Register Variation Online

Douglas Biber, Jesse Egbert

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781107122161
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108618045
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Screenshots
• List of Tables
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Corpus and Methods
• 3 A Survey of the Registers on the Publicly Searchable Web
• 4 Overall Patterns of Register Variation on the Searchable Web: A Multidimensional 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 Multidimensional Analysis
• Appendix B Lexico-grammatical Features Included in the Key Feature Analysis
• Appendix C Descriptive Statistics for the Key Feature Analyses
• References
• Index