Variation in Language and Cohesion across Written and Spoken Registers

This paper investigates the variation in cohesion across written and spoken registers. The same method and corpora were used as in Biber’s (1988) study on linguistic variation across speech and writing; however instead of focusing on 67 linguistic features that primarily operate at the word level, we compared 236 language and cohesion features at the textlevel. Variations in frequencies across these features provided evidence for six dimensions: (1) speech versus writing, (2) informational versus declarative, (3) factual versus situational, (4) topic consistency versus topic variation, (5) elaborative versus constrained, (6) narrative versus non-narrative. Our cohesion and linguistic analysis showed most variation in speech and writing, whereas the linguistic feature analysis operating at the word level did not yield any difference.