Register Studies - Online First

This study explores the differences between academic lectures and TED talks by comparing their respective frequent four-word lexical bundles, and the discourse functions of those bundles in these two registers. The results indicate that academic lectures use more varied lexical bundles at a higher frequency than TED talks do. The functional distributions of the bundles further reveal that referential bundles are prevalent in both registers. However, TED speakers use more lexical bundles to organize their discourse and to guide the audience through their talks, while academic lecturers use more stance bundles to show their intentions and to inform the audience about upcoming events. The distinctive characteristics of academic lectures and TED talks are revealed via the divergent sets of lexical bundles in the two registers; the two registers are also shown to differ greatly in terms of the use of lexical bundles for different functions.

In this article, we present the results of a corpus-based study where we explore whether it is possible to automatically single out different facets of text complexity in a general-purpose corpus. To this end, we use factor analysis as applied in Biber’s multi-dimensional analysis framework. We evaluate the results of the factor solution by correlating factor scores and readability scores to ascertain whether the selected factor solution matches the independent measurement of readability, which is a notion tightly linked to text complexity. The corpus used in the study is the Swedish national corpus, called Stockholm-Umeå Corpus or SUC. The SUC contains subject-based text varieties (e.g., hobby), press genres (e.g., editorials), and mixed categories (e.g., miscellaneous). We refer to them collectively as ‘registers’. Results show that it is indeed possible to elicit and interpret facets of text complexity using factor analysis despite some caveats. We propose a tentative text complexity profiling of the SUC registers.