Frozen Register

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  Text, Context and the Johannine Community

  A Sociolinguistic Analysis of the Johannine Writings

  • David A. Lamb(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • T&T Clark

    (Publisher)

  29 Halliday de ¿ nes dialect as ‘variety according to the user’ and register as ‘variety according to the use’. 30 Halliday’s understanding of register will be con-sidered in more detail below, alongside that of the American socio-linguist Douglas Biber. For both these scholars, the fundamental aspect of the register of a given text is that it carries with it signi ¿ cant informa-tion about its social context. 31 Indeed, ‘[t]he sensitivity of language to its 26 Crystal, Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics , p.409. 27 ‘Registers…when they are distinguished from styles, tend to be associated with particular groups of people or sometimes speci ¿ c situations of use. Journalese, babytalk, legalese, the language of auctioneers, race-callers, and sports commen-tators, the language of airline pilots, criminals, ¿ nanciers, politicians and disc jockeys, the language of the courtroom and the classroom, could all be considered examples of different registers. The term “register” here describes the language of groups of people with common interests or jobs, or the language used in situations associated with such groups.’ Janet Holmes, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics , (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2nd ed., 2001), p.246. Similarly, Wardhaugh states, ‘Registers are sets of language items associated with discrete occupational or social groups. Surgeons, airline pilots, bank managers, sales clerks, jazz fans, and pimps employ different registers’. Wardhaugh, Introduction to Sociolinguistics , p.51. 28 Ferguson draws a parallel between the systematic analysis of register varia-tions and ‘the extensive publications in German on Fachsprachen “occupational languages” and in English on “Language for Special Purposes” (mostly on commer-cial and scienti ¿ c registers of English)’. Ferguson, ‘Dialect, Register and Genre’, p.16. 29 Crystal, Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics , p.409.

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  Discourse and the Translator

  • B. Hatim, Ian Mason(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  restricted registers.

  The restriction in question refers to the purpose of the communication. One basic feature of such registers is the predictable and limited number of formal (phonological, lexical, grammatical) items and patterns in use within a fairly well-defined domain of language activity. An example of restricted registers is the language of international telecommunications. It is hardly surprising in this respect that the area in which machine translation has so far found most success is that of restricted registers: the Canadian system METEO for translating weather forecasts runs on a restricted dictionary of some 1500 entries and is said to have an 80 per cent success rate without any need for post-editing.

  The degree of register restriction may be viewed as a continuum. At one end we have maximally-restricted registers such as ‘diplomatic protocol’. At the other end, we have open-ended registers such as the ‘language of journalism’. In between, we may locate registers such as those of weather bulletins, insurance contracts, etc. The continuum establishes the relationship of a given register to its situation, a relationship which is expressed by Gregory and Carroll (1978: 68) in the following terms:

  The more typical or stereotyped the situation, the more restricted will be the range of options from which choices in the field, mode and tenor can be made…

  It is interesting to note that some organisations which have adopted machine ranslation systems now encourage their staff to draft texts in restricted registers in order to render them machine-usable.

  On the other hand, we need to beware of positing such unrestricted registers as ‘commerce’ and ‘journalism’. To attempt to quantify the frequency of items of vocabulary and grammar in such wide domains cannot lead to any meaningful characterisation of a register. Thus, whereas our concept of register is a fairly adequate device for predicting language use in restricted domains, it becomes less powerful in unrestricted areas. Here, other factors are at work which translators need to respond to. These will be the subject of Chapter 4

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  Speaking With Style (RLE Linguistics C: Applied Linguistics)

  The Sociolinguistics Skills of Children

  • Elaine Andersen, Elaine Slosburg Andersen(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter two The study of register variation

  Every human being is a bundle of institutionalized roles. He has to play many parts, and unless he knows his lines as well as his role he is no use in the play. (Firth, quoted in Verma 1969: 293)

  The notion of ‘register’

  Doctors from Atlanta speak differently from doctors from Brooklyn; they come from different regions of the United States. Salespeople at Saks in New York speak differently from salespeople at Gimbels in that same city; they come from different socio-economic classes (Labov 1966). The speech of grandparents varies in a number of systematic ways from the speech of their grandchildren; they are from different generations. The area of linguistics which traditionally has been concerned with such differences is called dialectology: regional and ‘temporal’ dialects have long been a topic of study for linguists (Bloomfield 1933); social dialects have also been of long-standing interest (Labov 1972(a); Bernstein 1960; Sweet 1928).

  There is, however, another dimension along which one can arrange language varieties. While dialects vary in relation to characteristics of users (i.e. where they are from, their social class), there are other varieties within any language which are distinguished by the circumstances of their use. The use of the term ‘register’ to describe this form of variation was introduced by Reid (1956) who first analysed the phenomenon in the context of bilingualism. (Other terms – most notably ‘speech style’, ‘variety’, and ‘code’ – have also been used, but ‘register’ seems preferable to them, largely because, unlike the others, it has not already been applied with other meanings to such fields as literature, dialectology, etc.1 ) Reid pointed out that in many bilingual or multilingual communities, given languages serve discrete functions. Language x, for example, may be used in the classroom, in the newspaper, in government, etc., while language y

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