【正文】 ter trains running in the most adverse conditions. You can control the trains this way and if you do that you can be quite sure that they will be able to run more safely and more quickly than they could otherwise no matter how bad the weather gets. . ? Spoken language People centered ? Written language Topic centered ? Spoken language Context dependent ? Written language Context reduced ? Douglas Biber： ? speech and writing : a stylistic continuum. (≠two discrete entities) (. a personal letter) Prof. Douglas Biber founder of the Multidimensional Analysis (MDA) approach professor at Northern Arizona University. manager of international project team who produced the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Longman, 1999). Spoken language supreme ? Speech is the primary medium of munication among all peoples, it should therefore be the primary object for linguistic study. ? Ferdinand de Saussure ? Leonard Bloomfield It is rather as if people believed that in order to find out what a person looks like it is better to study his photograph than his face. Sa