Text types in Brazilian Portuguese: a multidimensional perspective

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.