Abstract

Douglas Biber is a veteran in corpus linguistics which is a field of linguistics studying natural written or spoken languages to better understand how the language is used and now is attracting numerous linguists’ interests. One salient contribution of corpus linguistics for present linguistic studies is that it helps reveal lexico-grammatical patterns (or grammatical collocations) naturally used in the language together with their underlying communicative functions. Biber  is said to be a pioneerin this field of study and to have employed a statistical approach (Multidimensional Analysis: MA) to investigate lexico-grammatical collocations in his corpus of written and spoken discourses. This paper thus elaborates to what extent Biber’s Corpus-based Multidimensional Analysishas contributed to studies in the field. After reviewing literatures related to the topic, the writers of this paper found that numerous scholars have agreed that Biber’s Corpus-based Multidimensional Analysis is relatively good forstudying lexico-grammatical patterns and their communicative functions and can further be applied for other studies particularly in the corpus linguistics field.

Keywords: Douglas Biber, Multidimensional Analysis, Lexico-grammatical Pattern, Corpus Linguistics