently, genre analysis. These will now be looked at in turn.

Register analysis

In the 1960s, the focus was on register analysis, whereby statistical analyses were conducted into, for example, verb tense frequencies and vocabulary frequencies for different subjects (ESP) in order to provide grammar registers and lexicons of those subjects.

The names of Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens (1964) are usually associated with the concept of register in ESP. However, Michael West was, perhaps, the true originator of register analysis in 1936 with his count of the frequency of the occurrence of the meanings and uses of words in a study of five million running words. This was reprinted as A General Service List of English Words (Longman 1953), and presented a list of 2000 of the most common words ‘considered suitable as the basis of vocabulary for learning English as a foreign language’.