Register Studies - Online First

Specialized word lists (SWLs) can help language learners acquire domain-specific vocabulary; however, there are few such lists for legal domains despite the growing demand for resources in this area. Additionally, in list design and construction, register is rarely considered a meaningful component of design or validation despite the fact that register is one of the most meaningful predictors of linguistic variation, including lexical variation. The present study begins to fill these gaps by expanding on the Contracts Word List (Hanks, Hashimoto, & Egbert 2024) in creating subregister specific lists for 54 types of contracts (CWL+). SWLs within the Contracts Word List were generated relying heavily on text-dispersion keyness analysis (Egbert & Biber 2019), and their usefulness was validated through percent coverage statistics and register analysis. This study illustrates the usefulness of keyness analysis in word list creation and the constructive role that register can play in the design and evaluation of SWLs.

TV news broadcasts (TVNBs) represent an unusual mix of oral/literate situational characteristics. In addition, TVNBs have shifted historically to become increasingly focused on ‘soft’ human-interest stories. Thus, we have good reason to predict that present-day TVNBs will incorporate a hybrid blend of oral and literate lexico-grammatical characteristics.

The present study explores this possibility through a corpus-based analysis of TVNBs compared to conversation and newspaper writing. In part, the results confirm these prior expectations. Surprisingly, though, a more detailed analysis shows that this mixture of situational characteristics has given rise to a unique grammatical style of discourse rather than a hybrid style. In particular, TVNBs can be analyzed to a large extent as main clauses where the finite verb has been deleted. This discourse style is interesting because it cannot be attributed to challenging production circumstances. Rather, the functional motivation seems related to creating a perception of urgency and excitement.

A register, defined as a text variety with specific situational characteristics and a communicative purpose (Biber & Conrad 2019), is also recognized as a cultural construct (Biber & Egbert 2023). Registers merit thorough investigation due to their pivotal role in reflecting linguistic and cultural landscapes. However, existing studies predominantly focus on Indo-European languages. This study investigates Turkish web registers through the introduction of the Turkish Corpus of Online Registers (TurCORE). Comprising 2,780 web texts, TurCORE was manually annotated using a register taxonomy targeting the entire unrestricted web and identifying 24 web register categories. By employing Text Dispersion Keyword Analysis (Egbert & Biber 2019), the research examines the register characteristics with a specific focus on news reports, interactive discussions, and recipes, drawing comparisons with their English equivalents. Results reveal parallels between Turkish and English news reports while Turkish interactive discussions and recipes exhibit distinctive language- and culture specific features.