Article published In:
Register Studies: Online-First ArticlesVariation-Based Distance and Similarity Modeling
A new way of measuring distances between registers
We present a corpus-based method — Variation-Based Distance and Similarity Modeling (VADIS) — that calculates
distances between registers as a function of the extent to which the probabilistic conditioning of variation differs across
registers. When language users have a choice between different ways of saying similar things (e.g., cut off the
tops versus cut the tops off), what is the extent to which these choices are regulated differently
in different registers? In this spirit, we re-analyze pre-existing datasets that cover the genitive, dative, and particle
placement alternations in the grammar of English. These datasets cover five broad register categories: spoken informal English,
spoken formal English, written informal English, written formal English, and online/web-based English. Analysis shows that (a) the
registers under analysis are relatively but not entirely homogeneous in terms of the probabilistic grammars conditioning
grammatical choices, and (b) more often than not we see a split between spoken and written registers.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Methods and data
- 2.1Datasets and registers under study
- 2.2Method: Variation-Based Distance and Similarity Modeling (VADIS)
- Step 1
- Step 2
- Step 3
- Step 4
- Step 5
- Step 6
- Step 7
- 2.3Questions and answers about our methodology
- 3.Results
- 3.1Quantification via similarity coefficients
- 3.2Mapping out (dis)similarity relationship between registers
- 4.Discussion and conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].
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