Register Studies - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2019

This study investigates the effect that reference corpora of different registers have on the content of keyword lists. The study focusses on two target corpora and the keyword lists generated for each when using three distinct reference corpora. The two target corpora consist of published research by faculty at two PhD-granting programs in applied linguistics in North America. The reference corpora comprise published research in applied linguistics, newspaper and magazine articles, and fiction texts, respectively. The findings suggest that while common keywords representing each target corpus emerge regardless of the reference corpus used in the analysis, there are also substantial differences. Primarily, using a reference corpus of the same sub-register as the target corpus better highlights content unique to each target corpus while using a reference corpus of a different register better uncovers words that reflect the register that the target corpora represent. Implications for conducting keyword analysis are discussed.

There are sets of grammatical stance markers that are morphologically and semantically related, but that differ with regard to their syntactic realization (e.g., importantly, it is important that and the importance of). Little attention has, however, been paid to how these pattern across registers. This study examines eleven such sets across five registers in apprentice and expert production to investigate which register(s) the apprentice writers’ use is closest to and what that can tell us about their adherence to academic norms. The results show that there is a cline from the a priori more formal registers to the less formal registers for the stance markers investigated. When the apprentice writers’ usage was mapped onto this cline, it became clear that their usage diverged slightly from that of the academic experts, thus indicating a lack of register awareness. Yet, very little evidence was found to support previous claims of the ‘spoken-like’ nature of learner writing.

While the language of the internet has been an increasingly popular research topic, there remain many understudied areas and topics which deserve more attention. This study explores register variation within the social media website Reddit using the multi-dimensional approach developed by Douglas Biber. Reddit, the third most popular English-language social media website after the giants Facebook and Twitter, is made up of thousands of user-created ‘subreddits’, subcommunities centered around different topics, where users make posts and comment on them. Many different communities and topic areas under one roof makes Reddit a particularly fruitful source of research material. In this paper, three register dimensions are extracted from data collected over one month from a group of thirty-seven subreddits: ‘On-line Subjective Production’, ‘Informational Style’ and ‘Instructional Focus’. These dimensions describe register variation within Reddit in meaningful ways. They are also in line with suggested register universals (Biber 2014).

This article focuses on how register considerations informed and guided the design of the spoken component of the British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014). It discusses why the compilers of the corpus sought to gather recordings from just one broad spoken register – ‘informal conversation’ – and how this and other design decisions afforded contributors to the corpus much freedom with regards to the selection of situational contexts for the recordings. This freedom resulted in a high level of diversity in the corpus for situational parameters such as recording location and activity type, each of which was captured in the corpus metadata. Focussing on these parameters, this article provides evidence for functional variation among the texts in the corpus and suggests that differences such as those observed presently could be analysable within the existing frameworks for analysis of register variation in spoken and written language, such as multidimensional analysis.