Register and Style

10 Key excerpts on "Register and Style"

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  Sociolinguistics / Soziolinguistik. Volume 1

  • Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus J. Mattheier, Peter Trudgill, Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus J. Mattheier, Peter Trudgill(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Other authors try to resolve the problem 38. Style and Register 281 by introducing a differentiation in functional stylistics that approaches the conception of linguistic registers (cf. e.g. Kraus 1971, 273; Gal'perin 1973, 14 ft). 3.4. Theory of Register In contrast to functional stylistics, which pro-ceeds from a small number of domains of communication and assigns to them relatively closed subsystems of linguistic means on all levels of language, registers are determined by the parameters of the communication situa-tion. Unlike the functional styles, they refer to both written and spoken language; a deli-mitation to standard language is not made by all authors. The theory of register was developed in English linguistics by J. R. Firth and his school (cf. Gläser 1976, 234-240); though the theoretical positions and the terminology of its various adherents are very heterogene-ous (cf. the comparison in Hess-Lüttich 1974, 272 — 274), yet it is possible to summarize it as a common theoretical basis: Den meisten Definitionen des register-Begriffs gemeinsam sind die sprachliche Variante, der Rollen-wechsel des Sprechers sowie der sozial-situa-tive Rahmen der sprachlichen Äußerung. Übereinstimmung besteht unter den Vertre-tern der FIRTH-Schule und anderen engli-schen Linguisten auch darin, daß die registers einen gesellschaftlich verbindlichen Charak-ter tragen und als makrolinguistische Norm gelten können. (Gläser 1976, 239). Halliday defines 'register' as 'language variety accord-ing to use' in contrast to 'dialect', which he conceives as 'language variety according to user' (Halliday/Mclntosh/Strevens [1964] 1970, 87). The difference between dialect and register is explicated further by Turner: In one case, when we compare dialects, we nor-mally compare entirely different linguistic situations: speaker, hearer, and circumstances all differ between one dialect and another.

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  Variational Text Linguistics

  Revisiting Register in English

  • Christoph Schubert, Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer, Christoph Schubert, Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The follow-ing two quotations taken from standard introductions to sociolinguistics aptly demonstrate this narrow notion of “register”. Linguistic varieties that are linked […] to particular occupations or topics can be termed registers. […] Registers are usually characterized entirely, or almost so, by vocabulary differ-ences. (Trudgill 2000: 81) Register is another complicating factor in any study of language varieties. 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 . (Ward-haugh 2002: 51) It is obvious that subject matters connected to certain types of activity are respon-sible for the linguistic choices made by discourse participants in this type of approach to “register”. Although the second quotation includes the term “social groups”, this is conceptualized in a narrow way, excluding the language of social classes in the sense of working- or middle-class sociolects. In contrast to this narrow notion of “register”, a wide definition of the term is employed by the tradition of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), as can be seen in the next two definitions taken from a classic introduction to cohesion and a recent study on register variation. The linguistic features which are typically associated with a configuration of situational fea-tures – with particular values of the field, mode and tenor – constitute a register. (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 22, emphasis original) Just as situations tend to recur and thus form types, registers represent recurring ways of using language in a given situation. […] Registers can thus be described as sub-systems of the language system or, when viewed from below, as types of instantiated texts reflecting a similar situation.

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  The Sociolinguistics of Urban Vernaculars

  Case Studies and their Evaluation

  • Norbert Dittmar, Peter Schlobinski(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  3. Style is explicitly, or more often, implicitly, an inherently comparative concept. Any isolation of a specific style presuppose a benchmark norm against which that style is observably distinctive. 4. Styles correlate with contexts, whether those are viewed primarily in terms of the producer (or author), the audience (or interlocutor, or reader), or the social situation (or event). All of this is eminently sensible, and close to the ordinary ('lay') use of the term 'style', which is, after all, part of our everyday metalanguage. But from a sociolinguistic perspective, this traditional concept of style will hardly serve to distinguish style from other linguistic and sociolinguistic concepts like dialect, diglossic level, genre, or code as in code-switching. We therefore turn to the sociolinguistic literature in search of a technical concept of style. But there seems to be some very fundamental confusion, or at least disagreement, in that literature about what we should mean by 'style' and 'register'. First, there is a relatively well-defined notion of style in correlational sociolinguistics, namely the Labovian concept of style as the linguistic reflexes of degree of attention to speech (LABOV, 1972a: Ch. 3). Conceptual Problems in the Study of Regional and Cultural Style 163 This has been operationalized, for the purpose of sociolinguistic interview techniques, as the distinctions between reading styles, word-citation styles, and more casual styles of varying degrees (as elicited by asking for certain kinds of absorbing narrative). There are reasons to doubt that the linguistic reflexes thereby induced are really unitary phenomena; for example, D RESSLF.R & W ODAK (1982), in a study of Viennese German, were able to tease apart the 'natural' phonological processes of fortition from the switch to prestige phonological variants, both to be found in 'formal style' (high degree of attention to speech).

