Register Variation Online

Explores and provides situational and linguistic descriptions of the full range of registers found on the searchable web.

Douglas Biber (Author), Jesse Egbert (Author)

9781107122161, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 August 2018

262 pages
23.5 x 15.5 x 1.8 cm, 0.5 kg

'Overall, this monograph is impressive in extracting multi-dimensions to account for the register variation on the Web. Given its persuasive elaboration and innovative insights, this monograph is an invaluable asset for researchers and students in register variation, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and other related studies.' Danping Wu, Discourse Studies

While other books focus on special internet registers, like tweets or texting, no previous study describes the full range of everyday registers found on the searchable web. These are the documents that readers encounter every time they do a Google search, from registers like news reports, product reviews, travel blogs, discussion forums, FAQs, etc. Based on analysis of a large, near-random corpus of web documents, this monograph provides comprehensive situational, lexical, and grammatical descriptions of those registers. Beginning with a coding of each document in the corpus, the description identifies the registers that are especially common on the searchable web versus those that are less commonly found. Multi-dimensional analysis is used to describe the overall patterns of linguistic variation among web registers, while the second half of the book provides an in-depth description of each individual register, including analyses of situational contexts and communicative purposes, together with the typical lexical and grammatical characteristics associated with those contexts.

1. Introduction
2. Corpus and methods
3. A survey of the registers on the public searchable web
4. Overall patterns of register variation on the searchable web: a multi-dimensional analysis
5. Narrative registers
6. Opinion, advice, and persuasion registers
7. Informational descriptions, explanations, and procedures
8. Oral registers
9. The web as a continuous space of register variation
Appendix A. Linguistic features included in the multi-dimensional analysis
Appendix B. Lexicogrammatical features included in the key feature analysis
Appendix C. Descriptive statistics for the key feature analyses.

Subject Areas: Computational linguistics [CFX], Grammar, syntax & morphology [CFK], Semantics, discourse analysis, etc [CFG], Sociolinguistics [CFB], Linguistics [CF], Language [C]