Register Variation Research Articles

Register variation in L1 and L2 student writing

Abstract While there have been many studies describing L2 academic writing, most of these studies have used corpora of first year or assessment writing (Crosthwaite 2016; Weigle & Friginal 2014). The present study seeks to describe linguistic variation in L2 writing for content classes and to compare these linguistic patterns to those found in L1 writing. A multi-dimensional (MD) analysis was conducted in two corpora, BAWE and BrAWE, extracting five dimensions. The L2 corpus contained 379 texts written by Brazilian students doing part of their undergrad in the UK and the L1 corpus contained 395 texts from BAWE. The results of this study indicate that L1 and L2 writers use similar linguistic resources to convey the purpose of university registers, with the exception of case studies, designs, exercises and research reports. This linguistic variation between L1 and L2 writers might be explained by students’ interpretation of these registers’ communicative purposes.

Diachronic register change

Abstract A number of studies have found that grammatical differences across registers are more extensive than those across dialects. However, there is a paucity of research examining intervarietal register change, exploring how registers change differently over time in different regional varieties. The present study addresses this diachronic deficit, focusing on grammatical developments – from the early 20th to the early 21st century – in corpora representing three written registers and two speech-based registers in Australian, British and American English. We conducted a factor analysis on 68 lexicogrammatical features to identify six dimensions of register variation, and subsequently investigated the diachronic change of the five registers across these dimensions. We interpret our findings in terms of the differential effects of broad social changes on individual registers, in light of existing findings on trends of change in different registers and varieties.

The Ways Of Expressing Condolences Implicitly And Their Effect On Sociolinguistics.

The article considers condolence as a form of English speech etiquette, analyzed as an expressive speech act. The relevance of teaching speech etiquette in a situation of condolence lies in the fact that the effectiveness of learning English increases in the conditions of modeling a real communicative situation. Linguistic means of speech act expression are considered. It introduces sociolinguistics by means of five areas of research: quantitative sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, register variation, discourse analysis, and the sociology of language.

Is courtroom discourse an ‘oral’ or ‘literate’ register? The importance of sub-register

By applying Multi-Dimensional Analysis, this study has provided a thorough description of the lexico-grammatical characteristics of courtroom discourse to see to what extent it employs both linguistic features of oral registers and literate registers. In particular, this study focuses on language used in the four public sub-registers (opening statements, direct examinations, cross-examinations, closing arguments) of courtroom discourse and analyzes how oral/literate each sub-register is, instead of characterizing courtroom discourse as oral/literate overall. Detailed interpretation of results focuses on Dimension 1 (involved and interactive vs. informational production) and 2 (narrative vs. non-narrative discourse) as these two dimensions are identified as universal parameters of register variation (Biber, 2014). A corpus of high-profile courtroom trials was compiled for this study that includes the O. J. Simpson criminal trial, the Boston Marathon bombing trial, and the Oklahoma bombing trial.

THE WAYS OF EXPRESSING CONDOLENCES IMPLICITLY AND THEIR EFFECT ON SOCIOLINGUISTICS

The article considers condolence as a form of English speech etiquette, analyzed as an expressive speech act. The relevance of teaching speech etiquette in a situation of condolence lies in the fact that the effectiveness of learning English increases in the conditions of modeling a real communicative situation. Linguistic means of speech act expression are considered. It introduces sociolinguistics by means of five areas of research: quantitative sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, register variation, discourse analysis, and the sociology of language.

A Multi-dimensional Approach to Register Variations in Mandarin Chinese

Multi-dimensional Analysis (MD) is a quantitative corpus-based approach which describes and interprets patterns of register variations through factor analysis of a set of linguistic fea-tures across text varieties, and reveals their systematic relationships with communicative purposes. The model has been employed to explore language variation in many languages (e.g., English, Somali, Nukulaelae Tuvaluan, Korean, and Spanish), yet insufficient research has been carried out on register variation in Mandarin Chinese on a full scale. In this research, 88 linguistic features are tagged in a balanced corpus composed of 20 Mandarin Chinese spoken and written registers. Through factor analysis, five dimensions which consist of 65 linguistic features are identified and interpreted from linguistic and functional perspectives. The first two dimensions, interactive vs. informational discourse and narrative vs. non-narrative concern, are similar to dimensions that have been claimed to constitute universal parameters of register variation in previous MD studies. The exist-ence of two potential universal dimensions suggests that the basic communicative purposes and functions underlying the different languages are markedly similar, given the existing social, cultural, and linguistic dissimilarities. Dimension 4, casual real-time speech with stance, is identified as a distinctive dimension in Mandarin Chinese. Dimension 3, explicit-ness in cohesion and reasoning, and Dimension 5, abstract information, are found to be as-sociated with foreign influence, and their register variation patterns illustrate how foreign contact affects Chinese register variation in a quantitative manner.

