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Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 24:1 (2019) ► pp.3–32

Dimensions of variation across American television registers

| São Paulo Catholic University
| Federal University of São Paulo

The goal of this study is to identify the dimensions of variation across American television programs, following the multidimensional analysis (MD) framework introduced by Biber (1988). Although television is a major form of mass communication, there has been no previous large-scale MD study of television dialogue. A large corpus containing the key types of contemporary American television programs was collected, annotated with the Biber tagger, and subjected to multi-dimensional analysis, which indicated four factors of statistically correlated linguistic features. Each of these factors was interpreted communicatively to reveal the underlying dimensions of variation on American television, namely “Exposition and discussion vs. Simplified interaction” (Dimension 1), “Simulated conversation” (Dimension 2), “Recount” (Dimension 3) and “Engaging presentation” (Dimension 4). This article presents, illustrates, and discusses each of these dimensions, showing the macro linguistic patterns in use across hundreds of American television programs.

Keywords: multidimensional analysis, American television, dimensions of register variation, television registers
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Studies of the language of television
  • 3.Corpus design and compilation
  • 4.Dimensions of variation
    • 4.1Dimension 1: Exposition and discussion vs. Simplified interaction
    • 4.2Dimension 2: Simulated conversation
    • 4.3Dimension 3: Recount
    • 4.4Dimension 4: Engaging presentation
    • 4.5Comparing the mean dimension scores
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.15014.ber
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