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Volume 23, Issue 1
  • ISSN 1384-6655
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9811
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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to identify the effect of register variation in spoken British English on the occurrence of the four principal verb-forming suffixes: ‑, ‑, ‑ and ‑, by building on the work of Biber et al. (1999) , Plag et al. (1999) and Schmid (2011) . Register variation effects were compared between the less formal Demographically-Sampled and the more formal Context-Governed components of the original 1994 version of the British National Corpus. The pattern of ‑ derivatives revealed the most marked register-based differences with respect to frequency counts and the creation of neologisms, whereas ‑ derivatives varied the least compared with the other three suffixes. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of these suffix profiles in the context of spoken language reveal markers of register formality that have not hitherto been explored; derivative usage patterns provide an additional dimension to previous research on register variation which has mainly focused on grammatical and lexical features of language.

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2018-05-31
2025-04-21

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/content/journals/10.1075/ijcl.16036.law
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Register variation in spoken British English
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 23, 1 (2018); https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.16036.law
/content/journals/10.1075/ijcl.16036.law
/content/journals/10.1075/ijcl.16036.law
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): derivational morphology; register variation; spoken language; verb-forming suffixation

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