Abstract The goal of this study is to identify the dimensions of variation across American television programs, following the multidimensional analysis (MD) framework introduced by Biber (1988). Although television is a major form of mass communication, there has been no previous large-scale MD study of television dialogue. A large corpus containing the key types of contemporary American television programs was collected, annotated with the Biber tagger, and subjected to multi-dimensional analysis, which indicated four factors of statistically correlated linguistic features. Each of these factors was interpreted communicatively to reveal the underlying dimensions of variation on American television, namely “Exposition and discussion vs. Simplified interaction” (Dimension 1), “Simulated conversation” (Dimension 2), “Recount” (Dimension 3) and “Engaging presentation” (Dimension 4). This article presents, illustrates, and discusses each of these dimensions, showing the macro linguistic patterns in use across hundreds of American television programs.

中文翻译：

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美国电视收视率变化的维度

摘要 本研究的目标是按照 Biber (1988) 引入的多维分析 (MD) 框架确定美国电视节目的变化维度。虽然电视是大众传播的一种主要形式，但之前并没有大规模的电视对话的 MD 研究。收集了一个包含当代美国电视节目关键类型的大型语料库，用 Biber 标注器进行注释，并进行多维分析，表明四个统计相关的语言特征因素。这些因素中的每一个都经过交流解释，以揭示美国电视变化的潜在维度，即“展示和讨论与简化互动”（维度 1）、“模拟对话”（维度 2）、“重述”（维度 3）和“引人入胜的演示”（维度 4）。本文介绍、说明和讨论了这些维度中的每一个，展示了数百个美国电视节目中使用的宏观语言模式。