Do all roads lead to Rome?: Modeling register variation with factor analysis and discriminant analysis

Previous theoretical and empirical research on register variation has argued that linguistic co-occurrence patterns have a highly systematic relationship to register differences, because they both share the same functional underpinnings. The goal of this study is to test this claim through a comparison of two statistical techniques that have been used to describe register variation: factor analysis (as used in Multi-Dimensional analysis, MDA)...