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1 1 ■The Ubiquitous Oral versus Literate Dimension: A Survey of Multidimensional Studies DOUGLAS BIBER Northern Arizona University ■ THE METHODOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS OF corpus-based linguistics have enabled researchers to ask fundamentally different kinds of research questions from previous research, sometimes resulting in radically different perspectives on language variation and use. Corpus linguistic research offers strong support for the view that language variation is systematic and can be described using empirical, quantitative methods. Variation often involves complex patterns consisting of the interaction among several different linguistic parameters, but in the end, it is systematic. Beyond this, the major contribution of corpus linguistics is to document the existence of linguistic constructs that are not recognized by current linguistic theories. Research of this type—referred to as a corpus-driven approach—identifies strong tendencies for words and grammatical constructions to pattern together in particular ways, while other theoretically possible combinations rarely occur. That is, in a corpus -driven analysis, the “descriptions aim to be comprehensive with respect to corpus evidence” (Tognini-Bonelli 2001, 84), so that even the linguistic categories are derived “systematically from the recurrent patterns and the frequency distributions that emerge from language in context” (Tognini-Bonelli 2001, 87). Corpus-driven research has shown that these tendencies are much stronger and more pervasive than previously suspected, and that they usually have semantic or functional associations. Much corpus research has focused on particular linguistic features and their variants, showing how these features vary in their distribution and patterns of use across registers. This relationship can also be approached from the opposite perspective , with a focus on describing the registers rather than describing the use of particular linguistic features. However, the distribution of individual linguistic features cannot reliably distinguish among registers, as there are simply too many different linguistic characteristics to consider and individual features often have idiosyncratic distributions. Instead, sociolinguistic research has argued that register descriptions must be based on linguistic co-occurrence patterns (see, e.g., Ervin-Tripp 1972; Hymes 1974; Brown and Fraser 1979, 38–39; Halliday 1988, 162). 2 Douglas Biber Multidimensional (MD) analysis is a corpus-driven methodological approach that identifies the frequent linguistic co-occurrence patterns in a language—the dimensions of variation (see, e.g., Biber 1988, 1995). Frequency plays a central role in the analysis, since each dimension represents a constellation of linguistic features that frequently co-occur in texts. MD analysis is corpus-driven because the linguistic constructs—the dimensions—emerge from quantitative analysis of linguistic cooccurrence patterns in the corpus, rather than being posited on theoretical grounds. MD analyses have been carried out to study register variation in many different discourse domains of English and across many different languages. One of the most surprising findings across these studies is the existence of a basic oral/literate dimension . In most cases, this is the first dimension identified in the statistical analysis. Therefore, it is the most important dimension because it accounts for more linguistic variation than any of the other dimensions. In almost all of these analyses, this first oral/literate dimension is composed of a similar set of linguistic features that are distributed in a similar way across oral and literate registers, as demonstrated below. This finding is surprising because it is reasonable to expect that diverse languages and discourse domains within languages would be governed by different dimensions of linguistic variation. MD research shows that this is indeed the case: the analysis of each language and discourse domain has identified dimensions that are peculiar to that language/domain. At the same time, though, these analyses have identified dimensions that might be considered universal, and the oral/literate dimension is the strongest of these. This finding is also surprising because it contrasts with earlier researchers who argued that there are essentially no meaningful linguistic differences between speech and writing. Many of these researchers took an ethnographic perspective, studying literacy practices in communities where writing is used for specific, local functions. Having noticed that those functions do not necessarily include the stereotypical purposes of informational exposition, these researchers have made general claims minimizing the importance of literacy as a technology. For example: Literacy can be used (or not used) in so many different ways that the technology it offers, taken on its own, probably has no implications at all. (Bloch 1993, 87) It seems quite evident that speech may have all the characteristics Olson ascribes to text and written prose may have none of them. . . . Thus, the characteristics of linguistic performance at issue here...

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