Register Studies - Online First

The aim of the present study is twofold: (1) to assess the degree of register flexibility in advanced second language (L2) learners of English and (2) to determine whether and to what extent this flexibility is impacted by inter-individual variability in experiential factors and personality traits. Register flexibility is quantitatively measured as the degree of differentiation in the use of linguistic complexity – gauged by a range of lexical, syntactic, and information-theoretic complexity measures – across three writing tasks. At the methodological level, we aim to demonstrate how a corpus-based approach combined with natural language processing (NLP) techniques and a within-subjects design can be a valuable complement to experimental approaches to language adaptation.

This study explores how email is partly shaped by writers’ positions within a corporate structure. This stylistic variation is measurable at scale and can be described by messages’ rhetorical organizations and orientations. The modeling was carried out on a subset of the Enron email corpus, which was processed using the dictionary-based tagger DocuScope. The results identify four stylistic variants (Trained/Technical Support, Decision-Making, Everyday Workplace Interaction, and Engaged Planning), each realizing distinctive combinations of features reflective of their communicative functions. In Trained/Technical Support emails, for example, constellations of words and phrases associated with informational production and facilitation are marshaled in fulfilling routine guidance-seeking and guidance-giving tasks. While writers’ positions motivate stylistic tendencies (e.g., members of upper-level management compose a majority of their messages in the Decision-Making style), all writers avail themselves of a variety of styles, depending on audience and purpose, suggesting that learners might benefit from developing adaptable communicative repertoires.