Re: Corpora: register and genre

From: David Lee (david_lee00@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Aug 31 2000 - 15:23:38 MET DST

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    [Beverley McCombe asked:],

    > Having embarked on a masters thesis in corpus analysis and wishing to
    > compare the collocational nature of prepositions across academic
    disciplines
    > I find that I am not sure whether to call this 'specific registers' or
    > genres. Both are written academic prose which would seem to be of the
    same
    > genre but as the topics are different - commerce and economics versus
    > natural science/history - I would call it ,specific registers'.
    > Any comments?

    Short answer: call them genres. They may well be *written in* different
    *registers* if you can find enough linguistic differences between the
    genres and can demonstrate that these constitute established patterns
    which you would like to label as 'registers'. But that's to be
    established (after the fact). 'Topic' is an entirely different matter,
    and has little to do with the distinction between 'register' and
    'genre'.

    Long answer:
    I prefer 'genre' to refer to categories of texts, and 'register' to
    refer to empirically established types of language (i.e. specific
    configurations of linguistic and textual features, established through
    research). Not all linguists will observe such a distinction (e.g. Biber
    & Finegan (1994) don't draw such a distinction), so it's up to you, but
    I wish we linguists would standardise our use of terminology a lot more
    (can you imagine natural scientists disagreeing over 'oxygen' or
    'hydrogen'?).

    In general, I am loath to use 'register' at all: to me, it implies an
    empirically established set of language patterns unique to a situational
    use and inextricably tied to ideas of 'appropriateness' (and all the
    ideological problems therein). There are very few such sets which
    linguists have established so far (among them: air-traffic control talk,
    recipe instructions, etc... This means that "sublanguages" usually
    constitute "registers", but not all "registers" are "sublanguages").
    Certainly, I have no idea what an 'economics register' looks like, nor
    how it is different from other such purported 'registers'. I therefore
    disagree with Biber & Finegan's (1994) use of the term. As to whether
    different academic texts all belong to a single academic 'genre', that
    depends on how flexible you want the term 'genre' to be. I would use the
    term 'super-genre', on the *assumption* that they have something in
    common. But we may well find that the texts produced by natural
    scientists have little in common at all with art historians or social
    scientists... again, this may well be an empirical question to be
    resolved.

    David Lee

    Ref:
    ====
    Biber, Douglas & Edward Finegan (eds.) (1994) Sociolinguistic
    Perspectives on Register. New York: Oxford University Press.

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    David YW Lee **************************************
    Visiting Researcher * Stop the narrowing of minds *
    Dept of Linguistics * Affirm the diversity of life *
    Lancaster University ***************************************
    Lancaster LA1 4YT
    England, UK.

    Email: david_lee00@hotmail.com
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