Specialized discourse and written language: focus and variation

Abstract

This paper investigates the variation across written and spoken registers and specialized and non-specialized texts. The same method was used as in Biber's (1988) research on linguistic variation across speech and writing, but the focus was the Spanish language with emphasis on a text-oriented perspective. A corpus of 90 authentic texts was collected and 65 salient linguistic features, with functional and communicative implications, were determined, most of them not only operating at word and sentence level, but in search for a text projection. Normalized frequencies of these features in each text were then entered in a factor analysis, from which five dimensions emerged. The emerging dimensions tend to identify variation between written and spoken registers and technical and non-technical texts, being the case that the "Informational Focus" turned out to be the most relevant dimension to account for the written technical-scientific corpus.