Diachronic Registers

Abstract

The present chapter discusses the concept of register from a diachronic perspective. While our examples are mainly taken from English, the general points remain valid for historical corpus linguistics as a whole. An initial survey demonstrates the importance of the register factor in historical corpus linguistics. We discuss the choice between comparability and representativeness in corpus design as well as the challenges caused by the absence of some registers during part of the recorded history of a language and the dearth of texts from some registers that did exist. We also introduce ways in which the spoken interaction of the past can be approached via speech-related registers and the different insights that can be gained through studying single linguistic features as well as the co-occurrence of several features. After this survey, we provide a more detailed account of a case study where the register concept turned out to be of crucial importance as a determinant of language variation and change: not -contraction in nineteenth-century English. The chapter concludes with some remarks on envisaged future developments in the field.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 57 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.