Chapter published in:
Corpus-based Approaches to Register Variation
Edited by Elena Seoane and Douglas Biber
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 103] 2021
► pp. 143–178

A register variation perspective on varieties of English

| RWTH Aachen University
| FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg
This chapter reports an exploration of dimensions of register variation across varieties of English. We analyse 2,844 texts from the Hong Kong, Jamaica and New Zealand components of the International Corpus of English, using its text categorization scheme as a frame of reference. We apply Geometric Multivariate Analysis, an interactive procedure for exploring latent structure in language variation, based on the frequencies of 41 lexico-grammatical features informed by systemic functional register theory. Visual inspection of the distribution of texts across the multidimensional space reveals continuities between groups of texts as well as dimensions of variation that can be related to theoretical register constructs. We also observe differences between the three ICE components (and their text categories) in register space.
Keywords: register variation, varieties of English, the International Corpus of English , Geometric Multivariate Analysis, visualisation, field, tenor and mode
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.103.06neu
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