Dimensions of Register Variation A Cross-Linguistic Comparison [Paperback]

Douglas Biber's new book gives a linguistic analysis of register in four widely differing languages: English, Nukulaelae Tuvaluan, Korean, and Somali.Douglas Biber's new book extends and refines the research and methodology reported in his ground-breaking Variation across speech and writing (1988), and adds for the first time a diachronic dimension. In it he gives a linguistic analysis of register in four widely differing languages: English, Nukulaelae Tuvaluan, Korean, and Somali. Striking similarities as well as differences emerge, allowing Biber to predict for the first time cross-linguistic universals of register variation.Douglas Biber's new book extends and refines the research and methodology reported in his ground-breaking Variation across speech and writing (1988), and adds for the first time a diachronic dimension. In it he gives a linguistic analysis of register in four widely differing languages: English, Nukulaelae Tuvaluan, Korean, and Somali. Striking similarities as well as differences emerge, allowing Biber to predict for the first time cross-linguistic universals of register variation.Douglas Biber's new book extends and refines the research and methodology reported in his ground-breaking Variation Across Speech and Writing (1988), and adds for the first time a diachronic dimension. In it he gives a linguistic analysis of register in four widely differing languages: English, Nukulaelae Tuvaluan, Korean, and Somali. Striking similarities as well as differences emerge, allowing Biber to predict for the first time cross-linguistic universals of register variation.Acknowledgments; 1. Introduction; 2. The comprehensive analysis of register variation; 3. Sociocultural description of the four language situations; 4. The linguistic bases of cross-linguistic register comparisons: a detailed quantitative comparison of English and Somali registers. 5. Methodology; 6. Multi-dimensional analyses of the four languages; 7. Cross-linguistic patternlz