Variational Text Linguistics: Revisiting Register in English
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Christoph Schubert and Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer (Eds.) Variational Text Linguistics Topics in English Linguistics Editors Elizabeth Closs Traugott Bernd Kortmann Volume 90 Variational Text Linguistics Revisiting Register in English Edited by Christoph Schubert Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer ISBN 978-3-11-044310-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-044355-4 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-043533-7 ISSN 1434-3452 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Brian Stablyk/Photographer’s Choice RF/Getty Images Typesetting: fidus Publikations-Service GmbH, Nördlingen Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Acknowledgements The foundations for this edited collection of articles were laid at the interna- tional conference Register revisited: New perspectives on functional text variety in English, which took place at the University of Vechta, Germany, from June 27 to 29, 2013. The aim of the present volume is to conserve the research papers and many inspiring discussions which were stimulated then and to make them available to a larger audience. It was only possible to achieve this aim thanks to the help of many people joining us in the effort. First and foremost, we would like to thank all contributors for their continued cooperation in this project. Furthermore, we are very grate- ful to the external peer reviewers who contributed their expertise to the selec- tion and improvement of the contributions. These are (in alphabetical order): Federica Barbieri (Swansea, Wales), Eniko Csomay (San Diego, USA) Jürgen Esser (Bonn, Germany), Maria Freddi (Pavia, Italy), Christer Geisler (Uppsala, Sweden), Bethany Gray (Ames, Iowa, USA), Joachim Grzega (Eichstätt, Germany), Thomas Kohnen (Cologne, Germany), Rocío Montoro (Granada, Spain), Neal Norrick (Saar- brücken, Germany), Caroline Tagg (Birmingham, UK), Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen (Helsinki, Finland) and Marija Zlatnar Moe (Ljubljana, Slovenia). We are very happy that this volume appears in the series Topics in English Lin- guistics (TiEL) and would like to thank the series editors Elizabeth Traugott and Bernd Kortmann as well as Wolfgang Konwitschny, Julie Miess and Birgit Sievert at de Gruyter Mouton for their invaluable support in the preparation of this book. Needless to say that we are to blame for any remaining inadequacies. Going back to the roots of this project, we would like to express our grat- itude to the German Research Foundation/Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for the generous funding of the conference as well as to the Kommission für Forschung und Nachwuchsförderung der Universität Vechta, the Universitäts- gesellschaft Vechta (UGV), the Volksbank Vechta and the city of Vechta for their financial support and hospitality, which contributed immensely to the memora- ble pleasant atmosphere of the event. Christoph Schubert and Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer April 2016 Table of contents Acknowledgements v Christoph Schubert Introduction: Current trends in register research 1 Section I: Specialised registers Douglas Biber and Jesse Egbert Towards a user-based taxonomy of web registers 19 Heidrun Dorgeloh The interrelationship of register and genre in medical discourse 43 Markus Bieswanger Aviation English: Two distinct specialised registers? 67 Rolf Kreyer ‘Now niggas talk a lotta Bad Boy shit’: The register hip-hop from a corpus- linguistic perspective 87 Teresa Pham The register of English crossword puzzles: Studies in intertextuality 111 Section II: Cross-register comparison Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer Punctuation as an indication of register: Comics and academic texts 139 Martina Lampert Linking up register and cognitive perspectives: Parenthetical constructions in academic prose and experimentalist poetry 169 Stella Neumann and Jennifer Fest Cohesive devices across registers and varieties: The role of medium in English 195 viii Table of contents Section III: Regional, contrastive and diachronic register variation Barbara Güldenring Metaphors in New English academic writing 223 Steffen Schaub The influence of register on noun phrase complexity in varieties of English 251 Valentin Werner Real-time online text commentaries: A cross-cultural perspective 271 Javier Pérez-Guerra Word order is in order here: A diachronic register analysis of syntactic markedness in English 307 Index 337 Christoph Schubert Introduction: Current trends in register research 1 Research interest and goals of the volume The discipline of text linguistics is firmly established as “any work in language science devoted to the text as the primary object of inquiry” (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 14). Although there is a variety of theories and approaches in text linguistics, common research issues are the definition of “text” in old and new media, the formal and functional connections between sentences, typological classifications of texts and processes in the production and comprehension of texts (cf. Esser 2009: 20–21 and Schubert 2012: 29). As the new discipline of “var- iational pragmatics”, which investigates contextual language use across regional varieties of English, has been established in recent years (cf. Schneider and Barron 2008), the present volume aims to foster and further develop the discipline of “variational text linguistics”. Since this new field of research covers both func- tional and regional types of textual variation, it intends to provide novel insights into the multi-faceted concept of “register”. Along the lines of Biber and Conrad’s monograph Register, Genre, and Style (2009: 6), we regard “register analysis” as a perspective on text variety which investigates context-dependent communica- tive functions of characteristic lexico-grammatical features in discourse. Thus, quantitative results based on adequate corpora are here combined with qualita- tive assessment. We approach the subject of “register” from a wide perspective, incorporating stylistics, variational linguistics and discourse analysis, so that convergences and synergistic effects between disciplines become obvious. In recent years, other volumes dedicated to textual variety have placed emphasis on different research foci, which may be illustrated by three examples: the essay collection by Dorgeloh and Wanner (2010) is interested in textual variety in English exclusively from the perspective of syntactic parameters and it inves- tigates genre rather than register. In the volume by Andersen and Bech (2013), genre variation is only one parameter next to diachronic variation in time and geographical variation in space. Moreover, the three types of variation are largely discussed separately, and the editors’ main interest lies in corpus development Christoph Schubert, University of Vechta 2 Christoph Schubert and analysis. The book by Szmrecsanyi and Wälchli (2014) does not only discuss register and dialectology but also includes language typology and therefore com- prises articles on a number of languages such as Dutch or members of the Slavic family. Yet, they also formulate the central diagnosis that “[e]ven though dialec- tologists, register analysts, typologists, and quantitative linguists all deal with linguistic variation, there is astonishingly little interaction across these fields” (Wälchli and Szmrecsanyi 2014: 1). In general, register analysis offers a constantly widening range of research opportunities because of the ever-increasing possibilities of communication, mainly triggered by the advent of modern communication technologies. As the main body of linguistic research has concentrated on well-established and fre- quent registers such as newspaper writing or face-to-face conversations, many descriptive and theoretical issues have not yet been sufficiently investigated. Accordingly, the report on major register studies in Biber and Conrad (cf. 2009: 271–295) reveals that research on specialized registers has had a clear preference for academic and newspaper texts. In particular, the language of popular genres such as pop music, comics or puzzles has hardly been investigated so far, and there are several forms of electronic communication, such as online text com- mentaries, which need to be described more closely. Hence, by giving room to the description of registers which have not received an appropriate amount of atten- tion so far, we intend to point out emerging trends as well as new directions for future research. By means of cross-cultural comparisons of registers, the volume aims to build bridges to neighbouring disciplines such as cultural studies, espe- cially with regard to intercultural communication. By pointing out the ubiquitous nature of register, we also intend to show that adequate register choice is not a marginal phenomenon but a fundamental prerequisite for successful communi- cation in specific social situations. 2 Definitions of “register” As far as the semantic origin of the term “register” is concerned, the linguistic use of the term represents a metaphorical borrowing from the domain of music, in particular organ playing (cf. Renkema 2004: 146), where it refers to a “sliding device controlling a set of organ-pipes which share a tonal quality”