Article published in:
Register and social media
Edited by Isobelle Clarke and Jack Grieve
[Register Studies 4:2] 2022
► pp. 171–201

The medium is not the message

Individual level register variation in blogs vs. tweets

| Ruhr-Universität Bochum
| Philipps-Universität Marburg
| Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Linguistic expressions in social media vary along many axes, including author style, the specific medium and its affordances, and others. In this paper, we argue that different registers must be distinguished within social media and that register should be included as an important factor independent of (social) medium in analyses of variable linguistic phenomena. We introduce a new German cross-media corpus, consisting of blog posts and tweets from the same 44 authors. We define the registers as ‘Informative’, ‘Narrative’, and ‘Persuasive’, based on situational characteristics of the texts. We then correlate the registers with two variable linguistic phenomena: German modal and intensifying particles. In each case, we document considerable inter- and intraindividual variation in the expressions used and their frequency across texts. The statistical analysis shows that the register grouping corresponds more closely to linguistic similarities between texts than the grouping by medium does.

Keywords: register, social media, modal particles, intensifiers, German, corpus linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Register and social media
    • 2.1Defining register
      • 2.1.1Describing the felicity conditions of register variation
    • 2.2Register variation across media
    • 2.3Developing registers for personal narratives on social media
    • 2.4Exemplary linguistic markers for register variation: German modal particles and intensifiers
      • 2.4.1Modal particles
      • 2.4.2Intensifiers
  • 3.A multi-register corpus of individual variation in social media
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2Preprocessing
    • 3.3Register annotation
  • 4.Case studies
    • 4.1Case study 1: Modal particles
    • 4.2Case study 2: Intensifiers
  • 5.Analysis: Linguistic influence of medium and register
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 27 October 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.22009.sch
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The medium is not the message