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Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 23:1 (2018) ► pp.1–27

Register variation in spoken British English

The case of verb-forming suffixation

| University of Reading
| University of Reading

The aim of this paper is to identify the effect of register variation in spoken British English on the occurrence of the four principal verb-forming suffixes: ‑ate, ‑en, ‑ify and ‑ize, by building on the work of Biber et al. (1999), Plag et al. (1999) and Schmid (2011). Register variation effects were compared between the less formal Demographically-Sampled and the more formal Context-Governed components of the original 1994 version of the British National Corpus. The pattern of ‑ize derivatives revealed the most marked register-based differences with respect to frequency counts and the creation of neologisms, whereas ‑en derivatives varied the least compared with the other three suffixes. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of these suffix profiles in the context of spoken language reveal markers of register formality that have not hitherto been explored; derivative usage patterns provide an additional dimension to previous research on register variation which has mainly focused on grammatical and lexical features of language.

Keywords: register variation, derivational morphology, spoken language, verb-forming suffixation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Register variation and complex words
  • 3.Corpus metrics, measures of productivity and morphological categories
  • 4.The function and meaning of verb-forming suffixes in English
    • 4.1The characteristics of ‑ate
    • 4.2The characteristics of ‑en
    • 4.3The characteristics of ‑ify
    • 4.4The characteristics of ‑ize
  • 5.Methodology
    • 5.1Data source
    • 5.2Data preparation and analysis
  • 6.Results and discussion
    • 6.1Distribution patterns of ‑ate, ‑en, ‑ify and ‑ize
    • 6.2Category diversity and density between DS and CG registers
    • 6.3The overlap between register-based vocabulary sets
    • 6.4Qualitative differences in register-based vocabulary sets
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 31 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.16036.law
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