Register Studies - Online First

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.

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.

The aim of this study is to determine whether the British comedy drama Cold Feet could be used in English learning contexts to expose students to useful elements of natural conversation. Using additive multi-dimensional register analysis, we empirically ascertain how similar the language used in Cold Feet is to that of natural conversation. Through n-gram analysis, we furthermore examine to what extent the subtitles of Cold Feet share any register markers or style features with natural conversation in the Spoken BNC2014. The results show that Cold Feet shares many characteristics with natural conversation. It is matched closest to “conversations” on Dimension 1, but “general fiction” on Dimensions 3 and 5. Based on the findings, we provide concrete pedagogical recommendations for using the comedy drama as a classroom model with which students can critically engage to improve their linguistic awareness and conversation skills.