Register Variation Online

While other books focus on special internet registers, like tweets or texting, no previous study describes the full range of everyday registers found on the searchable web. These are the documents that readers encounter every time they do a Google search, from registers like news reports, product reviews, travel blogs, discussion forums, FAQs, etc. Based on analysis of a large, near-random corpus of web documents, this monograph provides comprehensive situational, lexical, and grammatical descriptions of those registers. Beginning with a coding of each document in the corpus, the description identifies the registers that are especially common on the searchable web versus those that are less commonly found. Multi-dimensional analysis is used to describe the overall patterns of linguistic variation among web registers, while the second half of the book provides an in-depth description of each individual register, including analyses of situational contexts and communicative purposes, together with the typical lexical and grammatical characteristics associated with those contexts.

1. Introduction; 2. Corpus and methods; 3. A survey of the registers on the public searchable web; 4. Overall patterns of register variation on the searchable web: a multi-dimensional analysis; 5. Narrative registers; 6. Opinion, advice, and persuasion registers; 7. Informational descriptions, explanations, and procedures; 8. Oral registers; 9. The web as a continuous space of register variation; Appendix A. Linguistic features included in the multi-dimensional analysis; Appendix B. Lexicogrammatical features included in the key feature analysis; Appendix C. Descriptive statistics for the key feature analyses.

Douglas Biber is Regents' Professor of English (Applied Linguistics) at Northern Arizona University. His research efforts have focused on corpus linguistics, English grammar, and register variation (in English and cross-linguistic; synchronic and diachronic). He has published over 220 research articles and 23 books and monographs, including primary research studies as well as textbooks.
Jesse Egbert is Assistant Professor in the Applied Linguistics program at Northern Arizona University. He specializes in corpus-based research on register variation, particularly academic writing and online language, and methodological issues in quantitative linguistic research. He has published more than thirty research articles published in journals such as the Journal of English Linguistics, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.