FIRST ROUNDTABLE ON PRACTICES AND STANDARDS IN FORENSIC AUTHORSHIP ANALYSIS (OVERVIEW 2)

The article provides an overview of the reports of the 1st Roundtable on Practices and Standards in Forensic Authorship. The roundtable was held by the International Association of Forensic Linguistics and the Centre for Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester on May 15, 2019. The review presents a co-authored report by Krzysztof Kredens from the University of Aston and Piotr Rezik “Large-scale author classification — looking into the black box”, Jack Grieve, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Birmingham “Register variation and authorship analysis” and the report by Jack Grieve, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Birmingham, “Register variation and authorship analysis”. Each report is supplemented with questions to the speaker and their answers to them. The first report looks at the issue of authorship identification on the material of short messages from popular Internet forums («Musmnet» is one of them). Data processing involves the k-nearest neighbors algorithm and uses the following style markers: n-grams, POSlemmas with neutralized polysemanticity, collocations demonstrating typical lexical realizations of syntactic constructions (phrasal verbs, direct objects and subjects expressed by pronouns). In case there are no universally accepted markers, it is necessary each time to find optimal parameters and treat each case as unique. In his report on stylometry, Jack Grieve argues that the functional theory of language variation is more suitable as a foundation for it than sociolinguistics: language varies in different contexts because some linguistic forms suit these contexts better than others. To demonstrate the advantages of the functional approach, a stylometric analysis of the articles of two political columnists of “The Telegraph” is performed. The style of analytical columns of these authors differs depending on the communication strategy: the style of one author is more narrative, and that of the other is more analytical. The reporter concludes that the functional theory of authorship identification studies can become more reliable than the sociolinguistic theory of individual style and can be considered a foundation of forensic linguistics on the whole.

Morphological features of Kiswahili youth language(s): Evidence from Dar es Salaam, Goma, Lubumbashi and Nairobi

AbstractSince the late 1980s, linguists’ analyses of Sheng, the urban youth language from Nairobi, have led to the growth of a considerable body of literature. In contrast, only a few studies are available that cover other youth registers from the Kiswahili-speaking parts of Africa. While most of the available studies either deal with techniques of manipulation or with adolescents’ identity constructions, our paper intends to give a comparative overview of specific morphological features of Kiswahili-based youth languages. While certain characteristics of Sheng (Nairobi/Kenya), Lugha ya Mitaani (Dar es Salaam/Tanzania), Kindubile (Lubumbashi/DR Congo) and Yabacrâne (Goma/DR Congo) largely diverge from East Coast Swahili (hereafter ECS) in regard to their nominal and verbal morphology, they all share specific features. Focusing on (apparent) supra-regional developments and changes in Kiswahili, this preliminary description of some structural features that transcend all four youth language practices aims to provide comparative insights into urban register variation, approaching East African youth languages from a micro-typological perspective.

“Dear Emma…”. Genre Overlapping and Register Variation in the English and Italian Version of Sergio Marchionne’s Letter to Confindustria

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to examine whether genre overlapping and register variation have implications in terms of translation outcomes. To this end, the English and the Italian version of the letter sent by Sergio Marchionne to the President of Confindustria – Italy’s most important employers’ organisation – will be analysed. The decision to investigate Marchionne’s statement is based on the fact that this is a letter disseminated as a press release, which also contains highly-technical terminology pertaining to the discourse of Employment Relations (ER). It is stressed that a number of issues arise when deciding which genre and register to use when translating specialised texts. It is argued that genre overlapping and register variation affect the texts in English and Italian in important respects, leading to different perceptions on the part of the target audience.

Author and register as sources of variation

AbstractThis paper investigates the contribution of author/idiolect vs. register/type-of-text – as the most salient factors influencing the final shape of a text – towards explaining the variation observed in Czech texts. Since it is almost impossible to explore the effect of these factors on authentic data, we used elicited letters collected in a fully crossed experimental design (representative sample of 200 authors × four elicitation scenarios serving as a proxy to register variation). The variation encompassed by the elicited texts is analyzed through the lens of a general-purpose multi-dimensional model of Czech. Using triangulation via three established statistical methods and one devised for the purpose of this study, we find that register matters a great deal, explaining 1.5 times as much variation overall as idiolect. This should be taken into account when designing research in sociolinguistics or variation studies in general.

Register Variation in Word-formation Processes

This paper traces the development of two roughly synonymous nominalizing suffixes during the Early Modern English period, the Romance -ity and the native -ness. The aim is to assess whether these suffixes were favored in particular registers or followed similar paths of development, and to ascertain whether the ongoing processes of standardization and vernacularization may have affected their diachronic evolution. To this purpose, the type frequencies and rates of aggregation of new types of the two suffixes were analyzed in seventeen different registers distributed along the formal-informal and the speech-written continua. Results indicate that -ness tends to lose ground in favor of -ity between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, a change which seems to have begun in formal written registers and spread towards ‘oral’ ones, probably aided by a general trend in written registers for the adoption of a more learned and literate style during the eighteenth century.

