(Searching by and comparing genre and sub-genre in BNC and COCA)

fiction verbs, academic adjectives, newspaper adverbs, magazine nouns

Utah English - spoken (1.7m words)

1. What is perhaps the best example of a corpus-based investigation into register variation? (Biber charts)

2. What are some examples of (syntactic) variation based on gender, social groups, and region?

• Gender: GC-Women, BNCweb ("lovely") (ling..../verloyaEng)

• Social groups: BNC-Demographic, BNCweb

• Dialect: Brown/LOB: have questions, he has / he's got. ICE

4. What is a "register".  How "fine-grained" should (or could) our registers be? (E.g. mag / sports/ b-ball / college)

5. Give examples of register variation in 1) word frequency and 2) word meaning and use (use wordfreq lists)

6. Give examples of register variation in 1) part of speech categories and 2) syntactic features (Biber above)

7. Discuss Carter and McCarthy's idea that we may need different grammatical categories to describe different registers

8. In spite of register variation (in grammar), does it make sense to describe a register-neutral norm?  Why or why not?

9. Discuss Biber's use of "factor analysis" to describe register variation

10. In Biber's model, what is a "dimension"?  How are different dimensions related to each other, and to the different registers?

Biber / Davies

Register variation in Spanish

NSF grant with Doug Biber and Jesse Egbert 2012-2015