Corpora: register and genre

[David Lee]

[Beverley McCombe asked:],

> Having embarked on a masters thesis in corpus analysis and wishing to
> compare the collocational nature of prepositions across academic
disciplines
> I find that I am not sure whether to call this 'specific registers' or
> genres. Both are written academic prose which would seem to be of the
same
> genre but as the topics are different - commerce and economics versus
> natural science/history - I would call it ,specific registers'.
> Any comments?


Short answer: call them genres. They may well be *written in* different
*registers* if you can find enough linguistic differences between the
genres and can demonstrate that these constitute established patterns
which you would like to label as 'registers'. But that's to be
established (after the fact). 'Topic' is an entirely different matter,
and has little to do with the distinction between 'register' and
'genre'.

Long answer:
I prefer 'genre' to refer to categories of texts, and 'register' to
refer to empirically established types of language (i.e. specific
configurations of linguistic and textual features, established through
research). Not all linguists will observe such a distinction (e.g. Biber
& Finegan (1994) don't draw such a distinction), so it's up to you, but
I wish we linguists would standardise our use of terminology a lot more
(can you imagine natural scientists disagreeing over 'oxygen' or
'hydrogen'?).

In general, I am loath to use 'register' at all: to me, it implies an
empirically established set of language patterns unique to a situational
use and inextricably tied to ideas of 'appropriateness' (and all the
ideological problems therein). There are very few such sets which
linguists have established so far (among them: air-traffic control talk,
recipe instructions, etc... This means that "sublanguages" usually
constitute "registers", but not all "registers" are "sublanguages").
Certainly, I have no idea what an 'economics register' looks like, nor
how it is different from other such purported 'registers'. I therefore
disagree with Biber & Finegan's (1994) use of the term. As to whether
different academic texts all belong to a single academic 'genre', that
depends on how flexible you want the term 'genre' to be. I would use the
term 'super-genre', on the *assumption* that they have something in
common. But we may well find that the texts produced by natural
scientists have little in common at all with art historians or social
scientists... again, this may well be an empirical question to be
resolved.



David Lee


Ref:
====
Biber, Douglas & Edward Finegan (eds.) (1994) Sociolinguistic
Perspectives on Register. New York: Oxford University Press.

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David YW Lee            **************************************
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Dept of Linguistics     *   Affirm the diversity of life     *
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Email: david_lee00 at hotmail.com
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