Afterword

Abstract

Edward Finegan, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Law at the University of Southern California, provides this afterword to synthesize and provide commentary on the six articles in this issue. He has been involved with research on register for more than 30 years, publishing a large number of empirical studies on register and the book Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register (Biber & Finegan 1994, Oxford University Press). He is also co-author on the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan 1999, Longman), the first comprehensive reference grammar to systematically account for register. He is currently involved in research on the relationship between register variation and social dialect variation. In addition to his research on register, Finegan has made tremendous contributions in the areas of general linguistics, language variation in the U.S., and language attitudes toward correctness, publishing widely-used textbooks in all three areas. He has also been an influential figure in the application of linguistics in legal proceedings, acting as expert witness in many legal cases, particularly those related to defamation and trademark. He currently serves as the Editor of the journal Dictionaries: The Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America.