Part of
Multi-Dimensional Analysis, 25 years on: A tribute to Douglas BiberEdited by Tony Berber Sardinha and Marcia Veirano Pinto
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 60] 2014
► pp. 3–34
Edited by Tony Berber Sardinha and Marcia Veirano Pinto
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 60] 2014
► pp. 3–34
Chapter 1.1 A Multi-Dimensional analysis of regional variation in American English
This paper analyzes regional linguistic variation in a corpus of letters to the editor from across the United States. However, unlike most regional dialect studies, which analyze linguistic alternation variables, this study analyzes the relative frequency of parts-of-speech using a Multi-Dimensional approach, which allows for patterns of regional functional linguistic variation to be identified in this corpus. In particular, this analysis identifies three basic patterns of regional functional linguistic variation in American letters to the editor: letters from the East tend to exhibit an elaborate style, letters from the Central States tend to exhibit a narrative style, and letters from South tend to exhibit an opinionated style, when compared to letters originating from the rest of the United States.
References (25)
Atwood, E.B. (1953). A survey of verb forms in the Eastern United States. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: CUP. 
Carver, C.M. (1987). American regional dialects. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Chambers, J.K. (1995). Sociolinguistic theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Chambers, J.K., & Trudgill, P. (1998). Dialectology(
2
nd
Ed.
). Cambridge: CUP.
Conrad, S., & Biber, D. (2001).Variation in English: Multi-Dimensional studies. London: Longman.
Grieve, J. (2009). A corpus-based regional dialect survey of grammatical
variation in written Standard American English. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ.
. (2011). A regional analysis of contraction rate in written
Standard American English. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics,
16
, 514-546.
. (2012). A statistical analysis of regional variation in
adverb position in a corpus of written Standard American English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory,
8
, 39-72.
Grieve, J., Speelman, D., & Geeraerts, D. (2011). A statistical method for the identification and
aggregation of regional linguistic variation. Language Variation and Change,
23
, 193-221.
. (2013). A multivariate spatial analysis of vowel formants in
American English. Journal of Linguistic Geography,
1
(1),31-51.
Kurath, H. (1949). Word geography of the Eastern United States. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Kurath, H., & McDavid, R.I. (1961).The pronunciation of English in the Atlantic states. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Labov, W. (1966). The linguistic variable as a structural unit. Washington Linguistics Review,
3
, 4-22.
. (1969). Contraction, deletion, and inherent variability of
the English copula. Language,
45
, 715-62.
. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Labov, W., Ash, S., & Boberg, C. (2006). Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, phonology, and
sound change. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Odland, J.D. (1988). Spatial autocorrelation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Ord, J.K., & Getis, A. (1995). Local spatial autocorrelation statistics:
Distributional issues and an application. Geographical Analysis,
27
, 286-306.
Preston, D. (2001). Style and the psycholinguistics of sociolinguistics:
The logical problem of language variation. In
P.
Eckert & J.R.
Rickford
(Eds.), Style and sociolinguistic variation (pp.
279-304). Cambridge: CUP.
Tagliamonte, S. (2006). Analysing sociolinguistic variation. Cambridge: CUP.
Toutanova, K., Klein, D., Manning, C., & Singer, Y. (2003). Feature-rich part-of-speech tagging with a cyclic
dependency network. In
Proceedings, 2003, HLT-NAACL
(pp. 252-259).
Weiner, E.J., & Labov, W. (1983). Constraints on the agentless passive. Journal of Linguistics,
19
, 29-58.
Wolfram, W. (1991). The linguistic variable: Fact and fantasy. American Speech,
66
, 22-32.
. (1993). Identifying and interpreting variables. In
D.
Preston
(Ed.), American dialect research (pp.
193–221). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Wingrove, Peter & Peter Crosthwaite
Yu, Xiaoli
2022. A multi-dimensional analysis of English-medium massive open online courses (MOOCs) video lectures in China. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 55 ► pp. 101079 ff. 
Bohmann, Axel
2019. Variation in English Worldwide,
Veirano Pinto, Marcia
2014. Chapter 2.1 Dimensions of variation in North American movies. In Multi-Dimensional Analysis, 25 years on [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 60], ► pp. 109 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.