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Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 23:1 (2018) ► pp.1–27

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Register variation in spoken British English

The case of verb-forming suffixation

 | University of Reading
 | University of Reading
Published online: 31 May 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.16036.law
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to identify the effect of register variation in spoken British English on the occurrence of the four principal verb-forming suffixes: ‑ate, ‑en, ‑ify and ‑ize, by building on the work of Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Plag, I., Dalton-Puffer, C., & Baayen, R. H. (1999). Morphological productivity across speech and writing. English Language and Linguistics, 3(2), 209–228. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar and Schmid, H-J. (2011). English Morphology and Word-formation: An Introduction. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar. Register variation effects were compared between the less formal Demographically-Sampled and the more formal Context-Governed components of the original 1994 version of the British National Corpus. The pattern of ‑ize derivatives revealed the most marked register-based differences with respect to frequency counts and the creation of neologisms, whereas ‑en derivatives varied the least compared with the other three suffixes. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of these suffix profiles in the context of spoken language reveal markers of register formality that have not hitherto been explored; derivative usage patterns provide an additional dimension to previous research on register variation which has mainly focused on grammatical and lexical features of language.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Register variation and complex words
  • 3.Corpus metrics, measures of productivity and morphological categories
  • 4.The function and meaning of verb-forming suffixes in English
    • 4.1The characteristics of ‑ate
    • 4.2The characteristics of ‑en
    • 4.3The characteristics of ‑ify
    • 4.4The characteristics of ‑ize
  • 5.Methodology
    • 5.1Data source
    • 5.2Data preparation and analysis
  • 6.Results and discussion
    • 6.1Distribution patterns of ‑ate, ‑en, ‑ify and ‑ize
    • 6.2Category diversity and density between DS and CG registers
    • 6.3The overlap between register-based vocabulary sets
    • 6.4Qualitative differences in register-based vocabulary sets
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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