Chapter 2
Extending text-linguistic studies of register variation to a continuous situational space
Case studies from the web and natural conversation
In text-linguistic register research, distributions of linguistic features across registers are theorized
as having a functional relationship to the situational context. A strength of this approach is its focus on frequencies of
linguistic features across texts/registers. Situational variables, by contrast, have not been measured with the same
granularity. Only recently have text-linguistic researchers begun to treat situational characteristics as continuous variables
that vary between registers, and also across texts within registers. In the current chapter, we discuss the theoretical
foundation of this perspective and present two studies of register variation from a continuous situation perspective. For
both, we present methods for coding situational variables as continuous as well as key findings facilitated by the continuous
situation perspective.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Methodological and theoretical issues arising in previous empirical studies of situational variation
- 2.Case study 1: Situational variation among web documents
- 2.1Background
- 2.2Coding scheme and multi-dimensional analysis
- 2.3Situational text types on the web
- 3.Case study 2: Conversational discourse types
- 3.1Coding discourse units in extended conversations
- 3.2Analysing continuous communicative parameters to identify and describe conversational discourse types
- 4.Conclusion
-
Notes
-
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