Comparer des méthodes

	Multidimensional Register Analysis	N-gram Analysis
Domaine	Linguistique	Linguistique
Famille	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Année d'origine	1988	1999
Auteur d'origine	Douglas Biber	Corpus linguists (Douglas Biber; lexical bundles tradition)
Type	Factor-analytic analysis of co-occurring linguistic features across registers	Frequency analysis of contiguous word sequences
Source fondatrice	Biber, D. (1988). Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521425568	Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Longman. ISBN: 9780582237254
Alias	Multidimensional Analysis (MD/MDA), Biber's Multidimensional Analysis, Dimensions of Register Variation	Lexical Bundle Analysis, Cluster Analysis (corpus linguistics), Contiguous Sequence Analysis
Apparentées	4	4
Résumé	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.	N-gram analysis is a corpus-linguistic technique that extracts and ranks every contiguous sequence of n words (or characters) in a corpus, exposing the recurrent multi-word units — two-word bigrams, three-word trigrams, and longer 'lexical bundles' — that make up a register or text type. By counting how often each sequence recurs, it reveals the prefabricated, formulaic backbone of language that single-word frequency lists cannot capture.