Books by Douglas Biber

This collection brings together the editors¿ previous research with new work on the Register-Functional (RF) approach to grammatical complexity, offering a unified theoretical account for its further study.The volume will appeal to students and scholars with research interests in either descriptive linguistics or applied linguistics.

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.

This grammar reference is written for the advanced student. It combines explanations of English grammar with information on how, when and why we use different structures. It shows the differences between spoken and written grammar and includes frequency information on the most common forms.

Multi-dimensional studies (MD) is a statistical approach to language variation. This book shows how MD studies can be used to investigate research questions in a number of linguistic core subjects, including corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and studies of literary style.