... on their prevalence in academic prose as identified in various analyses of academic English language corpora (Biber, 198 8; Biber et al., 199 9; Hyland, 199 6; Quirk et al., 198 5) Be-verbs Copula ... prevalence in academic texts Biber's, et al ( 199 9) large corpus analysis of various types of written texts indicates that lexical verbs (e.g., walk, sing, talk) are far less common in academic prose ... English corpora have shown that two- and three-word verbs are hardly ever used in academic prose (Biber et al., 199 9) The most common are to be set out in or to be set up in used at the rate of...