DOI 10.

1515/ling-2013-0040 Linguistics 2013; 51(Jubilee): 15 – 17

The third decade (1983–1993)

Douglas Biber, A typology of English texts.Linguistics1989, Volume 27, issue 1,

3–43. DOI 10.1515/ling.1989.27.1.3

Introductory comments by the author

Why has this article been so influential? Well, a glib response might be that I
was brash in my choice of a title, and the editors allowed me to get away
with it! Although at least I didn’t claim to be presenting the typology of English
texts!
But seriously, I think the article was highly innovative for its time in its meth-
odology, and that it made important descriptive and theoretical contributions to
the study of text typologies.
Methodologically, this article was one of the early applications of Multi-
Dimensional (MD) Analysis, published just a year after my Cambridge University
Press book Variation across Speech and Writing. At the time, there was widespread
interest in MD analysis. In part, this reflected the fact that this was a powerful
methodological approach, incorporating sophisticated corpus analysis as well as
statistical modeling of the linguistic patterns. But MD analyses were not just
demonstrations of computational and statistical prowess; rather, the widespread
interest in MD analysis reflected the fact that the approach was designed to ad-
dress genuine linguistic research questions, and that it had already proven its
theoretical importance in uncovering linguistic patterns of use that had not been
previously noticed.
The 1989 article on text typology offered a major methodological extension to
previous MD research, employing a statistical cluster analysis to identify group-
ings of texts that were similar in their linguistic characteristics – the text types.
This was probably the first time that anyone had tried to identify English text
types empirically, based on their internal linguistic characteristics
There had been a long previous tradition of research on text typologies, but
nearly all previous research had proceeded on some kind of intuitive or percep-
tual basis, since there really weren’t alternative methodologies available. To the
extent that previous studies considered strictly linguistic criteria, they were not
clearly distinguished from situational criteria. Thus, an additional major method-
ological contribution of the study was that it made a clear distinction between
text categories defined in situational terms (the genres of earlier MD studies)

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versus text categories defined in linguistic terms (text types), and to offer an em-
pirical comparison of the two approaches to text categorization.
Descriptively, the study identified eight major text types. Those types were
identified and described for their quantitative-linguistic characteristics, but then
the text types were interpreted functionally, based on detailed consideration of
the texts grouped into each category. This is actually another distinctive method-
ological contribution of the study (and of all MD studies): that the analysis did not
end with the presentation of quantitative findings. Rather, this was treated pri-
marily as a linguistic investigation. Quantitative, corpus-based investigation
was used to identify the linguistic patterns of use and the text categories them-
selves, but those quantitative findings were then interpreted in functional-
linguistic terms and illustrated through detailed consideration of individual text
excerpts.
Theoretically, the study was important for showing how text typologies could
be approached from either situational or linguistic perspectives, and how the two
result in fundamentally different perspectives on the ways in which texts are or-
ganized in English (or any language/culture). I have continued to be interested
in these issues; for example, I try to further tease out the distinctions between
register, genre, and style in my recent CUP book (co-authored with Susan Conrad).
I don’t talk much about future directions for research in the conclusion of
this article. But there is a lot more that could be done with this topic. I note in the
article that future research should consider additional linguistic features and
additional “dimensions” of variation. Research that I did in the 1990s on the
Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English certainly provides the founda-
tion for that extension, describing the use of numerous lexico-grammatical fea-
tures with important functions related to their use in different registers. So it
would be easy to replicate this study now considering a much more comprehen-
sive set of lexico-grammatical features.
But surprisingly, I did not mention the need to replicate this research based
on analysis of other corpora. That oversight might have been due to the fact that
there really weren’t other corpora to analyze at the time – I had assembled pretty
much the most inclusive corpus that I could in the 1980s. But that situation has
changed dramatically over the last two decades, so that there are now numerous
corpora available for analysis. These are much larger than the corpora that I used
in the 1980s, and in some cases, also more inclusive of different specialized kinds
of texts. I think this last point is especially important. These methods will only
identify the text types that are actually represented in the corpus used for the
analysis. The corpora that I used in the 1980s were actually quite inclusive of the
breadth of variation found among English texts, but there are clearly additional

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specialized kinds of texts that were not included. Future analyses based on larger
as well as more comprehensive corpora should thus allow us to test the validity of
the 8 text types identified in this 1989 article, and to further identify additional
English text types.

Douglas Biber: Northern Arizona University. E-mail: douglas.biber@nau.edu

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