Abstract
In this study we examine elaboration, compression and explicitness in academic and popular writing in an Outer
Circle variety of English, that of Hong-Kong, as represented in the International Corpus of English corpus. As Biber and Gray (2016) show, contemporary academic discourse is structurally compressed at
NP level (rather than elaborated) and inexplicit in the expression of meaning. The linguistic features selected for analysis are
short passives, which are compressed and inexplicit, and adnominal relative clauses, which represent the opposite tendency, that
towards elaboration and explicitness. We focus on register variation through analyzing, first, differences between academic and
popular writing, and second, interdisciplinary variation in four sub-registers: humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and
technology.