Shirley Carter-Thomas, Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet. Syntactic differences in oral and written scientific discourse: the role of information structure. ASp – La revue du GERAS, 2001, 31-33, pp.19-37. ⟨10.4000/asp.1752⟩.

This article analyses some of the differences in syntactic structure that emerge from a comparison between a series of oral presentations, given at an international conference in physics by English native speaker scientists, and the corresponding articles, published in the proceedings of the same conference. Our motivation was not only to provide a statistical account of these differences but also to propose some explanations for the differences observed. In our view, a study of the syntactic differences between these two genres of scientific discourse can be usefully linked to the linguistic notion of information structure. By studying information packaging arrangements we can gain added insight into why, in a specific context, certain syntactic forms are preferred. The syntactic forms that will be particularly focused upon in this article are extraposition, existential constructions, inversion and pseudo-clefts.