Describing the situational characteristics of registers and genres

Abstract

Introduction In the last chapter, we defined a register as a language variety associated with both a particular situation of use and with pervasive linguistic features that serve important functions within that situation of use. In this chapter we focus on the “situation,” that is, on how to describe characteristics related to the situation of use, or what we call situational characteristics . These characteristics include the physical context, such as the actual time and place, but also many other considerations. For example, the situational characteristics of face-to-face conversation include the fact that there are two or more participants producing language in the spoken mode and interacting directly with one another in a shared place and time. The situational characteristics of newspaper articles are very different, with a single author producing language in the written mode for a large number of readers scattered across different places and times. An analysis of situational characteristics is important for the genre perspective as well as the register perspective, and most of the issues discussed in this chapter relate to both. In contrast, style variation is independent of the situational context, and thus we do not address that perspective in this chapter. This chapter begins by discussing two issues related to the identification of registers and genres – first, how these text varieties can be described at different levels of generality, and second, cultural distinctions among registers/genres.