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  Issues in Sociolinguistics

  • Oscar Uribe-Villegas(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Different dialects of the same language may include different local varieties of the same language and also different social varieties (Ellis, 1965). Register, as we have said, is a norm that obtains in a particular language community. Since no two communities are entirely alike on the social plane, but each will have its own contacts, traditions and activities, we can predict that there will be different register repertories for each community (i.e., registers for a different range of social situations), even where these communities speak the same language. Indeed, with the major international languages, such as English (e.g., in U.K., U.S.A., and, for example, West Africa) or Spanish (as in Spain, Mexico, etc.) it is probably register differences, rather than any major differences in lexis and grammar, that provide the most striking difference within the one language. Register in descriptive linguistics and linguistic sociology 199 The study of register: Language events The object of register study is the language event: a social occasion on which a piece of language is produced. Each language event con-sists of text and context of situation. Knowledge of registers is arrived at by generalising from the study of a large number of language events and discovering what linguistic features are shared. Linguistic features (which may be of various kinds) are found by means of descriptive analysis (see below); contextual features are found by means of analysis of the particular context of situation ('immediate situation', Ellis, 1966a) and related to the register-use in terms which are already familiar to most linguists used to dealing with problems of style and meaning, such as formality and medium.

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  Speaking With Style

  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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  Theory of the History Classroom

  • Manuel Köster, Holger Thünemann, Meik Zülsdorf-Kersting(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Wochenschau Verlag

    (Publisher)

  We advance the proposition that the linguistic dimensions of history in the classroom exist in a perpetual state of tension between enabling communication and understanding, and increasing the potential for contingent classroom events . As we show, this enables many of the students’ empirically doc-umented problems with historical learning to be interpreted as difficulties in dealing with the interplay between the different languages of history in the class-room . 7.2 Dimension 1: registers One key constituent of classroom education as a social system is linguistic com-munication . Linguistic communication in the classroom is specifically different from other situations involving communication . English-language sociolinguis-tics developed the term “register” (cf . Linke/Nussbaumer/Portmann 2004, 338) to describe such specific communication situations . When German-language sociolinguistics was becoming established as a discipline, it focused on the “ influ-ence of social factors on language or linguistic behaviour” (ibid ., 345, italics in orig-© Wochenschau Verlag, Frankfurt/M. 167 inal) and created the term Varietät (variety) to describe the link between linguis-tic idiosyncrasies and social groups . While the term “register” describes specific communication situations (cf . Hymes 1989, 440); varieties can be described in terms of the interaction between geographical difference (diatopic), difference based on social background (diastratic) and stylistic difference (diaphasic) (cf . Gantefort 2013, 80) . Registers are mainly defined based on their diaphasic features, although this frequently goes hand in hand with a high level of dias-tratic marking, i . e . association with certain groups of speakers (cf . Riebling 2013, 110 – 114) . The situation-specific use of different registers is the focus of Michael Hal-liday’s functional grammar or systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) .

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  The Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics

  • Rajend Mesthrie(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Halliday for a while seemed to endorse the separation of language and situation in his discussions of dialect and register. By dialect Halliday meant all those aspects of language use associated with a speaker or speakers’ social provenance and experience. Dialect, he suggested, is “what you habitually speak”; register is “what you are speaking at a given moment” (Halliday 1978: 35). But it is important to appreciate the level of abstraction Halliday is using here. He makes the case that dialect and register, once again, cannot be kept apart as concepts – they are “two sides of the same coin,” and both are implicated in making meaning. Because we know that dialect usage is not fully consistent at the level of the individual, “the dialect comes to be an aspect of the register … the choice of dialect becomes a choice of meaning, or a choice between dif- ferent areas of our meaning potential” (Halliday 1978: 34). In this discussion we are already encountering quite different concep- tions of not only style but of sociolinguistics itself. In the variationist paradigm, we see priority being given to linguistic systems over social processes, and this view is naturalized in the central concept of variation. Languages are seen as systems which subsume variability, particularly dialect variability, in the sense that they can adopt different systemic forms, and move over time from one form or state to another. This sug- gests a plan-view, a top-down visualization of language systems “in soci- ety,” where the explanatory movement is from society to language. The social placement of groups of speakers and the situational configurations in which they operate, seen “from above,” play a part in shaping lan- guage systems. This is consistent with the argument that (variationist) sociolinguistics is above all a version of linguistics – one in which social facts play an important part in reaching accurate descriptions of how linguistic systems stand relative to others.