Investigating the effects of gender, dialect, and training size on the performance of Arabic speech recognition

Research in Arabic automatic speech recognition (ASR) is constrained by datasets of limited size, and of highly variable content and quality. Arabic-language resources vary in the attributes that affect language resources in other languages (noise, channel, speaker, genre), but also vary significantly in the dialect and level of formality of the spoken Arabic they capture. Many languages suffer similar levels of cross-dialect and cross-register acoustic variability, but these effects have been under-studied. This paper is an experimental analysis of the interaction between classical ASR corpus-compensation methods (feature selection, data selection, gender-dependent acoustic models) and the dialect-dependent/register-dependent variation among Arabic ASR corpora. The first interaction studied in this paper is that between acoustic recording quality and discrete pronunciation variation. Discrete pronunciation variation can be compensated by using grapheme-based instead of phone-based acoustic models, and by filtering out speakers with insufficient training data; the latter technique also helps to compensate for poor recording quality, which is further compensated by eliminating delta-delta acoustic features. All three techniques, together, reduce Word Error Rate (WER) by between 3.24% and 5.35%. The second aspect of dialect and register variation to be considered is variation in the fine-grained acoustic pronunciations of each phoneme in the language. Experimental results prove that gender and dialect are the principal components of variation in speech, therefore, building gender and dialect-specific models leads to substantial decreases in WER. In order to further explore the degree of acoustic differences between phone models required for each of the dialects of Arabic, cross-dialect experiments are conducted to measure how far apart Arabic dialects are acoustically in order to make a better decision about the minimal number of recognition systems needed to cover all dialectal Arabic. Finally, the research addresses an important question: how much training data is needed for building efficient speaker-independent ASR systems? This includes developing some learning curves to find out how large must the training set be to achieve acceptable performance.

Placement patterns of English and French conjunctive adjuncts of contrast

AbstractIn many languages, conjunctive adjuncts (e.g.however, therefore) are syntactically mobile. Several corpus-based contrastive studies have shown that languages differ in the positions that they tend to prefer for conjunctive adjuncts. However, the studies available have formulated general cross-linguistic differences in placement for languages as wholes, without considering the possibility that such contrasts may be influenced by register. The objective of this paper is to investigate and compare the placement patterns of English and French conjunctive adjuncts of contrast in two written registers (viz. editorials and research articles) in order to measure the impact of register variation on the differences between these two languages. The results suggest that, although register variation plays a significant role on placement within each language system, language is a better predictor of placement than register, since cross-linguistic differences in placement between English and French are stable across communicative situations. In a second stage, the results obtained in the comparable corpus study are complemented with the analysis of translation data, with a view to assessing the translators’ degree of awareness of the inherent word order preferences of the target language. The study is grounded in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics and relies on the notions of Theme and Rheme to describe conjunctive adjunct placement.

Register Variation in Chinese English and Language Variation between Chinese English and American English: A Case Study of Perhaps and Maybe

The study aims to explore the register variation in Chinese English and language variation between Chinese English and American English. A corpus-based and comparative methodology was used to analyse the discourse features of Chinese English in the use of the lexical items perhaps and maybe. The major findings of the study can be stated as follows: 1) the more formal word perhaps is used more frequently than the informal word maybe in all the four genres in Chinese English. This shows that the text of Chinese English is generally in a more formal style. 2) In the Chinese English text, the ratios of the standard frequency of perhaps to maybe are greater than those in American English in the all the four genres. This indicates that the text in Chinese English is generally in a more formal style than that in American English. 3) In the Chinese English text, the informal word maybe is used less frequently than in the American English text. This is a sign that Chinese English is more formal than American English.

Elaboration, compression and explicitness across sub-registers of popular and academic writing in Hong Kong English

Abstract In this study we examine elaboration, compression and explicitness in academic and popular writing in an Outer Circle variety of English, that of Hong-Kong, as represented in the International Corpus of English corpus. As Biber and Gray (2016) show, contemporary academic discourse is structurally compressed at NP level (rather than elaborated) and inexplicit in the expression of meaning. The linguistic features selected for analysis are short passives, which are compressed and inexplicit, and adnominal relative clauses, which represent the opposite tendency, that towards elaboration and explicitness. We focus on register variation through analyzing, first, differences between academic and popular writing, and second, interdisciplinary variation in four sub-registers: humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and technology.

