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Register Studies
Vol. 5:2 (2023) ► pp.205–239

The role of situation in individual style

A powerful confounding variable or a new dimension? The case of American presidential discourse

ORCID logo | Northern Arizona University

The study adopts a cross-register approach to style, examining style with relation to the situation of use. While register tends to be avoided by style research as a confounding variable, this investigation of the styles of four American presidents in memoirs, official letters, and public addresses illustrates that adding a register dimension leads to a more accurate, nuanced analysis. The study identifies linguistic features associated with register vs. style variation in the corpus and analyzes intraspeaker differences across registers with regard to the following functional categories: information density, oral style, situation-dependent discourse, and narration vs. immediacy. The results indicate that even authors with a well-defined individual style consistently adjust their language to the demands of the situation, with the most noticeable differences lying between strictly regimented literate registers and the more oral, less conventionalized ones.

Keywords: American presidential discourse, corpus linguistics, register variation, style variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Trends in style research
    • 1.2Controversy over the role of register
    • 1.3The present study
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Corpus and research design
      • 2.1.1Memoirs
      • 2.1.2Letters
      • 2.1.3Public speeches
    • 2.2Linguistic features and quantitative analysis
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Linguistic features predicted by style vs. register
    • 3.2Cross-register stylistic analysis
      • 3.2.1Information density
      • 3.2.2Oral style
      • 3.2.3Situation-dependent discourse
      • 3.2.4Narration vs. immediacy
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 February 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.23005.gra
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