English Speech And Commentary: A Corpus Based Genre Analysis

Abstract

The study explores the use of language in English commentary and speech using corpus-based genre analysis. The corpus includes English cricket commentaries and speeches of Barack Obama, categorized under various linguistic/lexical categories. Doglous Biber's (1988) Multidimensional Analysis has been used to quantitatively identify and compare the textual dimension and genre types of these speeches and commentaries. The comparative analysis revealed that commentary's textual dimension is positive on D2 and negative on D1, D3, D4, D5, and D6, while speech's textual dimension is positive on D3, D4, D6, and negative on D1, D2, D5. Biber's dimensions show the most similar and closest genre of commentary on dimension 1, 4 and 6 is broadcast, dimension 2 and 5 is prepared speeches and dimension 3 is general fiction, while speech's closest genre on dimension 1 is general fiction, dimension 2, 3 and 6 is academic prose, dimension 4 is personal letters and dimension 5 is press reportage.