Register Studies - Online First

This study examines functional differences between texts elicited under different scenarios (both between- and intra-register variation). Text elicitation is used (in linguistics and other disciplines) to control for the conditions of production and in the hopes of observing different reactions to scenarios emulating real-life situations. However, it entails a series of questions: How well does the collected data correspond to real-world situations? How to design scenarios to be meaningfully distinct in terms of the language they elicit? In order to examine the linguistic variability of scenarios and to assess their ecological validity, the present study maps Czech elicited texts onto a previously established general-purpose multi-dimensional model of register variability. One of the takeaways is that scenarios mimicking informal situations are particularly conducive to obtaining responses with high intra-register variation, which makes them more likely than formal ones to reflect variability induced by for example different psychological characteristics of participants.