Register Studies - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2025

Research on graduate student writing (GSW) has typically focused on theses and dissertations, with less attention paid to coursework assignments (e.g., recounts, exercises, etc.), which are prioritized by students and professors as assessments and are graduate students’ first ventures into disciplinary writing. This study details the situational exploration of a corpus of academic writing assignments from graduate students in two applied sciences disciplines (applied linguistics and engineering) at a major Midwestern American university. The Corpus of Graduate Student Papers (CorGrad) represents 12 sub-registers, over 1,000 texts, and 2 million words. The study highlights key contextual features of the course papers, noting the influence of both textual purpose and discipline. Findings highlight the significance to disciplinary writing research and representativeness of student writing corpora. Knowledge of the register-specific patterns of GSW can help to refine curricula, programmatic design, and graduate student support during the pre-thesis/dissertation phase of their matriculation.

Situational analysis (SA), defined by Biber and Conrad (2019) as the description of the characteristics of use of registers, is a key step in any corpus study of text varieties. Register SA is essential not only for the collection of a representative corpus, but also for the interpretation of the linguistic characteristics of the register, i.e., the description of the relationship between the situational characteristics and the linguistic features. The present paper reports the SA that was conducted as the first step of a comparative study of the formulaic profiles of two registers in the medical field: the research article and the case report. The findings revealed that both registers share the overarching goals of advancing medical research and practice and have medical pathologies and treatments as general topics but differ fundamentally in their specific communicative purposes, channels, and production circumstances, resulting in noticeable linguistic variations in the two registers.

Adopting a corpus-based register approach, this study explores the extent to which television courtroom discourse aligns with or diverges from authentic courtroom language, thereby contributing to broader discussions of register variation. In particular, drawing on the analytical framework for situational characteristics proposed by Biber and Conrad (2019), the present study offers a systematic account of the situational features associated with four sub-registers of courtroom discourse — opening statements, direct examinations, cross-examinations, and closing arguments — across both authentic and TV courtroom settings. In this study, Biber’s (1988) Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA) model is applied to situate the eight sub-registers within predefined dimensions and to guide the identification of relevant linguistic features for subsequent quantitative examination and functional interpretation. The findings reveal notable differences between authentic and TV cross-examinations as well as between authentic and TV closing arguments. These contrasts are primarily attributable to the different communicative purposes of the sub-registers, thereby underscoring the significance of sub-register distinctions in register-based research. The present study builds upon an unpublished dissertation (Chen, 2018) that investigated the similarities and differences between authentic and TV courtroom discourse.

This study explored the correlation between findings from a multidimensional analysis (MDA) of Czech (Cvrček et al. 2020) and native speakers’ intuition about register variation. Four linguistic features (contact expressions, adjective clusters, non-dropped pronouns, and verbal nouns) were examined across dynamic, static, spontaneous, and prepared situations, representing two key dimensions of Czech register variation. MDA showed that adjective clusters and verbal nouns are typical of static registers, while contact expressions and non-dropped pronouns are linked to spontaneous registers. Participants (n = 230) chose between sentences with or without these features under different contextual conditions. Two main findings were uncovered: (1) participants preferred sentences with register-specific features in congruent contexts, and (2) the amount of contextual information did not significantly affect choices. The study highlights native speakers’ intuition about register variation and the role of context in perceiving linguistic features.

This study analyses phonetic variation in cross-situational conversational speech styles in German by varying situations in terms of the level of perceived formality of the addressee and the function of an interaction as well as the space in which the interaction took place. We propose an experimental paradigm for controlled elicitation of intra-individual phonetic variation in situated interaction. Several stimulus videos were created and rated in which the identical person was dressed in different guises varying between formal and informal. The person acted in a choreographed way across the videos. Two types of tasks were given to each participant of the production experiment: one posed a potential face-threat, while the other consisted of casually conversing with the informal persona shown in the video. We analyzed vowel dispersion, mean fundamental frequency and its range in formal vs. informal situations. Results show complex effects of formality interacting with space and speaker gender.

In the text-linguistic tradition of register analysis, registers have often been seen as varieties of language defined by situations of use (see e.g., Biber & Conrad 2019). Recently, however, registers have been reconceptualized so as to permit more robust analyses of situations, intra-register variation in situational characteristics, and functional correspondences between situational and linguistic variables (e.g., Biber & Egbert 2023). As part of this program, Biber and Egbert have recently called for psycholinguistic research into the nature of registers and register variation (Biber & Egbert 2023: 19). However, few researchers have attempted to theorize registers as explicitly psycholinguistic constructs (cf., Keller 2021). Toward this end, this paper proposes the Discourse Category Model (DCM) of cognitive processes underlying register acquisition, representation, and processing. In this model, registers are mental categories of discourse events. This view contrasts with a purely functional view of register variation that sees registers as corpus-linguistic epiphenomena rather than cognitive phenomena. The model is intended to provide a framework for investigating the nature of registers and register variation from an explicitly cognitive orientation. Testable predictions generated by the model are presented along with research paradigms that may be useful for testing them.