Prof. Douglas Biber - founder of the MDA approach

[xiaoz]

Prof. Douglas Biber - founder of the Multi-dimensional Analysis (MDA) approach

He is a professor at Northern Arizona University. His book "Variation across Speech and Writing" (Cambridge University Press, 1988) established the multi-feature/multi-dimensional analytic framework which has since been used in a wide range of corpus studies. Biber was also the manager of international project team who produced the "Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English" (Longman, 1999). For more information, see

http://www.nau.edu/english/ling/faculty/biber.html

 

[xujiajin]

He is a prolific scholar indeed.

Is he really the founder of MD? This statistical method has been used in general statistics for long, if I am not mistaken. SSPS has this function too.

So I guess he is the first scholar to apply MD to language study, and esp. for register varation.

 

[xiaoz]

Factor analysis as a statistical measure existed long before Bober's 1988 book. But the MDA approach is Biber's child for sure.

 

[动态语法]

回复：Prof. Douglas Biber -

His main contributions, to me, lay in his identification of the discourse/linguistic dimensions and the interpretation of these dimensions, not the technical tools he used. His research makes it clear that the so-called spoken and written distinction is a compex matter that can be quantified.

 

[xiaoz]

Many of the lingusitic features Biber used had been studied and interpreted in relation to their functions before Biber 1988. It is Biber, however, who clustered them into dimensions or facors as he calls them. I refer to this analytic framework as MDA. MDA is not only useful in register and genre analysis, it has also been used in a much wider range of linguistic investigations. I provided an overview of recent studies which have used Biber's MDA, in the introduction section of my recent paper "Two approaches to genre analysis", which is available at this site.

 

[xujiajin]

以下是引用 动态语法 在 2005-7-12 13:06:15 的发言：
His main contributions, to me, lay in his identification of the discourse/linguistic dimensions and the interpretation of these dimensions, not the technical tools he used. His research makes it clear that the so-called spoken and written distinction is a compex matter that can be quantified.

I like this comment.
We are intuitively aware of the differences of spoken and written modes, but we are not so capable of telling them apart verbally until the (distribution of) frequency data of the different registers, say, fiction, conversation, prose etc, come to help.