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  Language

  Its Structure and Use

  • Edward Finegan, , , (Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Academic lectures and job interviews may reflect some characteristics of planned discourse more common with writing. On the other hand, some types of writing are produced with relatively little planning, and the language of an email note typed in a hurry is likely to be quite speechlike. 3. Speakers and addressees often stand face-to-face , whereas writers and readers ordinarily do not . In face-to-face interactions, the immediacy of the interlocutors and the contexts of interaction allow them to refer to themselves ( I think , you see ) and their own opinions and to be more personal in their inter-action. By contrast, the contexts of writing limit the degree to which written expression can be personal. But we wouldn’t want to overgeneralize. Consider, for example, a personal letter and a face-to-face friendly conversation. People Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 356 Chapter 10 Language Variation Across Situations of Use: Registers may feel they have a right to be equally personal in both contexts. An im-personal stance is thus a feature of only some written registers, as a personal stance is a feature of only some spoken registers. 4. Written registers tend to rely less on the context of interaction than spo-ken registers do . Writing is more independent of context. In spoken registers, expressions of spatial deixis (such as demonstrative pronouns like this and that ) and temporal deixis (like today and next Tuesday ) can be understood with ref-erence to the here and now of the utterance.

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  Syntactic Variation and Genre

  • Heidrun Dorgeloh, Anja Wanner, Heidrun Dorgeloh, Anja Wanner(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Such names may themselves be as untested as those which researchers come up with – and may indeed come from the same fund of common experience. Askehave and Swales recommend that communicative purpose be recursively revisited in genre study, for what they call a “re-purposing” (Swales 2001: 207), always in recognition of the complexity, we might add, of speakers’ motives in taking up a way of speaking. Despite continuing mention of genre in formal corpus studies of linguistic variation across text instances, and despite attempts to distinguish between genre and register, genre on the whole seems to have given way to register. By 2006, Biber suggests that genre and register are interchangeable, and opts for register to name “situationally-defined varieties described for their characteristic lexico- grammatical features” (Biber 2006: 11). Register itself is a porous term, as when Biber, Csomay and Jones (2004) refer to both “written narrative” and scientific research articles as registers, these two classifications deriving from different criteria. Such incommensurability sometimes goes unnoticed, or it may be part of an expedient instability which register inherits from genre. Biber (2006: 12) 32 Janet Giltrow says register can be named at any level of generality, and one will find more formal similarity at low levels, less at higher levels. Yet even as register is in the ascendancy, what could be called genre is still playing a role in identifying social scenes for speech – classroom talk, or live exchanges on television shows, or guest lectures, to take examples from a recent collection (Partington, Morley, and Haarman 2004) of corpus-based studies of linguistic variation – without those identifications being examined for their criteria or definition, for their measure of purpose, let alone for their complex articulation with the social order.

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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)

  In fact, individual linguistic features do not provide the basis for such distinctions. However, when analyses are based on the co-occurrence and alternation patterns within a group of linguistic features, important differences across registers are revealed.’ Biber, ‘Analytical Framework’, p.35. This is an important warning against studies of the situation of NT texts that are based solely on the use of particular words. An extensive table of ‘Linguistic features that might be investigated in a register analysis’ is provided in Biber and Conrad, Register, Genre, and Style , pp.78–82. 70 Biber, ‘Analytical Framework’, p.36. 71 See above (section 3.3) for Biber’s framework of ‘Situational characteristics of registers and genres’. However, Dittmar is critical of Biber for failing to give adequate explanation of situational and linguistic correlations: ‘Wünschenswert ist hier die präzisere Formulierung des Zusammenhangs von grammatischen Variablen und pragmatischen Eigenscahften von Äußerungen’. Dittmar, ‘Register/Register’, p.223. 72 Biber, Dimensions of Register Variation , p.22. 76 Text, Context and the Johannine Community 1 re À ect not just stylistic changes, but also different social contexts. 73 Biber’s synchronic and diachronic cross-linguistic approach seems particularly relevant when we take up the challenge of trying to establish the register of the ¿ rst-century Koiné texts of the Jn literature. 3.5. Examples of Register and the Problem of Corpus Given our sensitivity to register, it often requires only a few textual clues to envisage accurately the type of situation which has given rise to a particular text in our own contemporary language. A couple of examples should suf ¿ ce: Thank you, Lord Jesus, for making that picnic breakfast for your friends when they were hungry after a night’s ¿ shing. We are so glad that you are alive today and that you want us to be your friends. Thank you for sharing in all we do, and for giving us all that we need.

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