Intervarietal language differences in professional settings : Vagueness in British and American academic discourse

Abstract

The paper presents the main peculiarities of vague language used in academic settings, a special focus being on the differences between American and British English. The paper aims at looking at intervarietal differences and the main features of spoken academic discourse in the two varieties in relation to one category of vague language. The category under investigation is approximators (e.g. about, approximately). The investigation is based on corpus data and has some language teaching implications