Douglas Biber

Speaking and Writing in the University: A Multidimensional Comparison

The dozens of studies on academic discourse carried out over the past 20 years have mostly focused on written academic prose (usually the technical research article in science or medicine) or on academic lectures. Other registers that may be more important for students adjusting to university life, such as textbooks, have received surprisingly little attention, and spoken registers such as study groups or on-campus service encounters have been virtually ignored. To explain more fully the nature of the tasks that incoming international students encounter, this article undertakes a comprehensive linguistic description of the range of spoken and written registers at U.S. universities. Specifically, the article describes a multidimensional analysis of register variation in the TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language Corpus. The analysis shows that spoken registers are fundamentally different from written ones in university contexts, regardless of purpose. Some of the register characterizations are particularly surprising. For example, classroom teaching was similar to the conversational registers in many respects, and departmental brochures and Web pages were as informationally dense as textbooks. The article discusses the implications of these findings for pedagogy and future research.

Adverbial Stance Types in English.

The present paper identifies various speech styles of English as marked by stance adver‐bials. By stance we mean the overt expression of an authors or speakers attitudes, feelings, judgments, or commitment concerning the message. Adverbials are one of the primary lexical markers of stance in English, and we limit ourselves in this paper to adverbial marking of stance (the attitudinal and style disjuncts presented in Quirk, Green‐baum, Leech, & Svartvik, 1985). All occurrences of stance adverbials are identified in the LOB and London‐Lund corpora (410 texts of written and spoken British English), and each is analyzed in its sentential context to distinguish true markers of stance from adverbials that serve other functions (e.g., as manner adverbs). The adverbials marking stance are divided into six semantic categories, and the frequency of occurrence for each category in each text is computed. The six categories are labeled (1) honestly adverbials, (2) generally adverbials, (3) surely adverbials, (4) act...

Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register

The guiding idea of this collection is to bring together a number of different perspectives on variation in language according to occasion of use. At present this is a rather ill-defined field of interest sometimes referred to as style variation and sometimes as register variation. This area has not figured as prominently in sociolinguistics as certain and other aspects of variation (social dialect variation in particular). This volume draws attention to the importance of this ubiquitous linguistic phenomenon and points the way to a unified approach. Biber and Finegan have solicited studies presenting a variety of perspectives on registers and register variation, as well as papers that attempt to integrate register and social dialect variation into a coherent theoretical framework.

WHAT DOES FREQUENCY HAVE TO DO WITH GRAMMAR TEACHING

Using frequency findings from corpus linguistics, this paper explores the relationship between the information presented in ESL-EFL materials and what is known about actual language use based on empirical studies. Three aspects of materials development for grammar instruction are discussed: the grammatical features to be included, the order of grammatical topics, and the vocabulary used to illustrate these topics. For each aspect, we show that there are often sharp contrasts between the information found in grammar materials and what learners encounter in the real world of language use. In our conclusion, we argue that a selective revision of pedagogy to reflect actual use, as shown by frequency studies, could result in radical changes that facilitate the learning process for students.

On the complexity of discourse complexity: A multidimensional analysis

The present study uses a theory‐based statistical approach to investigate the dimensions of discourse complexity in English, analyzing the distribution of 33 surface linguistic markers of complexity across 23 spoken and written registers. The study shows that discourse complexity is a multidimensional construct, that different types of structural elaboration reflect different discourse functions, and that different kinds of texts are complex in different ways (in addition to being more or less complex). Building on earlier exploratory research, the study identifies a particular five‐dimensional model as the most adequate with respect to the surface linguistic features considered here. These dimensions are labeled to reflect their functional and grammatical underpinnings: Reduced Structure and Specificity, Structural Elaboration of Reference, “Framing” Structural Elaboration, Integrated Structure, and Passive Constructions. Analysis of the relative complexities of spoken and written registers with respect ...

A Textual Comparison of British and American Writing

M ANY AMERICANS REGARD BRITISH ENGLISH as more formal and proper than American English, while the British in turn consider American English to be markedly informal and relaxed. Observers commonly attribute these attitudes to differences in pronunciation, which are the most readily apparent distinctions between the two dialects. Correspondingly, nearly all linguistic comparisons of British and American English have focussed on phonological features and relatively idiosyncratic vocabulary differences. Syntactic differences between the two varieties have been largely ignored. The present study begins to fill this gap: it identifies systematic syntactic differences between British and American writing, and it suggests that these differences are associated with differing functional priorities. The study compares nine written genres (e.g., press reportage, academic prose, romantic fiction) in British and American English with respect to three underlying parameters of linguistic variation (identified in earlier studies). Based on their functional interpretations, these parameters have been tentatively labelled Dimension 1: INTERACTIVE versus EDITED TEXT; Dimension 2: ABSTRACT Versus SITUATED CONTENT; and Dimension 3: REPORTED versus IMMEDIATE STYLE. (These interpretations are described in section II.) The present study shows that there are systematic linguistic differences between British and American writing with respect to the first two of these dimensions. When the genres are compared along Dimension 1, it is found that the British genres are consistently more edited and less interactive than the corresponding American genres; along Dimension 2, the British genres are consistently less abstract than the corresponding American genres. Although these differences are not large, they are highly systematic across the different genres, indicating that they truly represent underlying linguistic differences between British and American written texts. The study suggests that the differences along both dimensions are associated with greater attention to grammatical and stylistic prescriptions in British than American writing. The discussion is organized as follows: in section I, some previous comparisons of British and American English are described; section II

