Register Variation Online

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.

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.