Stylistic variation in email

This study explores how email is partly shaped by writers’ positions within a corporate structure. This stylistic variation is measurable at scale and can be described by messages’ rhetorical organizations and orientations. The modeling was carried out on a subset of the Enron email corpus, which was processed using the dictionary-based tagger DocuScope. The results identify four stylistic variants (Trained/Technical Support, Decision-Making, Everyday Workplace Interaction, and Engaged Planning), each realizing distinctive combinations of features reflective of their communicative functions. In Trained/Technical Support emails, for example, constellations of words and phrases associated with informational production and facilitation are marshaled in fulfilling routine guidance-seeking and guidance-giving tasks. While writers’ positions motivate stylistic tendencies (e.g., members of upper-level management compose a majority of their messages in the Decision-Making style), all writers avail themselves of a variety of styles, depending on audience and purpose, suggesting that learners might benefit from developing adaptable communicative repertoires.

How can register analysis inform task-based language teaching?

For over 30 years, corpus research on register variation has expanded our understanding of language use by illustrating how linguistic features co-occur and vary in different situations of use (Biber & Conrad 2019). Over the same period, Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) has provided a theoretical and empirical basis for research in instructed Second Language Acquisition/SLA (Ellis 2012). This paper illustrates how the methods and approaches used in register analysis offer a useful framework for understanding critical issues in TBLT (e.g., describing tasks and interpreting task performance). The paper compares register analysis and TBLT and then draws upon recent empirical work demonstrating how a register approach (a) identifies a wider range of linguistic and non-linguistic variables than are generally in TBLT; and, (b) provides a useful framework to functionally interpret task performance. The paper ends by discussing how a register perspective can benefit future areas of investigation in task-based second language research.

L2 Theme development in Discursive and Experimental undergraduate student writing

To complement earlier studies of writing development in the BAWE corpus of successful student writing (Nesi & Gardner 2012; Staples et al. 2016), we examine the Systemic Functional Linguistics notion of Theme as used by L2 writers across first- and third-year and in two distinctive discourse types: persuasive/argumentative Discursive writing of assignments in the soft disciplines and Experimental report writing of assignments in the hard sciences. Theme analysis reveals more substantial differences across the two discourse types than between first- and third-year L2 undergraduate writing. Textual Themes are consistently more frequent than interpersonal Themes, and some variance is found within subcategories of each. Significant differences in lexical density occur across third-year discourse types and between first- and third-year Experimental writing where a predominance of N+N topical Themes is also found. These findings are important as previous research has tended to focus on L1 Discursive writing.

Register variation in school EFL textbooks

This study applies additive Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA) (Biber 1988) to explore the linguistic characteristics of ‘school English’ or ‘textbook English’. It seeks to find out how text registers commonly featured in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks differ from comparable registers found outside the EFL classroom. To this end, a Textbook English Corpus (TEC) of 43 coursebooks used in European schools is mobilised. The texts from six textbook register subcorpora and three target language corpora are mapped onto Biber’s (1998) ‘Involved vs. Informational’ dimension of General English. Register accounts for 63% of the variance in these dimension scores in the TEC. Additional factors such as textbook level, series and country of publication/use only play a marginal role in mediating textbook register variation. Textbook dialogues score considerably lower than the Spoken BNC2014, whereas Textbook Fiction scores closest to its corresponding reference Youth Fiction Corpus. Pedagogical and methodological implications are discussed.

Exploring register with The Prime Machine

Corpus approaches underpin a range of postgraduate studies and professional work in language, linguistics, translation and beyond. Awareness of the influences of contextual features on language choice is important for many activities: exploring new text varieties; finding relationships between social factors and language patterning; considering choices for post-editing machine translation; and understanding the very nature of language. Work on register relies on corpus methods, but more support and direction could be offered to help undergraduates gain earlier insights into the power of such corpus analysis. This paper introduces some ways register differences can be revealed through The Prime Machine corpus tool (Jeaco 2017a) and describes the design of a practically-oriented undergraduate module which uses this concordancer. Software features include the organization of texts and presentation of source information for readymade corpora, and methods which can be used to reveal useful starting points for register analysis of do-it-yourself corpora.

Register variation in L1 and L2 student writing

While there have been many studies describing L2 academic writing, most of these studies have used corpora of first year or assessment writing (Crosthwaite 2016; Weigle & Friginal 2014). The present study seeks to describe linguistic variation in L2 writing for content classes and to compare these linguistic patterns to those found in L1 writing. A multi-dimensional (MD) analysis was conducted in two corpora, BAWE and BrAWE, extracting five dimensions. The L2 corpus contained 379 texts written by Brazilian students doing part of their undergrad in the UK and the L1 corpus contained 395 texts from BAWE. The results of this study indicate that L1 and L2 writers use similar linguistic resources to convey the purpose of university registers, with the exception of case studies, designs, exercises and research reports. This linguistic variation between L1 and L2 writers might be explained by students’ interpretation of these registers’ communicative purposes.

The influence of the benchmark corpus on keyword analysis

The growing popularity of keyword analysis as an applied linguistics methodology has not been matched by an increase in the rigour with which the method is applied. While several studies have investigated the impact of choices made at certain stages of the keyword analysis process, the impact of the choice of benchmark corpus has largely been overlooked. In this paper, we compare a target corpus with several benchmark corpora and show that the keywords generated are different. We also show that certain characteristics of the keyword list and of the keywords themselves vary in relatively predictable ways depending on the benchmark corpus. These variations have implications for the choice of benchmark corpus and how the results of a keyword analysis should be interpreted. Analyzing the keywords from a comparison with a large general corpus or the keyword lists from multiple comparisons may be most appropriate for register studies.

Multiple Correspondence Analysis, newspaper discourse and subregister

This article introduces a new method for grouping keywords and examines the extent to which it also allows analysts to explore the interaction of discourse and subregister. It uses the multivariate statistical technique, Multiple Correspondence Analysis, to reveal dimensions of keywords which co-occur across the texts of a corpus. These dimensions are then interpreted in terms of the discourses to which they contribute within the data, thus forming the basis of a corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The approach is demonstrated through analysis of the discourses that are used to represent Muslims and Islam in a corpus of UK national newspaper articles published on these topics spanning 2010–2019. The approach reveals an interaction between discourse and subregister, hence this article argues for the need for (corpus-assisted) discourse analysts to account for subregister as a level of meaningful variation when analysing press discourse.