Modelling Variation in Spoken and Written English

Using fresh data from the British National Corpus, this book criticises and expands Biber`s seminal study (1988) of variation in spoken and written English. The author assesses the validity, stability and meaningfulness of Biber`s results, critically re-evaluating the statistical methodology. In the process, many issues of importance in corpus-based research are touched upon, including: research design, corpus construction, representativeness, search algorithms, operationalisation of linguistics concepts and interpretation of statistical results. Copyright (C) Muze Inc. 2005. For personal use only. All rights reserved.