The book extends and refines the research and methodology reported in the author’s ground-breaking Variation Across Speech and Writing, 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 to predict for the first time cross-linguistic universals of register variation.
Table of Contents:
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 patterns of register variation: synchronic similarities and differences
8. Cross-linguistic patterns of register variation: diachronic similarities and differences
9. Registers and text types in English and Somali
10. Towards cross-linguistic universals of register variation
Appendices
Notes
References
Index
