"Agile" and "Uptight" Genres

TLDR

This follow‑up study analyzes parallel British and American corpora from the 1960s and 1990s to examine factors driving the colloquialization of written English and the narrowing gap between spoken and written norms, a trend noted in both sociocultural and corpus‑based research. The authors propose a spectrum of genre openness to innovation, ranging from “agile” to “uptight” styles. Comparison of press and academic prose sections in one‑million‑word corpora reveals that press prose is more receptive to innovation, while academic prose retains more conservative features.

Abstract

This paper is a follow-up study to previous investigations based on the analysis of parallel British and American corpora from the early 1960s and 1990s. It focuses on variables that are suspected to contribute to the growing "colloquicdisation " of the norms of written English, that is, a narrowing of the gap between spoken and written norms. Such a shift in stylistic preferences has been observed in both socio-cultural approaches to language and corpus-based studies. Contrasting material from the press and academic prose sections of standard one-million-word corpora, we are able to show that the two genres differ in the degree to which they are open to innovations or prone to retain conservative features. What we are proposing is a cline of openness to innovation ranging from "agile " to "uptight" genres.