Before undertaking a cross-linguistic comparison of register variation, it is necessary to have a complete description of the distributional patterns within each language. The previous chapter gave the methodological and statistical details of the Multi-Dimensional analyses for English, Nukulaelae Tuvaluan, Korean, and Somali. The present chapter turns to the functional interpretation of the dimensions in each language and analysis of the relations among registers with respect to each of those dimensions.

English

Six basic dimensions of variation in English are identified and interpreted in Biber (1988). The present section will consider each of these dimensions in turn.

English dimension 1: ‘Involved versus Informational Production’

The interpretation of dimension 1 was briefly summarized in section 5.5. As table 6.1 shows, the negative features on this dimension are all associated with an informational focus and a careful integration of information in texts. Nouns are the primary device used to convey referential meaning, and a higher frequency of nouns is one reflection of a greater informational density. Prepositional phrases also integrate information into a text, functioning as postnominal modifiers to explicitly specify and elaborate referential identity (in addition to their function as adverbial modifiers). Word length and type–token ratio also mark a high density of information, by reflecting precise word choice and an exact presentation of informational content. Longer words tend to be rarer and more specific in meaning than shorter words (Zipf 1949).