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Volume 24, Issue 1
  • ISSN 1384-6655
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9811
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Abstract

Abstract

The goal of this study is to identify the dimensions of variation across American television programs, following the multidimensional analysis (MD) framework introduced by Biber (1988). Although television is a major form of mass communication, there has been no previous large-scale MD study of television dialogue. A large corpus containing the key types of contemporary American television programs was collected, annotated with the , and subjected to multi-dimensional analysis, which indicated four factors of statistically correlated linguistic features. Each of these factors was interpreted communicatively to reveal the underlying dimensions of variation on American television, namely “Exposition and discussion vs. Simplified interaction” (Dimension 1), “Simulated conversation” (Dimension 2), “Recount” (Dimension 3) and “Engaging presentation” (Dimension 4). This article presents, illustrates, and discusses each of these dimensions, showing the macro linguistic patterns in use across hundreds of American television programs.

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2019-07-02
2024-12-03

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Dimensions of variation across American television registers
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 24, 3 (2019); https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.15014.ber
/content/journals/10.1075/ijcl.15014.ber
/content/journals/10.1075/ijcl.15014.ber
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): American television; dimensions of register variation; multidimensional analysis; television registers

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