‘We kissed one another and parted good friends.’ On the expression of reciprocity in Early Modern English

Reciprocity in contemporary English is normally expressed by means of the compound pronouns each other and one another, both constructions used interchangeably and without any apparent difference in meaning, even though various factors have been proposed to account for the choice between the two alternatives. Among them, style stands out as the most convincing argument postulating the use of each other and one another in informal and formal contexts, register variation, each other being by far the most common form in all contexts while one another becomes relatively common in fiction and academic prose (Biber et al., 1999: 346-347). From a historical viewpoint, each other stems from those Old English constructions in which the quantifier aelc occurs with the alterity word o¯þer in neighbouring positions, while one another is a Late Middle English development of (the) one + (the) (an)other, where the first element is also the grammatical subject and the second the object (Haas, 2010: 63-68). Since then, both reciprocals have competed for more than five centuries for the expression of reciprocity in English and, interestingly enough, the dilemma is still unresolved, contradicting the general assumption that the competition between forms whose meaning is compatible is usually resolved either by the loss of one of them or by the adoption of a different (Kahlas-Tarkka, 2004: 132). The Early Modern English period becomes a crucial period in the history of reciprocals witnessing the transition from the discontinuous forms each the other and one the other to the fossilized constructions each other and one another. In the light of this, the present paper pursues the following objectives: a) to trace the origin, grammaticalization and univerbation of each other and one another within their own paradigm in Early Modern English, and b) to analyse the use and distribution of these reciprocals to determine the date and the circumstances that contributed to the adoption of each other over one another for the expression of reciprocity in the history of English. The source of evidence comes from the Early English Books Online Corpus (for the period 1473-1700) and the Old Bailey Corpus (for the period 1674-1913).

Parallel Sentence Alignment from Biomedical Comparable Corpora.

Parallel sentences provide semantically similar information which can vary on a given dimension, such as language or register. Parallel sentences with register variation (like expert and non-expert documents) can be exploited for the automatic text simplification. The aim of automatic text simplification is to better access and understand a given information. In the biomedical field, simplification may permit patients to understand medical and health texts. Yet, there is currently no such available resources. We propose to exploit comparable corpora which are distinguished by their registers (specialized and simplified versions) to detect and align parallel sentences. These corpora are in French and are related to the biomedical area. We treat this task as binary classification (alignment/non-alignment). Our results show that the method we present here can be used to automatically generate a corpus of parallel sentences from our comparable corpus.

Regularity and variation in Japanese recipes

Abstract This paper investigates the similarities and differences between three sub-registers of Japanese recipe texts: cookbook recipes, online commercial recipes written/edited by professionals, and online user-generated recipes. Past studies on Japanese recipes do not distinguish different sub-registers, and they tend to focus on a single feature. The present study of the sub-registers examines a group of frequently appearing linguistic features and uncovers functional links between observed features and situational characteristics. The comparative perspective contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of Japanese recipe language as well as universal and language-specific aspects of register variation. Shared traits among the three sub-registers are tied to the common topic of cooking and the central purpose of providing easy-to-follow food preparation instructions. Varied linguistic and textual features are motivated by different production circumstances, mediums, and relations among the participants. Professionally edited cookbook and online commercial recipes show a much higher uniformity in their grammatical features than unedited/self-edited user-generated recipes. Online sub-registers share a role of serving as a repository and reference center for numerous recipes and related information. Relationships among writers, readers, and other participants such as publishers and site organizers differ among all three sub-registers, resulting in some unique linguistic patterns.

Fiction – one register or two?

Abstract In this paper our focus is on analyzing register variation within fiction, rather than between fiction and other registers. By working with subcorpora that separate text within and outside of quotation marks, we appromixate fictional speech and narration. This enables us to identify and compare linguistic features with regard to different situational contexts in the fictional world. We focus in particular on the novels of Charles Dickens and a reference corpus of other 19th-century fiction. Our main method for the register analysis is Multi-dimensional Analysis (MDA) for which we draw on altogether four dimensions from two previous MDAs. The linguistic distinctions we identify highlight similarities between fictional speech and involved registers such as face-to-face communication, and between narration and more informational and narrative prose. In addition to the detailed information on register features that characterize speech and narration, the paper raises more general questions about the ability of register studies to deal with situational contexts within fiction.

On the interaction between register variation and regional varieties in English

AbstractThis paper examines the extent to which regional varieties of English influence register variation. Register is a key concept in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), whereas regional variation is rarely studied in this framework. However, languages like Chinese, Spanish and English are used in more than one region and such more complex language situations raise the question of whether registers are used consistently throughout. In this study, texts from three varieties represented in the International Corpus of English are analysed for frequencies of 41 lexico-grammatical features and subjected to exploratory multivariate analysis. The analysis shows that, while there are clear indications of register patterns irrespective of varieties, variety appears to override register in some cases. Variety therefore needs to be accounted for in language theory in addition to the language system and registers as subsystems.