Register, Genre, and Style

By Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad. 2019

768 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This book describes the most important kinds of texts in English and introduces the methodological techniques used to analyse them. Three analytical approaches are introduced and compared, describing a wide range of texts from the perspectives of register, genre and style. The primary focus of the book is on the analysis of registers. Part 1 introduces an analytical framework for studying registers, genre conventions, and styles. Part 2 provides detailed descriptions of particular text varieties in English, including spoken interpersonal varieties (conversation, university office hours, service encounters), written varieties (newspapers, academic prose, fiction), and emerging electronic varieties (e-mail, internet forums, text messages). Finally, Part 3 introduces advanced analytical approaches using corpora, and discusses theoretical concerns, such as the place of register studies in linguistics, and practical applications of register analysis. Each chapter ends with three types of activities: reflection and review activities, analysis activities, and larger project ideas.

Subfields: Language and Linguistics, Literature and Literary Theory

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97b48a1b9cfd4b876bc6bc6363ef4ef2012bf214

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Citations in the corpus

How Should My Chatbot Interact? A Survey on Social Characteristics in Human–Chatbot Interaction Design (2019, background): “as a vast literature that shows language variation according to the media and its effect in social perceptions (see e.g. [Baron 1984; Walther 2007]). Similarly, researchers in sociolinguistic fields [Conrad and Biber 2009] have shown that language choices are influenced by personal style, dialect, g”
Mirages: On Anthropomorphism in Dialogue Systems (2023, background): “Humans are adept at using linguistic features to convey a variety of registers and styles depending on the context (Biber and Conrad, 2009).”
Deliberate Metaphor Theory: Basic assumptions, main tenets, urgent issues (2017, background): “It is a general assumption that discourse guides, organizes and constrains the structures and functions of utterances as well as their production, reception and exchange (e. g., Biber and Conrad 2009).”
Controlling Linguistic Style Aspects in Neural Language Generation (2017, background): “…stylistic aspects of the text: style variations are used to express the social meanings of a message, and controlling the style of a text is necessary for appropriately conveying a message in a way that is adequate to the social context (Biber and Conrad, 2009; Nieder-hoffer and Pennebaker, 2002).”
On learning and representing social meaning in NLP: a sociolinguistic perspective (2021, background): “…to acknowledge that there are other types of linguistic variation—and other traditions that analyse variation within linguistics— including variation across communicative contexts, as is commonly analysed in corpus linguistics (i.e. register variation) (Biber, 1988; Biber and Conrad, 2009).”