6.1 Biber & Finegan (1989)

The essay “Drift and the evolution of English style: A history of three genres” by Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan is a socio-historical approach to an analysis of the evolution of the three genres essays, fiction and letters over the last four centuries. It describes the evolution of language variation by analysing the relative frequency of linguistic forms and by looking at linguistic co-occurrence with regard to underlying dimensions of variation (cf. Biber & Finegan 1989: 488-489; cf. also chapter 21 and the corresponding companion website). These dimensions or continua of classification derive from a synchronic analysis and are firstly informational versus involved production, secondly elaborated versus situation-dependent reference and thirdly abstract versus non-abstract style. By comparing the three genres in terms of these dimensions, the authors show that although the genres have been evolving differently, their developments reflect an underlying pattern or drift toward a more oral style (cf. Biber & Finegan 1989: 489, 505-506).

The research methods used, which are of particular interest here, are only mentioned briefly in the article. In detail, Biber & Finegan name the authors chosen and the periods the texts are divided into. The selection of the study from 1989 has not been made, however, by means of any literature database but obviously manually with the aim of displaying a representative sample. Accordingly, the authors analysed only a total of 115 texts which contained 120,000 words (cf. Biber & Finegan 1989: 497).

Apart from the drift toward a more oral characterization since the 17th century, the study comes to the conclusion that the three genres have tended toward more involved, more situated and less abstract style (cf. Biber & Finegan 1989: 506). In the final section of the essay, the authors try to explain the reasons of the noted drift by referring to a range of functional forces, such as the demand for oral styles by a progressively wider reading public over the last centuries (cf. Biber & Finegan 1989: 515-516).

Generally speaking, the article by Biber and Finegan is a good example of a diachronic linguistic study that tries not to scrutinize small individual phenomena but has its focus on the bigger context of a comprehensive drift or tendency of a language. Moreover, it can help understand the trend of one genre of our databases, namely fiction, toward a more oral style – a fact that must be taken into consideration by future researchers who work with literature databases. For the reader interested in the use of corpora or literature databases, however, it offers no further information.

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