Register Studies - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2022

This study explores how email is partly shaped by writers’ positions within a corporate structure. This stylistic variation is measurable at scale and can be described by messages’ rhetorical organizations and orientations. The modeling was carried out on a subset of the Enron email corpus, which was processed using the dictionary-based tagger DocuScope. The results identify four stylistic variants (Trained/Technical Support, Decision-Making, Everyday Workplace Interaction, and Engaged Planning), each realizing distinctive combinations of features reflective of their communicative functions. In Trained/Technical Support emails, for example, constellations of words and phrases associated with informational production and facilitation are marshaled in fulfilling routine guidance-seeking and guidance-giving tasks. While writers’ positions motivate stylistic tendencies (e.g., members of upper-level management compose a majority of their messages in the Decision-Making style), all writers avail themselves of a variety of styles, depending on audience and purpose, suggesting that learners might benefit from developing adaptable communicative repertoires.

One of the many resources teachers seek for authentic materials, particularly for spoken English, is TV. However, the concept of authenticity is relative, and it is sometimes hard to determine how authentic materials are. The present study uses a corpus-based analysis to assess to what extent a soap opera, compared to a sitcom, represent natural conversation on a salient set of linguistic features associated with the situational characteristics of conversation. Results showed that the soap opera seems to be closer to natural conversation, and hence more authentic, in the use of features associated with two situational characteristics out of three, namely real time production and interactiveness, and expressing feelings and stance. Results could help inform the practitioners’ decisions when looking for authentic spoken materials.

The aim of the present study is twofold: (1) to assess the degree of register flexibility in advanced second language (L2) learners of English and (2) to determine whether and to what extent this flexibility is impacted by inter-individual variability in experiential factors and personality traits. Register flexibility is quantitatively measured as the degree of differentiation in the use of linguistic complexity – gauged by a range of lexical, syntactic, and information-theoretic complexity measures – across three writing tasks. At the methodological level, we aim to demonstrate how a corpus-based approach combined with natural language processing (NLP) techniques and a within-subjects design can be a valuable complement to experimental approaches to language adaptation.

This article conducts Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) on a corpus of TED talks (2463 talks, across 427 topic tags) to create a new Multi-Dimensional model. The resultant model contained seven dimensions: i. ‘Spontaneous involved versus edited informational discourse’, ii. ‘Abstract informational versus narrative discourse’, iii. ‘Human-world oriented versus object-oriented discourse’, iv. ‘Subjective perspectives’, v. ‘Persuasive stance’, vi. ‘Expert elaboration’, and vii. ‘Change and inspiration’. When the model was compared to prior research, similarity with MD models based in academic texts was observed. However, some dimensions were found to be indicative of the unique nature of TED talks, such as expert elaboration and change and inspiration. When the EFA model was mapped onto the TED corpus’s subcorpora (defined by topic tags), individual disciplines were characterised in terms of the dimensions and some traditional academic groups were observed.