Text types in Brazilian Portuguese: a multidimensional perspective

E-ISSN： 1755-1676|12|3|483-515

ISSN： 1755-1676

Source： Corpora, Vol.12, Iss.3, 2017-11, pp. : 483-515

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Abstract

This paper presents a new typology of texts for Brazilian Portuguese, based on a thorough description of the linguistic characteristics of 960 texts in a 5.6 million-word corpus (Berber Sardinha et al., 2014). The typology follows the Multi-dimensional framework proposed by Biber (1989), which defines text types as linguistic constructs derived from dimensions of variation, or co-occurring sets of linguistic characteristics that underlie register variation in a particular language or language variety. The text types were identified following a cluster analysis that took as input the dimension scores for each text on each of the six dimensions of variation. The clusters were interpreted as nine text types, each representing a typical textual configuration found in Brazilian Portuguese.