To appear in World Englishes 28(4), 2009
Multidimensional Analysis and the Study of World Englishes
The multidimensional analysis (MDA) approach was originally developed by Biber (1988) to compare written and spoken registers in English, but it has since been applied extensively in synchronic and diachronic analysis of registers in English as well as non-Western languages. While the WordSmith-style (Scott 1996, 2004, 2008) keyword analysis represents a quick and simple means of evaluating a genre against the MDA dimensions, the keyword approach nevertheless provides a less comprehensive contrast of genres and may not work for more fine-grained types of genre analysis (Xiao and McEnery 2005). However, Biber’s MDA model has so far been confined largely to grammatical categories, though Biber et al (2007) have started to incorporate semantic categories of some word classes in the model. In this article, we will seek to enhance the MDA framework with semantic components and also introduce this enhanced MDA model, for the first time, in the research of world Englishes by exploring variation across twelve registers and five varieties of English in the International Corpus of English (ICE), which are annotated with grammatical and semantic categories.
Downloading the pre-print version:
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/postgrad/xia...analysis and the study of world Englishes.doc
Multidimensional Analysis and the Study of World Englishes
The multidimensional analysis (MDA) approach was originally developed by Biber (1988) to compare written and spoken registers in English, but it has since been applied extensively in synchronic and diachronic analysis of registers in English as well as non-Western languages. While the WordSmith-style (Scott 1996, 2004, 2008) keyword analysis represents a quick and simple means of evaluating a genre against the MDA dimensions, the keyword approach nevertheless provides a less comprehensive contrast of genres and may not work for more fine-grained types of genre analysis (Xiao and McEnery 2005). However, Biber’s MDA model has so far been confined largely to grammatical categories, though Biber et al (2007) have started to incorporate semantic categories of some word classes in the model. In this article, we will seek to enhance the MDA framework with semantic components and also introduce this enhanced MDA model, for the first time, in the research of world Englishes by exploring variation across twelve registers and five varieties of English in the International Corpus of English (ICE), which are annotated with grammatical and semantic categories.
Downloading the pre-print version:
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/postgrad/xia...analysis and the study of world Englishes.doc
