Introduction

This chapter introduces the Register-Functional (RF) approach to grammatical complexity, which was motivated by two simple descriptive observations that emerged repeatedly from corpus-based studies of spoken and written registers: (1) the grammatical structures regularly employed by speakers in everyday conversation were long and structurally elaborated, often incorporating dependent clauses, and (2) the grammatical structures regularly employed by authors in specialist written academic prose were not structurally elaborated; in fact, they could be better characterized as structurally ‘compressed’. These documented patterns of use run directly counter to the previous theoretical accounts of grammatical complexity, leading to the need for the alternative approach provided by the RF descriptive and theoretical framework. Chapter 1 introduces that framework and provides an overview of the contents and organization of the rest of the book.