Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison

Description

Douglas Biber's new book extends and refines the research and methodology reported in his ground-breaking Variation Across Speech and Writing (1988), 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 Biber to predict for the first time cross-linguistic universals of register variation.

"The book is well edited, very readable, and does not assume familiarity with sampling methods in corpus linguistics. It has a detailed table of contents and a helpful index." James K. Watters, Notes on Linguistics