Variational Text Linguistics: Revisiting Register in English

Product Description
Owing to the ever-increasing possibilities of communication, especially with the advent of modern communication technologies, register analysis offers a constantly widening range of research opportunities. Still, research has mainly concentrated on well-established and frequent registers such as newspaper articles, while many descriptive and theoretical issues have not yet been sufficiently investigated.This volume gives a state-of-the-art insight into register studies and points out emerging trends as well as new directions for future research. Furthermore, it provides a forum for the description and discussion of registers which have not received an appropriate amount of attention so far. In particular, it deals with specialized offline and online registers, cross-register comparison as well as regional, contrastive, and diachronic register variation.In parallel to the new discipline of variational pragmatics, this volume aims to foster the discipline of 'variational text linguistics' and to initiate fundamental investigations in this area. This field of research provides new insights into the concept of register, since it covers both functional and regional types of textual variation.
Review
In summary, the volume represents significant explorations of underrepresented registers, with a number of exciting methodological innovations, a great deal of future research potential, and a wealth of useful findings. The individual chapters are all well-presented and are underpinned by clear theoretical and methodological frameworks. The volume should be of great interest to corpus linguists and educators in the field, and a number of the studies are likely to have implications and impact outside of linguistics, notably the studies on Aviation English, hip-hop, and OCTs. On the whole, then, the volume is successful in achieving its stated aims.Peter Crosthwaite in: Functions of Language 25:2 (2018), 328-334
About the Author
Christoph Schubert, University of Vechta, Germany; Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany.