From written to spoken – and in between

The paper looks at the differences in syntactic and information structure in four types of discourse produced by a single author, the British cosmologist and astrophysicist Sir Martin Rees: a written academic text, a text from a book of popular science, unprepared spoken discourse, and an academic lecture, i.e. a text written to be presented orally. The analysis of the variation in one speaker/writer is expected to highlight systematic differences between the separate types of discourses and to eliminate possible variation across different authors. The paper aims to show how, perhaps even subconsciously, competent language users modify the structure of discourse to fulfi l their communicative goals in different types of communication