Bücher von Douglas (Northern Arizona University) Biber

The use of language corpora, or large samples of natural texts, has become ubiquitous in linguistic research. Yet, there are no conceptual or methodological frameworks for corpus representativeness. This book is the first to provide the field of linguistics with a comprehensive framework for corpus design, evaluation, and representativeness.

Richly illustrated throughout with textual analyses, this book challenges widely held beliefs about grammatical complexity, academic writing, and linguistic change in English. This important new work will be of interest to discourse analysts, sociolinguists, and applied linguists, as well as descriptive linguists and historical linguists.

This book describes a range of the most important kinds of texts in English and introduces methodological techniques used to analyse them.

Douglas Biber's new book extends and refines the research and methodology reported in his ground breaking Variation Across Speech and Writing (CUP, 1988), and adds for the first time a diachronic dimension.

This book is about investigating the way people use language in speech and writing. It introduces the corpus-based approach to the study of language, based on analysis of large databases of real language examples, and illustrates interesting findings about language and the different ways that people speak and write.