7.886, Sum: formal and informal English

[The Linguist List]

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-7-886. Thu Jun 13 1996. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines:  135
 
Subject: 7.886, Sum: formal and informal English
 
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Editor for this issue: dseely at emunix.emich.edu (T. Daniel Seely)
 
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1)
Date:  Thu, 13 Jun 1996 17:32:26 +0200
From:  shimizu at let.kumamoto-u.ac.jp
Subject:  Sum: formal and informal English
 
---------------------------------Messages------------------------------------
1)
Date:  Thu, 13 Jun 1996 17:32:26 +0200
From:  shimizu at let.kumamoto-u.ac.jp
Subject:  Sum: formal and informal English
 
     Hello everybody!
 
     Thank you for your e-mails in reply for our query on formal and
     informal English. My colleague has made the following summary by
     taking sections from some of the responses and pasting them to a new
     message.  I hope you find it as helpful as the student did.
 
     ----------------------------------------------------------------------
     1.
     In response to your question on the 'Linguist' list, I can recommend
     the book: Biber,D. (1988) 'Variation across Speech and Writing'
     Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
     This book analyses the linguistic characteristics of 23 spoken and
     written genres of English, using computational methodology.
     I hope this is helpful.
 
     May I recommend Douglas Biber's book "Variation across Speech and
     Writing" (1988) as a way of looking at formal and informal English
     that does not
     assume that the differences are due to written and
     spoken registers, respectively.  Rather, Biber shows
     that there are various underlying dimensions of
     variation across spoken and written registers in English, and that
     registers are more formal on some dimensions, and less formal on
     others.  The publisher is Cambridge University Press, I think (or
     is it Oxford?)
 
     Hope this is helpful,
 
     Marie Helt
     Northern Arizona University
     Flagstaff, AZ  USA
 
 
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     2.
     The subject areas your colleague's student needs to pursue are '
     register' (as a linguistic term it means something like 'language
     variation according to social situation'); 'style' may be helpful, but
     is obviously much more broad. 'Register' is the technical term for
     this in linguistics. An item to start with is 'The Five Clocks' by
     Martin Joos.
 
     Good luck!
 
     Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics              = English
     Department, California Polytechnic State University   = San Luis
     Obispo, CA 93407                                     = Tel. (805)-756-
     0117  E-mail: jrubba at oboe.aix.calpoly.edu      = = = = = = = = = = =
 
 
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     3.
     I'd suggest the following:
 
     The London-Lund corpus of spoken English : description and research /
     edited
     by Jan Svartvik.  Lund, Sweden : Lund University Press, c1990. Series
     title:  Lund studies in English ; 82.
 
     Biber, Douglas.
     Dimensions of register variation : a cross-linguistic comparison /
     Douglas
     Biber.  Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1995.
 
     Best Wishes,
 
     -Jane Edwards
     ----------------------------------------------------------------------
     4.
 
     Douglas Biber 1989. ``A typology of English texts'', Linguistics, 27:
     3-43, and something in the 1993 or 1994 Computational Linguistics.
 
     His work is on different varieties of language - mainly using English
     as an example: he measures various computationally simple clues for
     distinguishing different types of language from each other, and uses
     simple multivariate statistical methods to verify differences between
     varieties.
 
     If your student is interested in computational work, a publication of
     mine might be interesting:
 
     Jussi Karlgren and Douglass Cutting. 1994.
     ``Recognizing Text Genres with Simple Metrics Using Discriminant
     Analysis'', {\it Proceedings of COLING 94}, Kyoto. (In the Computation
     and Language E-Print Archive: cmp-lg/9410008).
 
     It describes an experiment to automatically recognize different genres
      in a genre-analyzed corpus.
 
     Jussi Karlgren                                             karlgren@
     cs.nyu.edu Visiting Researcher, Computer Science                  715
     Bwy # 704, NYU, NYC vox: (212) 998-3496 fax: (212) 995-4123
     URL: http://sics.se/~jussi
 
 
     ------------------------------------------------------------
 
     Once again thank for taking the time to help my colleague and her
     student.
 
     K. Shimizu
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