The main goal of this article is to describe the occurrence of the verb talk in con-temporary academic spoken English. The analysis proceeds along semantic, syntactic and pragmatic paths, with a focus on accounting for the functions performed by talk in academic spoken English. The occurrence of talk was investigated in small and large lectures in the MICASE corpus, with corpus linguistics constituting the major methodological tool. This article is addressed to linguists, students of linguistics and English philology, as well as to all scholars whose interests revolve around academic English.