M U LT I D I M E N S I O N A L

PAT T E R N S O F R E G I S T E R
VA R I AT I O N

Bc. Slavomíra Lauková, Bc. Dajana Jašari

AJOK22m3
27.10.2023
 KEYWORDS:
(ACTIVITY 1)

 focuses on the extent to which different

 Register  British National
spoken and written registers vary with
Corpus
respect to their linguistic characteristics
 Register variation
 pronouncing
 a language variety defined by its situational words ending in -
 Co-occurrence (patterns) characteristics, including the speaker’s ing with a velar
purpose, the relationship between speaker nasal instead of
 Corpus ( or Linguistic and hearer, and the production an alveolar nasal
circumstances (e.g., walking
Corpora) rather than
walkin‘)
 a collection of linguistic data, either written
texts or a transcription of recorded speech  academic prose,
newspaper
writing, e-mail
 the above-chance frequent occurrence of
two terms from a text corpus alongside
each other in a certain order
 For many years, researchers have studied the
language used in different situations: the description
of registers
 Although registers are defined in situational terms,
they can also be compared with respect to their
linguistic characteristics: the study of register
variation
 But what if analyst wanted to compare the full range
of registers used in a language?
multidimensional analysis – permits
comparisons of multiple registers
  The MD ( multidimensional patterns) of register variation
can be uncovered by considering the full set of linguistic
features distributed across multiple registers
 Important to identify two basic issues:
WHICH LINGUISTIC a) to what extent is it different from other registers?
F E AT U R E S T O b) in what particular ways does it differ?
CONSIDER?  This can become tricky – if researcher based only on one
set of features – e.g., verbs, adverbial clauses - it can come
to a conclusion that that these two registers are very
similar

the importance of multidimensional perspective

 A quantitative approach that allows to compare different registers
with respect to several different linguistic parameters – the
dimensions

M U LT I D I M E N S I O N A
L A N A LY S I S
a)MD analysis
identify was developed
the underlying linguistic as a methodological approach to:
dimensions of variation in language in
b) compare spoken and written registers in
the linguistic space defined by those
dimensions
empirical/quantitative terms

MD analysis uses the methodological tools of corpus linguistics – by

using computational techniques, it is possible to analyse the linguistic
patterns found in a large corpus of text
 METHODOLOGY IN MD APPROACH

AN RESEARCH IS PC PROGRAMS THE CO- DIMENSION THE FACTORS

APPROPRIATE CONDUCTED TO ARE DEVELOPED OCCURRENCE SCORES FOR FROM THE
CORPUS IS IDENTIFY THE FOR AUTOMATED PATTERNS EACH TEXT FACTOR
GRAMMATICAL AMONG
DESIGNED AND SET OF ANALYSIS: THE WITH RESPECT ANALYSIS ARE
COLLECTED LINGUISTIC LINGUISTIC TO EACH INTERPRETED
ENTIRE CORPUS FEATURES ARE
BASED ON FEATURES TO OF TEXTS IS DIMENSION ARE FUNCTIONALLY
PREVIOUS BE INCLUDED IN ANALYSED, COMPUTED AS
ANALYSED TO
USING A FACTOR
RESEARCH AND THE ANALYSIS COMPUTE THE
ANALYSIS OF
UNDERLYING
ANALYSIS FREQUENCY DIMENSIONS OF
COUNTS OF EACH THE FREQUENCY
COUNTS VARIATION
LINGUISTIC
FEATURE IN EACH
TEXT
 M D A N A LY S I S O F U N I V E R S I T Y S P O K E N A N D W R I T T E N
REGISTERS

To illustrate the MD approach, MD description of university spoken and

written registers is used as an example

After finding appropriate corpus, the next step is to quantitatively analyse the
distribution of all linguistic features, including:

3. semantic 6. lexico-grammatical
1. vocabulary combinations (that-
2. part-of-speech categories for the 4. grammatical 5. syntactic
distributions (e.g., complement clauses
classes (e.g., nouns, major word classes characteristics (e.g., structures (e.g., that
common vs controlled by
verbs) (e.g., activity verbs, past tense verbs) relative clauses) communication verbs
technical nouns)
mental verbs) vs mental verbs)
 1. Next step – the
factor analysis –
4. Final step is to identifies the
interpret each underlying factors (or
dimension in dimensions) in the
functional terms corpus

3. In the next step, the

dimensions analyse the
linguistic characteristics
of the texts and registers 2. These dimensions
by computing a have ´´positive´´ and
´´dimension score´´ for ´´negative´´ features
each text (the score
represents a sum of all
linguistic features
grouped on a
dimension)
 FOUR DIMENSIONS

Dimension 1: Oral vs literate discourse

Dimension 2: Procedural vs content-focused

discourse

Dimension 3: Reconstructed account of events

Dimension 4: Teacher-centered stance

  Biber, D.- Conrad, S.: Register, Genre
and Style. Cambridge: Cambridge
SOURCES:
Textbooks in Linguistics, 2009, pp.
215-246
THANK YOU
FOR YOUR
ATTENTION!