Register Studies - Current Issue

Abstract

Digital games can provide rich sources of second language (L2) input; however, the extent to which gaming discourse is similar to real-world discourse has been a topic of debate in the computer-assisted language learning community. To quantitatively measure the extent to which gaming discourse shares linguistic similarity with real-world discourse, this study reports the findings of an additive multidimensional (MD) analysis comparing registers in open-world role-playing games to real-world registers using Biber’s (1988) Dimension 1: ‘Involved versus Informational Production.’ Results indicate that gaming discourse provides extensive language exposure that shares much linguistic similarity across a wide range of real-world contexts. Importantly, however, these similarities only become salient when the situational characteristics of gaming discourse are considered and parsed appropriately into register categories.

Abstract

We present a corpus-based method — Variation-Based Distance and Similarity Modeling (VADIS) — that calculates distances between registers as a function of the extent to which the probabilistic conditioning of variation differs across registers. When language users have a choice between different ways of saying similar things (e.g., cut off the tops versus cut the tops off), what is the extent to which these choices are regulated differently in different registers? In this spirit, we re-analyze pre-existing datasets that cover the genitive, dative, and particle placement alternations in the grammar of English. These datasets cover five broad register categories: spoken informal English, spoken formal English, written informal English, written formal English, and online/web-based English. Analysis shows that (a) the registers under analysis are relatively but not entirely homogeneous in terms of the probabilistic grammars conditioning grammatical choices, and (b) more often than not we see a split between spoken and written registers.

This article reviews Designing and Evaluating Language Corpora: A Practical Framework for Corpus Representativeness