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Register in L1 and L2 Language Development
Edited by Bethany Gray and Jesse Egbert
[Register Studies 3:2] 2021
► pp. 279–298

Exploring register with The Prime Machine

Promoting register awareness through a module for English majors at a Sino-British university in China

ORCID logo | Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
Corpus approaches underpin a range of postgraduate studies and professional work in language, linguistics, translation and beyond. Awareness of the influences of contextual features on language choice is important for many activities: exploring new text varieties; finding relationships between social factors and language patterning; considering choices for post-editing machine translation; and understanding the very nature of language. Work on register relies on corpus methods, but more support and direction could be offered to help undergraduates gain earlier insights into the power of such corpus analysis. This paper introduces some ways register differences can be revealed through The Prime Machine corpus tool (Jeaco 2017a) and describes the design of a practically-oriented undergraduate module which uses this concordancer. Software features include the organization of texts and presentation of source information for readymade corpora, and methods which can be used to reveal useful starting points for register analysis of do-it-yourself corpora.
Keywords: register analysis, corpus tools, data driven learning, undergraduate corpus projects
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Register
    • 2.2Data Driven Learning
    • 2.3Software for register analysis
  • 3. tPM’s readymade corpora
  • 4. tPM tools for DIY corpora
  • 5.Introducing register to undergraduates using tPM
    • 5.1Teaching context
    • 5.2Course outline
    • 5.3Reflections on trouble-spots and solutions
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 14 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.20015.jea
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