Variation Across Speech and Writing

ISBN-13: 9780521425568 / Angielski / Miękka / 1991 / 316 str.

Douglas Biber

Opis

Similarities 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.

Recenzje

'By far the most extensive quantitative investigation of spoken-written language differences has been the recent stunning research of Biber …' Wallace L. Chafe and Deborah Tannen, Annual Review of Anthropology

Spis treści

Part I. Background Concepts and Issues: 1. Introduction: textual dimensions and relations; 2. Situations and functions; 3. Previous linguistic research on speech and writing; Part II. Methodology: 4. Methodological overview of the study; 5. Statistical analysis; Part III. Dimensions and Relations in English: 6. Textual dimensions in speech and writing; 7. Textual relations in speech and writing; 8. Extending the description: variations within genres; 9. Afterword: applying the model; Appendices.