REGISTER AND GENRE VARIATION IN CORPORA
Keywords:
Register, corpora, corpus linguistics, language variation, discourse analysis, communicative context, genre, stylistic features, frequency analysis, lexical patterns, grammatical variation, authentic data, spoken and written registers, applied linguistics, functional linguistics, sociolinguistics, data-driven learning, computational linguistics, linguistic research, contextual meaning, pragmatic function, register awareness, genre-based pedagogy, concordance analysis.Abstract
This article explores the intricate relationship between register and corpora in modern linguistics, emphasizing their complementary roles in analyzing real-world language use. The concept of register refers to variations in language that depend on social context, communicative purpose, audience, and medium of communication. Registers may range from formal and academic discourse to informal conversation or digital communication. On the other hand, corpora—large, structured collections of authentic spoken and written texts—allow linguists to study such variations empirically through frequency, collocation, and concordance analysis. The paper discusses how corpus linguistics provides reliable evidence to describe register differences across genres such as academic writing, journalism, casual speech, and social media. It explains how linguistic features such as vocabulary choice, grammatical patterns, modality, and discourse markers vary across registers.
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