Variation across Speech and WritingSimilarities and differences between speech and writing have been the subject of innumerable studies, but until now there has been no attempt to provide a unified linguistic analysis of the whole range of spoken and written registers in English. In this widely acclaimed empirical study, Douglas Biber uses computational techniques to analyse the linguistic characteristics of twenty three spoken and written genres, enabling identification of the basic, underlying dimensions of variation in English. In Variation Across Speech and Writing, six dimensions of variation are identified through a factor analysis, on the basis of linguistic co-occurence patterns. The resulting model of variation provides for the description of the distinctive linguistic characteristics of any spoken or written text andd emonstrates the ways in which the polarization of speech and writing has been misleading, and thus enables reconciliation of the contradictory conclusions reached in previous research. |
Contents
Methodology | 59 |
Dimensions and relations in English | 99 |
Texts used in the study | 208 |
algorithms and functions | 211 |
Mean frequency counts of all linguistic features in each genre | 246 |
Pearson correlation coefficients for all linguistic features | 270 |
280 | |
293 | |
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abstract academic prose agentless passives attributive adjectives Biber broadcasts Brown corpus Chafe characterization co-occur co-occurrence patterns corpus demonstrative pronouns dimension scores discourse particles downtoners English factor analysis factor scores fiction forms functions gerunds identified indefinite pronouns interactive interpretation lexical main verb mark Mean Minimum Maximum mean score Minimum Maximum Range narrative nominalizations non-narrative nouns official documents participial clauses past past participial clauses past tense perfect aspect verbs personal letters pied pipes place adverbials position WH relatives possibility modals predicative adjectives predictive modals present analysis present participial clauses present study present tense press reportage pro-verb professional letters reference relations among genres respect to Dimension romantic fiction second person pronouns sentence relatives situational speech and writing split infinitives spoken and written standard deviation sub-genres subj subordination tagged textual dimensions third person pronouns Tuvaluan types typical variation verb complements versus WH clauses WH questions written genres