A Corpus-based Multi-dimensional Analysis Of The Register Variation In Science Fiction

Isaac Asimov,the American author,is a highly successful writer of science fiction.As one of the most highly regarded works in Asimov’s fiction,the Foundation series has been the focus of many investigations.However,few studies have focused on the linguistic features of this series.This study takes the Foundation series(seven books)as an example for analysis.It adopted a mix of quantitative and qualitative approaches to explore the linguistic features in the series to find out why Asimov did not keep the consistency of his writing style in the Foundation series.Quantitative analysis was conducted with the help of the corpus tool.The seven books of the Foundation series were divided into three phases according to the publication time.Three separate corpora named Phase 1,Phase 2,and Phase 3 were built respectively for the study.The fictional texts from the Frown corpus(Frown K-N)were chosen to construct a reference corpus.The Multi-Dimensional analysis proposed by Biber(1988)was employed to perform comparative analyses among four corpora on five functional dimensions(involved versus informational production,narrative versus non-narrative concerns,explicit versus situationdependent reference,overt expression of persuasion,abstract versus non-abstract information).The multiple linear regression model was used to identify the salient linguistic features that have the strongest influence on each dimension.Detailed interpretation of the quantitative analysis was presented with the help of discourse analysis.Qualitative analysis helped to give explanations of the reason why Asimov changed his writing style in the Foundation series.This research has produced such key findings: It is found that there is a considerable change in Asimov’s writing style from the 1940 s to the 1980 s within the Foundation series.Firstly,the texts in Phase 1 of the Foundation series are more informative(Dimension 1)but less persuasive(Dimension 4).During the creation of the works in Phase 1,Asimov attempted to extend his understanding of scientific knowledge into science fiction.Therefore,he paid more effort to the scientific imaginations and inventions in the fiction and spent large amounts of words to make specific explanations for them.Secondly,the texts in Phase 2 and Phase 3 of the Foundation series are more involved(Dimension 1)and persuasive(Dimension 4).From the 1940 s to the 1980 s,Asimov wrote enormous amounts of science popularizations instead of science fiction.It is his experience of writing science popularizations that affected Asimov’s writing style.There are other findings in the research.Compared with the linguistic features in the corpus Frown K-N,the language in Phase 1 of the Foundation series is more explicit(Dimension 3),more abstract(Dimension 5),but less narrative(Dimension 2).When Asimov wrote Phase 1 of the Foundation series,he enriched his fictional ideas about imaginations of future galaxies in the fiction but did not stick to the narrative techniques.This evidence supports that the language in Phase 1 of the Foundation series is more explicit but less narrative.Besides,Asimov’s writing style was also affected by his personal experience.Being a student then an assistant professor at the university,Asimov wrote science fiction as a part-time job.Because Asimov was lack of adequate training to write fiction,the language in Phase 1 of the Foundation series is more abstract than the fiction in the Frown corpus.As a beginning step toward linguistic analysis in science fiction,the findings of the present research can not only contribute to a better understanding of the Foundation series but also provide an example for the application of corpus linguistics to the study of science fiction.