A typology of English texts

Bibliographic Data

ID3988680
AuthorsDouglas Biber (0000-0002-7024-505X, Northern Arizona University, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume51
Issues1
Pages15-17
Publication date2013-08-27
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLinguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0024-3949 • E-ISSN: 1613-396X
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/ling-2013-0040
OpenAlexW2764273953
LanguageEN
Citations received91
References cited6

Why has this article been so influential?Well, a glib response might be that I was brash in my choice of a title, and the editors allowed me to get away with it!Although at least I didn't claim to be presenting the typology of English texts!But seriously, I think the article was highly innovative for its time in its methodology, and that it made important descriptive and theoretical contributions to the study of text typologies.Methodologically, this article was one of the early applications of Multi-Dimensional (MD) Analysis, published just a year after my Cambridge University Press book Variation across Speech and Writing.At the time, there was widespread interest in MD analysis.In part, this reflected the fact that this was a powerful methodological approach, incorporating sophisticated corpus analysis as well as statistical modeling of the linguistic patterns.But MD analyses were not just demonstrations of computational and statistical prowess; rather, the widespread interest in MD analysis reflected the fact that the approach was designed to address genuine linguistic research questions, and that it had already proven its theoretical importance in uncovering linguistic patterns of use that had not been previously noticed.The 1989 article on text typology offered a major methodological extension to previous MD research, employing a statistical cluster analysis to identify groupings of texts that were similar in their linguistic characteristics -the text types.This was probably the first time that anyone had tried to identify English text types empirically, based on their internal linguistic characteristics There had been a long previous tradition of research on text typologies, but nearly all previous research had proceeded on some kind of intuitive or perceptual basis, since there really weren't alternative methodologies available.To the extent that previous studies considered strictly linguistic criteria, they were not clearly distinguished from situational criteria.Thus, an additional major methodological contribution of the study was that it made a clear distinction between text categories defined in situational terms (the genres of earlier MD studies)

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