REGISTER VARIATION II

Biber and Davies article (2006)

Biber, Douglas (1993) "The multi-dimensional approach to linguistic analyses of genre variation: an overview of methodology and findings". Computers and the Humanities 26: 331-45.

1. Explain the importance of each of the following eight characteristics of the multidimensional approach to register variation:

  1. It is corpus-based
  2. It is computer-based
  3. It is quantitative
  4. The main research goal focuses on the analysis of texts and registers, rather than specific syntactic constructions
  5. An analysis of just two varieties (e.g. spoken and written) is inadequate
  6. There are multiple parameters of variation
  7. Statistical co-occurrence patterns  reflect shared communicative functions
  8. It synthesizes macroscopic and microscopic approaches

2. Give some examples of words that have strongly different POS frequencies in different registers

3. What does Dimension 1 ("involved vs informational") measure?

4. Discuss the applications of the MD theory to the following topics:

  1. American/British English (e.g. Biber 1987)
  2. Stylistics (e.g. Connor 1988)
  3. School texts (e.g. Biber 1991)
  4. Historical variation (e.g. Biber and Finnegan 1989)
  5. Authors' styles (e.g. Biber and Finnegan 1991)

5. What types of MD analysis of other languages have been carried out?  Do they agree with the findings for English?