Register Studies - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2025

Specialized word lists (SWLs) can help language learners acquire domain-specific vocabulary; however, there are few such lists for legal domains despite the growing demand for resources in this area. Additionally, in list design and construction, register is rarely considered a meaningful component of design or validation despite the fact that register is one of the most meaningful predictors of linguistic variation, including lexical variation. The present study begins to fill these gaps by expanding on the Contracts Word List (Hanks, Hashimoto, & Egbert 2024) in creating subregister specific lists for 54 types of contracts (CWL+). SWLs within the Contracts Word List were generated relying heavily on text-dispersion keyness analysis (Egbert & Biber 2019), and their usefulness was validated through percent coverage statistics and register analysis. This study illustrates the usefulness of keyness analysis in word list creation and the constructive role that register can play in the design and evaluation of SWLs.

Writing is the main medium of communication between practising architects, their clients and other professionals involved in the construction and regulation of the built environment (Forty 2004; Decq 2013; Binotto 2013; Gerber & Patterson 2013). However, most prior studies of the language used by architects have examined texts from Architecture magazines and journals as opposed to practitioners’ choices relating to Field, Tenor and Mode in response to the social context of the workplace. Our paper investigates the register of Design and Access Statements (DASs), documents which all architects practising in the UK are required by law to submit to their local authorities when making planning applications. We chose the sub-system of Attitude within the theoretical framework of Appraisal (Martin & White 2005) to examine one aspect of the register of DASs: the linguistic resources used to evaluate architectural phenomena in order to justify architectural decisions to local clients and regulatory authorities. We found that inanimate entities in the DASs tended to be judged from an ethical and legal perspective, and were assigned feelings of desire, well-being or satisfaction. As one of the first investigations to relate the linguistic choices of practising architects to a specific situational context, our study should be relevant to all students of register and professional discourse, and particularly those involved in the professional development of practitioners, for example in Schools of Architecture.

This diachronic study analyzes engagement features — epistemic positioning and interactivity in particular — in the business case studies published by the Harvard Business Review (HBR) over the last century (1922–2023). Our study is based on a small, specialized corpus of HBR case studies, covering three periods (1922–1929, 1961–1979 and 2008–2023) in which we compare the frequency of epistemic and interactivity features. After reviewing the literature on the expression of positioning and stance in specialized contexts, we conceptualize business case studies as a register, and we identify a set of features by adopting a corpus-based approach thanks to a semantic tagger. Our corpus-driven, quantitative analysis highlights sharp differences in the frequency patterns as well in the functions they fulfill in the discourse.

Garnering public engagement with academic research in a timely and accessible manner has become a central concern in contemporary academia. This centrality has given rise to a growing interest in the social, communicative, and registral features of public-oriented academic texts, such as academic blog posts. This paper adds to this growing canon with a focus on academic news blog posts from The Conversation — part of a wider register of public-oriented research communication. Through experimental multidimensional and cluster analyses, focusing on one register, represented by texts on one topic (i.e., the climate crisis) from two disciplinary backgrounds (i.e., science and politics), this study offers a nuanced insight into internal variation within public-oriented research communication. Specifically, the paper proposes four text types for the academic news blog posts studied. These include (1) rhetorical narratives; (2) reasoned abstractions; (3) empirical storytelling; and (4) quantitative reflections.

This paper contributes to previous work on workplace registers by presenting an analysis of a corpus of virtual meetings. The Interactional Variation Online corpus is comprised of recordings of virtual meetings from four different organisations. This study describes how each organisation shares similar practices when engaging in virtual meetings and how variation emerges when each organisation is compared to the other three. Corpus results show how, to establish conclusions related to this register, it is necessary to consider the influence of variation across organisations, the chairing style of each meeting, the formality of each organisational culture and the level of participant engagement in each meeting.