Register Studies - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2020

Abstract

This study explores the differences between academic lectures and TED talks by comparing their respective frequent four-word lexical bundles, and the discourse functions of those bundles in these two registers. The results indicate that academic lectures use more varied lexical bundles at a higher frequency than TED talks do. The functional distributions of the bundles further reveal that referential bundles are prevalent in both registers. However, TED speakers use more lexical bundles to organize their discourse and to guide the audience through their talks, while academic lecturers use more stance bundles to show their intentions and to inform the audience about upcoming events. The distinctive characteristics of academic lectures and TED talks are revealed via the divergent sets of lexical bundles in the two registers; the two registers are also shown to differ greatly in terms of the use of lexical bundles for different functions.

Abstract

This contribution adds to ever-growing research on ‘pedagogical stylistics’, (e.g., Burke et al. 2012). We present a case study describing a register approach to teaching literature, or verbal art (Hasan 1985/1989), to undergraduate EFL students in a Systemic Functional Grammar (FG)-based perspective (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004). Our research is guided by two main goals: enhancing the students’ sensitivity to the peculiar functions of language in literature, as part of a wider curriculum on teaching register awareness, and setting up good practices to monitor and assess the effectiveness of our approach. Thus, we present a set of activities based on Hasan’s (1985/1989, 2007) framework for the analysis of verbal art as a ‘special’ register, which is rooted in FG. We then discuss quantitative and qualitative data related to student perceptions of our pedagogical approach, gathered through specifically designed questionnaires, which were followed by semi-structured interviews when possible. The data illustrate the largely positive impact of the approach on students’ engagement, though not unequivocally: problematic issues and implications for future research are also discussed.

Abstract

Much of the corpus-based research on medical discourse has focused on “involved” language (e.g., 1st person pronouns, discourse markers) and its importance in creating patient rapport (Adolphs, Brown, Carter, Crawford, & Sahota, 2004; Skelton & Hobbes, 1999; Staples, 2016). However, in the broader literature on health care interactions, providers’ information provision is equally important in patient-centered care (Ong, de Haes, Joos, & Lammes, 1995). This paper investigates the ways in which providers and patients use informational language in medical discourse using multidimensional analysis (MDA; Biber, 1988). We first examine three corpora of medical interactions and then focus a new MDA on one type of interaction that requires more informational language use: discussions of disease and treatment options. The analysis revealed multifaceted aspects of information provision that differ depending on the nature of the information, including providers’ procedural information for medical treatment and impersonal information provision for explaining the disease.

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.

Abstract

In this article, we present the results of a corpus-based study where we explore whether it is possible to automatically single out different facets of text complexity in a general-purpose corpus. To this end, we use factor analysis as applied in Biber’s multi-dimensional analysis framework. We evaluate the results of the factor solution by correlating factor scores and readability scores to ascertain whether the selected factor solution matches the independent measurement of readability, which is a notion tightly linked to text complexity. The corpus used in the study is the Swedish national corpus, called Stockholm-Umeå Corpus or SUC. The SUC contains subject-based text varieties (e.g., hobby), press genres (e.g., editorials), and mixed categories (e.g., miscellaneous). We refer to them collectively as ‘registers’. Results show that it is indeed possible to elicit and interpret facets of text complexity using factor analysis despite some caveats. We propose a tentative text complexity profiling of the SUC registers.

This article reviews Introducing English for Specific Purposes