I wasn't referring to a text or to any of Biber's well-known work on
variations across speech/writing, some of which I've found very useful.
Biber was not writing for teachers or students, so I don't see the relevance
of Bob's critique. I was referring to the data base at a university in
England; I had assumed that Biber was associated with it. I may have been
wrong. It seems likely that he has drawn on it, as others have. Judy



At 04:00 PM 6/24/00 -0500, you wrote:
>I think the text that Judy is referring to already exists.
>>
>> I know that the Dougals Biber group in England is accumulating a huge
>> database of texts of all kinds which is making it possible to show
>> grammar/text correlations with probabilities calculated. There is certainly
>> no 1:1 absolute relation, but there are just as certainly quite high
>> probabilities that certain linguistic features will show up in certain kinds
>> of text in a certain likely order -- which would indicate that, for writing
>> a certain kind of text, a student would benefit from knowing how to produce
>> the correlated features in the expected order.
>
>It is the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English.  Biber is the
>first author.
>
>I have a copy. The results have some interest, but I am not quite sure
>that it would be helpful to a student, let alone a teacher.  Consider
>what it says about Sentence/turn-initial coordination [defined in this
>section as and, but, or, nor] (p 83-84).  Here are the two major
>conclusions:
>
>"Proportionally, turn-initial coordinators are considerably more common
>in conversation than sentence-initial coordination than in the written
>registers [defined as fiction, news, and academic prose]."
>
>"Sentence-initial coordination are least common in academic prose."
>
>In the figure next to these statements, it appears only 1% of the AND's
>in academic prose is as a sentence-initial coordinator.  For BUT this
>rate is 10%.  OR is like AND. For NOR, 30% of its occurrences is as a
>sentence-initial coordinator. (These percentages are my interpretation
>of the figure.  These numbers are not in the text.)
>
>In the discussion, the authors note: "The prescription against initial
>coordination seems most influential in academic prose.  The higher
>frequencies in fiction and news reportage probably reflect the fact that
>these registers often include more spontaneous discourse, including
>fiction dialogue and quoted speech."  What they are referring to is that
>in conversation about 20% of the AND's are sentence initial
>coordinators, 50% of the BUT's, 8% of the OR's, and about 90% of the
>NOR's.
>
>Notice all of these numbers refer to percentages.  Several pages early,
>there is a figure showing the distribution of coordinators across
>registers.  In academic prose AND occurs 25,000 times per one million
>words and BUT occurs about 6,000 per one million words.  So, out of
>everyone one million words in academic prose 250 AND's will be as a
>sentence-initial coordinator and about 600 BUT's will be.
>
>What does a teacher of grammar do with such distributions, either
>percentages or words per million words?  How do these data benefit a
>student?  I modestly suggest some. In academic prose, AND is so rare as
>a sentence-initial coordinator that a student should never use it.  Or,
>AND can only be used as a sentence-initial coordinator once every 100
>times AND is used.  Or, it is more acceptable to begin sentences with
>BUT than with AND.
>
>But, it might be the case that none of these suggestions are useful
>because it would appear that the distributions are the result of editors
>who have a commitment to prescriptivism.  It might be the case that it
>does not matter anymore because this is strictly a prescriptivist
>distribution and this rule is changing.
>
>Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University
>
>A final aspect of this issue.  FURTHERMORE occurs more than
>100/1,000,000 words of academic prose and less than 50/1,000,000 words
>in British English conversation. (p. 887)
>


Judith Diamondstone  (732) 932-7496  Ext. 352
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1183