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.
Argamon, Shlomo, Casey Whitelaw, Paul Chase, Sobhan Raj Hota, Navendu Garg & Shlomo Levitan. 2007. Stylistic
text classification using functional lexical features. Journal of the American Society
for Information Science and
Technology 58(6): 802–22.
Biber, Douglas. 1986. Spoken
and written textual dimensions in English: Resolving the contradictory
findings. Language 62(2): 384–414.
Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation
across Speech and
Writing. Cambridge: CUP.
Biber, Douglas. 1989. A
typology of English
texts. Linguistics 27: 3–43.
Biber, Douglas. 1995. Dimensions
of Register
Variation. Cambridge: CUP.
Biber, Douglas & Egbert, Jesse. 2016. Register
variation on the searchable web: A multi-dimensional analysis. Journal of English
Linguistics 44(2): 95–137.
Biber, Douglas & Finegan, Edward (eds). 1994. Sociolinguistic
Perspectives on
Register. Oxford: OUP.
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Ed. 1999. The
Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written
English. London: Longman.
Chang, Winston, Cheng, Joe, Allaire, J. J., Xie, Yihui & McPherson, Jonathan. 2020. Shiny:
Web Application Framework for R. <[URL]> (26May 2021).
Diwersy, Sascha, Evert, Stefan & Neumann, Stella. 2014. A
weakly supervised multivariate approach to the study of language
variation. In Aggregating Dialectology, Typology, and
Register Analysis. Linguistic Variation in Text and Speech [Linguae & Litterae
28], Benedikt Szmrecsanyi & Bernhard Wälchli (eds), 174–204. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Egbert, Jesse & Biber, Douglas. 2018. Do
all roads lead to Rome? Modeling register variation with factor analysis and discriminant
analysis. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic
Theory 14(2): 233–273.
Ervin-Tripp, Susan. 1972. On
sociolinguistic rules: Alternation and
co-occurrence. In Directions in Sociolinguistics. The
Ethnography of Communication, John J. Gumperz & Dell H. Hymes (eds), 213–50. New York NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Evert, Stefan & Hardie, Andrew. 2011. Twenty-first
century corpus workbench: Updating a query architecture for the new
millennium. In Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics
Conference 2011, University of Birmingham, UK, 20–22 July
2011. Birmingham: University of Birmingham. <[URL]> (26May 2021).
Evert, Stefan & Neumann, Stella. 2017. The
impact of translation direction on characteristics of translated texts. A multivariate analysis for English and
German. In Empirical Translation Studies. New Theoretical and
Methodological Traditions, Gert De Sutter, Marie-Aude Lefer & Isabelle Delaere (eds), 47–80. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Evert, Stefan & The
CWB Development Team. 2020. The IMS Open Corpus
Workbench (CWB) CQP Query Language Tutorial (version CWB Version
3.5). <[URL]> (26May 2021).
Garside, Roger & Smith, Nicholas. 1997. A
hybrid grammatical tagger: CLAWS4. In Corpus Annotation:
Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora, Roger Garside, Geoffrey Leech & Anthony McEnery (eds), 102–121. London: Longman. <[URL]> (26May 2021).
Greenbaum, Sidney. 1996b. Introducing
ICE. In Comparing English Worldwide. The International Corpus
of English, Sidney Greenbaum (ed.), 3–12. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Greenbaum, Sidney (ed.). 1996a. Comparing
English Worldwide: The International Corpus of
English. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gregory, Michael. 1967. Aspects
of varieties differentiation. Journal of
Linguistics 3(2): 177–98.
Grieve-Smith, Angus B.2007. The envelope of
variation in multidimensional register and genre
analyses. In Corpus Linguistics Beyond the
Word [Language and Computers 60], Eileen Fitzpatrick (ed.), 21–42. Leiden: Brill Rodopi.
Halliday, Michael A. K.1978. Language as Social Semiotic.
The Social Interpretation of Language and
Meaning. London: Arnold.
Halliday, Michael A. K.1988. On the language of
physical science. In Registers of Written English:
Situational Factors and Linguistic Features, Mohsen Ghadessy (ed.), 162–177. London: Frances Pinter.
Halliday, Michael A. K.1991. Towards probabilistic
interpretations. In Functional and Systemic Linguistics.
Approaches and Uses, Eija Ventola (ed.), 39–61. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Halliday, Michael A. K.2009. Methods –
techniques – problems. In Continuum Companion to
Systemic Functional Linguistics, Michael A. K. Halliday & Jonathan J. Webster (eds), 59–87. London: Continuum.
Halliday, Michael A. K. & Hasan, Ruqaiya. 1989. Language,
Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic
Perspective. Oxford: OUP.
Halliday, Michael A. K. & Matthiessen, Christian M. I. M.2014. Halliday’s
Introduction to Functional Grammar, 4th
edn. Abingdon: Routledge.
Hundt, Marianne, Röthlisberger, Melanie & Seoane, Elena. 2018. Predicting
voice alternation across academic Englishes. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic
Theory 17(1): 189–222.
Hymes, Dell H.1972. Models of the
interaction of language and social life. In Directions in
Sociolinguistics. The Ethnography of Communication, John J. Gumperz & Dell H. Hymes (eds), 35–71. New York NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Karlgren, Jussi & Cutting, Douglass. 1994. Recognizing
text genres with simple metrics using discriminant
analysis. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference
on Computational Linguistics (COLING 1994), Volume
2, 1071–1075.
Koch, Peter & Oesterreicher, Wulf. 1985. Sprache
Der Nähe – Sprache Der Distanz: Mündlichkeit Und Schriftlichkeit Im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie Und
Sprachgeschichte. In Romanistisches
Jahrbuch 36: 15–43.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1935. Coral
Gardens and Their Magic. London: Allen & Unwin.
Matthiessen, Christian M. I. M.1993. Register in
the round: Diversity in a unified theory of register
analysis. In Register Analysis. Theory and
Practice, Mohsen Ghadessy (ed.), 221–292. London: Pinter.
Neumann, Stella & Fest, Jennifer. 2016. Cohesive
devices across registers and varieties: The role of medium in
English. In Variational Text
Linguistics, Christoph Schubert & Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer (eds), 195–220. Berlin: De Gruyter.
R Core Team. 2018. R: A Language
and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. <[URL]> (26May 2021).
Sand, Andrea. 2004. Shared
morpho-syntactic features in contact varieties of English: Article use. World
Englishes 23(2): 281–98.
Schneider, Edgar W.2007. Postcolonial English. Varieties
around the
World. Cambridge: CUP.
Stamatatos, Efstathios, Fakotakis, Nikos & Kokkinakis, George. 2000. Automatic
text categorization in terms of genre and author. Computational
Linguistics 26(4): 471–95.
Tambouratzis, George, Markantonatou, Stella, Hairetakis, Nikolaos, Vassiliou, Marina, Carayannis, George & Tambouratzis, Dimitrios. 2004. Discriminating
the registers and styles in the modern Greek language-Part 1: Diglossia in stylistic
analysis. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 19 (2): 197–220.
Taverniers, Miriam. 2019. Semantics. In The
Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics, David Schönthal, Geoff Thompson, Lise Fontaine & Wendy L. Bowcher (eds), 55–91. Cambridge: CUP.
Teich, Elke. 2013. Choices
in analyzing choice: Methods and techniques for register
analysis. In Systemic Functional Linguistics: Exploring
Choice, Lise Fontaine, Tom Bartlett & Gerard O’Grady (eds), 417–31. Cambridge: CUP.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 december 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.