5.2 Overview of Biber anf Finegan's study on the drift of English style

As mentioned above, this case study is to a large extent based on the article “Drift and the Evolution of English Style: A History of three Genres”. In this article, the authors Biber and Finegan take a sociohistorical approach to the aggregate data analysis of the evolution of three written genres (fiction, essays and personal letters) in British and American English over the last four centuries by establishing three different parameters of variation (Informational versus Involved Production, Elaborated versus Situation-Dependent Reference and Abstract versus Non-Abstract Style).2 These aggregate parameters each comprise a group of co-occurring linguistic features, which share similar situational, functional and cognitive functions within their respective dimensions. According to their position along the continua for the dimensions these features are indicative of either a more oral or a more literate linguistic characterization. With the help of these parameters, the authors are able to characterize each individual genre by computing the dimension scores for each text individually and comparing the mean dimension scores of the different genres by placing them along the oral-literate continuum for each dimension. The result is that all three genres exhibit more or less similar developments on all three dimensions, with the 17th century indicating a relatively oral style and the 18th century showing a shift towards the literate pole of the continuum followed by a new continuous rise towards a more oral style up to the 20th century.

Building on these findings, the aim of the present case study is to examine to what extent the principle of such a diachronic drift as revealed through Biber and Finegan’s research, holds true for historical texts when analyzed in regards to the features word length and sentence length. In contrast to Biber et al., this mini-project will focus on fictional texts but include 16th century fiction for British English as well as British and American texts for the later centuries.

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