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

Chapter 6
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
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.State of the art
  • 3.Data
    • 3.1The corpus
    • 3.2Feature extraction
  • 4.Geometric multivariate analysis
    • 4.1The first four dimensions of the LDA
    • 4.2Observations about variation across the three varieties
    • 4.3General discussion
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.103.06neu
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