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 analyze 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 characteristic of any spoken or written text and demonstrates 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
Introduction textual dimensions and relations | 3 |
Situations and functions | 28 |
Previous linguistic research on speech and writing | 47 |
Methodology | 59 |
Methodological overview of the study | 61 |
Statistical analysis | 79 |
Dimensions and relations in English | 101 |
Textual relations in speech and writing | 121 |
Extending the description variation within genres | 170 |
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Common terms and phrases
academic prose agentless passives analytic negation attributive adjectives Biber broadcasts Brown corpus Chafe characterization co-occur corpus demonstrative pronouns discourse particles downtoners English factor analysis factor scores fiction forms functions gerunds identified indefinite pronouns interaction interpretation language lexical linguistic features mark Mean scores narrative necessity modals nominalizations nouns official documents past participial clauses perfect aspect verbs personal letters phrasal coordination pied pipes place adverbials position possibility modals predicative adjectives predictive modals present analysis present participial clauses present study present tense press reportage private verbs pro-verb professional letters public verbs reference relations among genres relative clauses scores of Dimension second person pronouns sentence relatives situational speech and writing split infinitives spoken and written Standard deviation suasive verbs sub-genres subj subordination synthetic negation textual dimensions third person pronouns type/token ratio types typical verb complements versus WH clauses WH questions WH relatives WHIZ deletions word length written genres