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Article published In:
Language, Context and Text
Vol. 2:1 (2020) ► pp.121–144

On the interaction between register variation and regional varieties in English

ORCID logo | RWTH Aachen University
This paper examines the extent to which regional varieties of English influence register variation. Register is a key concept in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), whereas regional variation is rarely studied in this framework. However, languages like Chinese, Spanish and English are used in more than one region and such more complex language situations raise the question of whether registers are used consistently throughout. In this study, texts from three varieties represented in the International Corpus of English are analysed for frequencies of 41 lexico-grammatical features and subjected to exploratory multivariate analysis. The analysis shows that, while there are clear indications of register patterns irrespective of varieties, variety appears to override register in some cases. Variety therefore needs to be accounted for in language theory in addition to the language system and registers as subsystems.
Keywords: register variation, variety, regional variation, context of situation, context of culture, multivariate analysis, corpus analysis, probabilistic distribution, linguistics, lexico-grammar
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
  • 3.Method
  • 4.Analysis
  • 5.Discussion: Register across varieties of English
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 29 January 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/langct.00023.neu
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