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| Multidimensional Register Analysis× | Keyness Analysis× | |
|---|---|---|
| Field | Linguistics | Linguistics |
| Family | Process / pipeline | Process / pipeline |
| Year of origin≠ | 1988 | 1997 |
| Originator≠ | Douglas Biber | Mike Scott |
| Type≠ | Factor-analytic analysis of co-occurring linguistic features across registers | Corpus comparison of relative word frequencies |
| Seminal source≠ | Biber, D. (1988). Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521425568 | Scott, M. (1997). PC analysis of key words — and key key words. System, 25(2), 233–245. DOI ↗ |
| Aliases | Multidimensional Analysis (MD/MDA), Biber's Multidimensional Analysis, Dimensions of Register Variation | Keyword Analysis, Corpus Keyness, Keyness Statistics |
| Related≠ | 4 | 3 |
| Summary≠ | Multidimensional (MD) analysis is a corpus-linguistic method, developed by Douglas Biber in the 1980s, for describing how language varies across registers — speech versus writing, conversation versus academic prose, and so on. Its central idea is that many individual linguistic features (pronouns, passives, nominalizations, modals, and dozens more) systematically co-occur, and that these co-occurrence patterns define underlying dimensions of variation. Biber tags and counts a large set of features in every text of a balanced corpus, then uses factor analysis to extract the dimensions, interprets each functionally (Biber's Dimension 1 contrasts 'involved' interactive production with 'informational' production), and scores every text and register along them. The result is a quantitative, multifaceted map of register variation that replaces single rankings (such as a simple formality scale) with several independent dimensions. | Keyness analysis identifies the words that are characteristically frequent (or infrequent) in a target corpus relative to a reference corpus, using statistical tests to measure how unexpected each word's frequency is. Introduced by Mike Scott in 1997, it answers the question 'what is this text or collection distinctively about?' and is a central technique in corpus linguistics and corpus-assisted discourse analysis for surfacing the salient vocabulary of a genre, period, author, or social group. |
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