Variation Among Blogs: A Multi-dimensional Analysis

A blog, short for a weblog, is a website containing an archive of regularly updated online postings. The postings are generally made by one person and presented in reverse chronological order. The archive is generally made freely available to the public. The postings tend to consist primarily of raw text, but may also contain hyperlinks and other media, including picture, video and sound files. Often blogs allow for readers to post comments as well.

Register as a predictor of linguistic variation

Abstract Over the last two decades, corpus analysis has been used as the basis for several important reference grammars and dictionaries of English. While these reference works have made major contributions to our understanding of English lexis and grammar, most of them share a major limitation: the failure to consider register differences. Instead, most reference works describe lexico-grammatical patterns as if they applied generally to English. The main goal of the present paper is to challenge this practice and the underlying assumption that the patterns of lexical-grammatical use in English can be described in general/global terms. Specifically, I argue that descriptions of the average patterns of use in a general corpus do not accurately describe any register. Rather, the patterns of use in speech are dramatically different from the patterns in writing (especially academic writing), and so minimally an adequate description must recognize the two major poles in this continuum (i.e., conversation versus informational written prose). The paper begins by comparing two general corpus approaches to the study of language use: variationist and text-linguistic. Although both approaches can be used to investigate the use of words, grammatical features, and registers, the two approaches differ in their bases: the first gives primacy to each linguistic token, while the second gives primacy to each text. This difference has important consequences for the overall research design, the kinds of variables that can be measured, the statistical techniques that can be applied, and the particular research questions that can be asked. As a result, the importance of register has been more apparent in text-linguistic studies than in studies of linguistic variation. The bulk of the paper, then, argues for the importance of register at all linguistic levels: lexical, grammatical, and lexico-grammatical. Analyses comparing conversation and academic writing are discussed for each level, showing how a general ‘average’ description includes some characteristics that are not applicable to one or the other register, while also omitting other important patterns of use found in particular registers.

Towards a taxonomy of web registers and text types: a multi-dimensional analysis

This paper uses multi-dimensional analysis to investigate the extent to which the subject categories used by Google are linguistically well-defined. A 3.7 million word corpus is constructed by a stratified sample of web pages from two Google categories: ‘Home’ and ‘Science’. The corpus is tagged (using the Biber Tagger) and factor analysis is carried out, resulting in four factors. These factors are interpreted functionally as underlying dimensions of variation. The ‘Science’ and ‘Home’ categories are compared with respect to each dimension; although there are large differences in the dimension scores of texts within each category, the two Google categories themselves are not clearly distinguished on linguistic grounds. The dimensions are subsequently used as predictors in a cluster analysis, which identifies the ‘text types’ that are well defined linguistically. Eight text types are identified and interpreted in terms of their salient linguistic and functional characteristics.

Current Conceptions of Stance

The linguistic mechanisms that convey a speaker or writer’s personal attitudes and assessments have long been of interest to linguists, and several major approaches to this function of language have been taken. In this chapter we survey several related threads of research, including evidentiality (e.g. Chafe, 1986), affect (e.g. Ochs and Schieffelin, 1989), hedging (e.g. Hyland, 1998b), evaluation (e.g. Thompson and Hunston, 2000), appraisal (e.g. Martin, 2000) and stance (e.g. Biber and Finegan, 1989). While each paradigm has its own focus and approach, this body of research as a whole contributes to our understanding of the ways in which speakers and writers encode opinions and assessments in the language they produce. In this chapter, we will refer to this overall concept as stance. Studies within these paradigms have been conducted with a variety of methodologies, ranging from detailed analyses of a single text to largescale investigations of patterns across texts in a corpus, as well as from detailed analyses of a single linguistic item or feature to descriptions of a large set of lexical and grammatical features. Taken together, these studies show that the expression of stance varies along two major parameters: (1) meaning of the assessment: personal feeling/attitude H status of knowledge (2) linguistic level used for the assessment: lexical H grammatical