摘要：Orality has become the focus of many corpus studies in recent years, especially
since the publication of Biber’s major contributions to that field (cf Biber 1988).
One important finding has been that texts are not easily classified into an oral vs
written dichotomy. Rather, it is more adequate to regard texts as aligned on a
continuum, with informal conversations and formal academic prose representing
the extreme ends of this continuum. The present paper will address several questions
which are related to the orality debate:
