Differing with the commonly held stereotypes in previous books about academic writing, Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray provide a new perspective on grammatical complexity and linguistic variation in academic prose in their new book, Grammatical Complexity in Academic English: Linguistic Change in Writing. Based on large-scale corpus analyses, the authors challenge dominant traditional stereotypical views about grammatical complexity of academic writing and the associated discourse functions from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. This book is a welcome addition to advancing research in corpus linguistics in terms of its theoretical and methodological importance. Linguists, EAP researchers, and graduate students will find it a data-rich source for gaining a clearer understanding of grammatical complexity and linguistic change in academic writing.

The book consists of seven chapters. Chapter 1 briefly introduces and examines the major stereotypical views and theoretical assumptions on academic writing, grammatical complexity, and linguistic change, setting the scene for the study. The authors point out that academic writing is generally taken as texts that are linguistically similar across sub-registers, not prone to change, explicit in meaning, and complex because of the use of elaborated grammar. In addition, grammatical complexity is operationalized primarily as the use of complex and elaborated grammar; grammatical changes are often attributed to being initiated in speech. By problematizing these conceptions, the authors argue for a fine-grained explanation of the real landscape of academic writing. Evidence to their argument is recursively presented throughout the subsequent chapters.

In Chapter 2, the authors outline the methodological procedures for the research, including the corpora used in the study, procedures of data analyses, and grammatical features in question. It is of particular importance to note that the authors employ not only automatic tagging but also manual check and tagging in order to ensure the reliability and accuracy of annotating the corpus. Meanwhile, they also give examples to illustrate in detail and justify the choices made in the tagging process, which can be very useful for readers to follow when annotating their own corpus.

Chapters 3 to 6 report on the findings of the study. In Chapter 3, the authors adopt a synchronic perspective to address the patterns emerging from register variation within the framework of two grammatical parameters (i.e., structure type and syntactic function) mentioned in Chapter 2. They first incorporated both purpose and audience in their two-dimensional framework to identify situational differences between academic prose and other registers as well as internal variation within academic prose. This taxonomy not only serves as a theoretical guide to collect representative corpus samples, but also enables the interpretation of how and why registers differ in the use of a range of linguistic features. Based on synchronic findings from four case studies, the authors find that grammatical complexity is not only realized through clausal embedding (i.e., structural elaboration) but is more commonly realized through phrasal devices (i.e., compressed structures) in academic writing. In addition, they observe that grammatical complexity varies systematically across written academic sub-registers. This adds new evidence to their previous findings (Biber & Gray, Reference Biber and Gray2010; Gray, Reference Gray2015) and updates our understanding with a finer-grained picture.

Chapter 4 shifts to a diachronic approach to document the historical changes of academic writing over the 300-year period since the 18^th century. The authors compare the use of both colloquial and complexity features (including phrasal and clausal features) across academic research writing and other written registers. The results reveal that academic prose has resisted the trends of the increasing use of colloquial features in general registers such as fiction and news reportage. In spite of this, in academic prose phrasal instead of clausal features have undergone more important historical changes. In addition, a close examination of diachronic changes suggests significant differences existing across written academic sub-registers. The differences are associated with the degree to which grammatical innovations are linked to the frequency of use in phrasal devices that modify head nouns. This also indicates that grammatical changes can be initiated in writing.

As a complement to the previous two chapters, Chapters 5 and 6 provide follow-up qualitative discussions on the corresponding grammatical and discourse functional extensions. Chapter 5 illustrates the functional changes of phrasal complexity, which is a typical grammatical innovation in academic writing with the examples of phrasal features functioning as pre-modifiers and post-modifiers of a head noun. With exemplars of the changes that primarily occur in written genres, the authors demonstrate that grammatical changes can also be initiated in writing. The qualitative analysis of the lexical associations, meaning relationships, and discourse functions may serve as good samples for readers to follow when tackling their own data. The authors further explain the motivations underlying such functional changes as the need for economy of expression. This leads to the use of structural compression in academic prose (p. 207), which in turn results in a loss of explicit meaning.

Still focusing on the functional analysis of phrasal features, the authors in Chapter 6 continue to discuss the loss in explicitness. The authors illustrate in a variety of ways how different inexplicit meaning relationships can be expressed by the compressed, phrasal devices. For instance, phrasal pre-modifiers and post-modifiers in noun phrases are used to express a wide range of meaning relationships. However, the multiple possible and abstract meanings, along with less predictable usage and the use of technical vocabulary lead to maximal inexplicitness in meaning.

In the closing chapter, the authors revisit the major patterns in Chapters 3 to 6, based on which they re-emphasize the inadequacy of the dominant stereotypes and assumptions in the field. In addition, they discuss implications of the findings from three perspectives. From theoretical perspectives, the authors refine the theories of grammar complexity by emphasizing the equal importance and fundamental difference of phrasal modifier and structural compression as opposed to clausal modifiers and structural elaboration. In terms of linguistic change, the authors argue that writing can also experience grammatical changes and therefore interpretation should be based on the specific context. In practice, the authors also discuss implications for language assessment development as well as the teaching of EAP reading and writing.

Overall, this book has three major strengths. First, it is a valuable contribution to the literature on the research of grammatical complexity in academic writing. The authors challenge traditional stereotypes and offer a more fine-grained picture of the multifaceted realities and dynamics of grammatical complexity. That is, they consider grammatical complexity as a much more complex construct and variable in terms of register, time, and modality. Second, methodological innovations contribute to a more diversified and convincing analysis. Unlike the traditional quantitative corpus design that uses sub-corpus as the unit of analysis, the authors turn to the text instead. As such, reliability and validity are enhanced with various and robust statistical approaches such as the Pearson correlation (Field, Reference Field2013) measuring changes over time and ANOVAs (Cardinal & Aitken, Reference Cardinal and Aitken2013) examining differences across synchronic registers and diachronic trends within sub-registers. Third, the comprehensive framework developed for classifying grammatical complexity along a cline (see Chapter 2) might be particularly informative and instructive for researchers in the field. They could either use it as departure points to initiate new research projects or adapt it for use in their current research.

While the book contributes largely from theoretical and methodological perspectives, an extended description or discussion of the pedagogical implications might be more useful. EAP course designers and practitioners would benefit from this if the authors devote more space to extrapolating the findings to classroom teaching. Additionally, as the authors draw heavily on their previous empirical research, readers who have little prior knowledge of this might find the text less accessible.