The Loss of Explicitness in Academic Research Writing *

Building on the research in Chapter 11, the last paper in this section shifts to a focus on meaning rather than structure, directly challenging the stereotype that academic writing is maximally explicit in the expression of meaning. Rather, this chapter argues that most of the innovative phrasal complexity features that are especially common in academic writing have the exact opposite effect, resulting in discourse that is maximally inexplicit in meaning. The reason for this effect is the loss of grammatical structure associated with phrasal complexity devices. As a result, there are few remaining grammatical signals that specify the meaning relations among grammatical constituents, and thus readers are required to rely on their specialist background knowledge to interpret the intended meaning of academic prose.