5.4 Conclusion

In summary, the following can be stated. Despite the different points of departure, the nevertheless considerable agreements between Biber and Finegan’s results and our own can indeed be viewed as a confirmation of the diachronic drift of English fiction towards a more oral style as described in the former’s article. That being said, there are of course a number of discrepancies which are too striking to be neglected. As suggested earlier, a plausible cause might be found within the aforementioned varying points of departure. While both studies aim to investigate English fiction in regard to its diachronic drift towards a more oral characterization, each put their focus on different features, with Biber and Finegan admittedly pursuing a more aggregate perspective (they considered a total of 67 functionally important linguistic features including word length, in his study) although it could be argued that this case study considered a more representative selection of texts. It needs to be expected that such differing approaches will yield differing results. All the more do the existing consistencies emphatically illustrate the determinative character of such features as word and sentence length or, in the relevant sense, the readability of texts regarding their characterization as either more oral or literate.

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