Category: Biber

Multidimensional Analysis Tagger

The Multidimensional Analysis Tagger is a program for Windows that replicates Biber’s (1988) Variation across Speech and Writing tagger for the multidimensional functional analysis of English texts, generally applied for studies on text type or genre variation. The program can generate a grammatically annotated version of the corpus selected as well as the necessary statistics to perform a text-type or genre analysis. The program plots the input text or corpus on Biber’s (1988) Dimensions and determines its closest text type, as proposed by Biber (1989) A Typology of English Texts. Finally, the program offers a tool for visualising the Dimensions features of an input text.

Manual

Source:
https://andreanini.com/software/

Acquiring text varities

One of the most important goals of formal schooling is teaching text varieties that might not be acquired outside of school […] Early in school, children learn to read books of many different types, including fictional stories, historical accounts of past events, and descriptions of natural phenomena. These varieties rely on different linguistic structures and patterns, and students must learn how to recognize and interpret those differences. At the same time, students must learn how to produce some of these different varieties, for example writing a narrative essay on what they did during summer vacation versus a persuasive essay on whether the school cafeteria should sell candy. The amount of explicit instruction in different text varieties varies across teachers, schools, and countries, but even at a young age, students must somehow learn to control and interpret the language of different varieties, or they will not succeed at school.

Biber & Conrad (2009:3)

Biber, D., & Conrad, S. (2009). Register, genre, and style (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics).

Check other quotations here.

Multi-Dimensional Analysis, 25 years on. A tribute to Douglas Biber

Edited by Tony Berber Sardinha and Marcia Veirano Pinto
São Paulo Catholic University
Approximately a quarter of a century ago, the Multi-Dimensional (MD) approach—one of the most powerful (and controversial) methods in Corpus Linguistics—saw its first book-length treatment. In its eleven chapters, this volume presents all new contributions covering a wide range of written and spoken registers, such as movies, music, magazine texts, student writing, social media, letters to the editor, and reports, in different languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese) and contexts (engineering, journalism, the classroom, the entertainment industry, the Internet, etc.). The book also includes a personal account of the development of the method by its creator, Doug Biber, an introduction to MD statistics, as well as an application of MD analysis to corpus design. The book should be essential reading to anyone with an interest in how texts, genres, and registers are used in society, what their lexis and grammar look like, and how they are interrelated.
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 60]  2014.  xxxviii, 328 pp.