Factor loading

The strength with which each linguistic feature is related to a factor is represented by the factor loading. The loading indicates the amount of variance that a feature has in common with the total pool of shared variance and ranges from 0 to +/−1. The more the loading tends to 1, the more representative a feature is of the dimension. Only features with important loadings (larger than +/−.30) are taken into account for the factor interpretation. Features are complementarily distributed, which is illustrated by the positive and negative signs. That is, features with positive loadings co-occur frequently in a text when features with negative loadings are less frequent (cf. Biber and Gray, Chapter 21).

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