Variation across Speech and Writing

Abstract

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 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.

How Taking a Word for a Word Can Be Problematic: Context-Dependent Linguistic Markers of Extraversion and Neuroticism

“…"would", "should", "could"), and inverse scores of Articles ("a", "the") and Words of More Than Six Letters. These linguistic variables have been found to naturally co-occur in speech and writing, and to factoranalytically form one, usually the first, factor (Biber, 1988;Gill, et al, 2006;Pennebaker & King, 1999). All variables were standardized prior to their aggregation.…”

“…private thoughts), (b) Neuroticism would be more strongly related to verbal emotional expression in participants' SOC than in their EAR-sampled language, and (c) verbal immediacy would be related to Extraversion in participants' EAR-sampled language and Neuroticism in their SOC language. Several studies across different labs have identified verbal immediacy as a core linguistic device that conveys a personal, involved, experiential language (Biber, 1988;Gill et al, 2006;Pennebaker & King, 1999). The last prediction, then, is based on the idea that verbal immediacy facilitates social processes in interpersonal contexts and emotional processes in private contexts (Wiener & Mehrabian, 1968).…”

The morphosyntax of varieties of English worldwide: A quantitative perspective

“…The difference between principal component analysis and cluster analysis, in short, is that while the former groups variables, the latter groups cases. In linguistics, principal component analysis has been applied in studies of register variation (for instance, Biber, 1988), corpus linguistics (for instance, Keune et al, 2005), and dialectology (for instance, Shackleton, 2005). As Shackleton (2005:142) succinctly puts it, ''applied to a data set of linguistic features, principal component analysis may isolate sets of linguistic features that tend to occur together and not with other features.''…”

A Review of Evidence Presented in Support of Three Key Claims in the Validity Argument for the TextEvaluator® Text Analysis Tool

“…Four additional features are based on word lists developed by Biber and his colleagues. These include the frequency per thousand words of academic verbs, abstract nouns, topical adjectives, and cognitive process nouns (see Biber, 1986Biber, , 1988Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999;Biber et al, 2004). Two measures of word length are also included: average word length measured in syllables and the frequency per thousand words of words containing more than eight characters.…”