7.842, Sum: Formal and informal English

[The Linguist List]

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-7-842. Fri Jun 7 1996. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines:  138
 
Subject: 7.842, Sum: Formal and informal English
 
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1)
Date:  Fri, 07 Jun 1996 15:51:04 +0200
From:  shimizu at let.kumamoto-u.ac.jp
Subject:  Sum: formal and informal English
 
---------------------------------Messages------------------------------------
1)
Date:  Fri, 07 Jun 1996 15:51:04 +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
 
 
     ---------------------------------------------------
     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.bcalpoly.edu
 
 
     ------------------------------------------------------------
     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 at 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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