What Does Register Mean In Linguistics

Linguistic Register.

The concept of linguistic register has been described by Trudgill (1983:101) as follows:

Linguistic varieties that are linked ... to occupations, professions or topics have been termed registers. The register of police, for example, is different from the annals of medicine, which in plow is dissimilar from the language of engineering---and and then on. Registers are ordinarily characterized solely by vocabulary differences; either by the utilize of particular words, or by the use of words in a particular sense.

Registers are simply a rather special case of a item kind of language being produced by the social situation.

Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens (1964) devote a long section to register in their 1964 piece of work. They also refer to register as `distinguished past use.'

I would suggest an improvement on Trudgill's definition by expanding the definition of register to include, in many cases, a preference (or fifty-fifty a dispreference) for particular syntactic patterns or rhetorical devices.

A close exam of many different kinds of registers shows that they tend to adopt or eschew

• the passive voice;
• the APA recommends using Active vocalisation: As a general dominion, use the active voice rather than the passive voice. For example, use "Nosotros predicted that ..." rather than "It was predicted that ..."
• metaphors ( APA warns against them!)
• imperative verbs;
• sexist or racist language;
• curt sentences

likewise as having a preference for certain lexical devices (such equally acronyms or blends) as well as certain more established lexical items and resource, such equally Greco-Latin vocabulary (western European languages) or other classical languages, due east.g. Sanskrit or Chinese.

When I say `registers prefer' etc. I hateful, of course, that decision-makers who control the standards of the register prefer or disprefer, and may explicitly state these preferences in fashion-manuals for various journals, etc. Some researchers take noted that register is related to uses rather than users. Scherer and Giles (1979:51-iii) devote two pages to a description of both differences in lexicon and the `complex, unusual semantic relations amongst perfectly commonplace words' found in certain registers.

Instance: While traveling by air to another urban center recently, I overheard two people next to me discussing an issue in their discipline, which turned out to be high-energy physics. One man kept using the word 'quench' in a manner I had never heard used earlier. In a lull in their conversation I interrupted and asked nearly this usage, explaining that I was a linguist. They explained that in their register, it meant rapidly decrease the temperature of a hot gas. My own understanding of this word was more similar 'put out a fire; alleviate a person's thirst.'

Permit u.s.a. tentatively propose the following definition of Register:

A set of specialized vocabulary and preferred (or dispreferred) syntactic and rhetorical devices/structures, used by specific socio-professional groups for special purposes. A register is a holding or feature of a language, and non of an individual or a grade of speakers.

Crucial for our word of register in the context of multilingualism and linguistic communication policy is the fact that some languages lack certain registers: in western industrial societies they may lack ethno-scientific registers (folk taxonomies for classifying plants, animals or natural phenomena), or specialized poetic registers, specialized politeness systems, or registers for speaking in a trance.

I utilize this example because of a state of affairs that arose during my observation of a Toda ritual in the Nilgiris District, Tamilnadu, India. A shaman went into a trance and began devining the futurity. Although I did not understand whatever Toda, the speech of the shaman while in a trance was to me impressionistically quite unlike from samples of Toda I had heard upward to that point. One frequent sentence-last utterance, delivered with rising intonation [ariyo: ] sounded like a possible borrowing from Malayalam, with the probable meaning `do you know?'. I asked the Toda informant guiding u.s. what the utterances meant, and he explained them without hesitation. But when I asked him to repeat some of the words, he said that he couldn't say those words unless he was in a trance .) Toda as well has a register for songs that is phonologically so different from spoken Toda equally to exist unrecognizable to someone who only knows spoken Toda (Emeneau, personal communication).

This illustrates how fifty-fifty a numerically small and preliterate language like Toda may have three registers that are so unlike linguistically that they constitute separate and mutually-unintelligible codes, i.e., the existence of circuitous registers is not but a characteristic of post-industrial western languages.

In pre-industrial societies the languages lack legal, technical, scientific, and medical registers and subvarieties of these (for example, the register that airline pilots use to communicate with air traffic controllers). Such languages either function without such registers, which relegates them to a marginal status within a larger multilingual order (Stewart's `1000' [group] office), or the members of such linguistic cultures acquire proficiency in these registers in other languages. In many postcolonial societies, of class, the registers they acquire proficiency in are registers of English or another ex-colonial linguistic communication.

What this illustrates, of course, is that registers for a particular language may be di- or even tri-glossic : certain registers are in the domain of the H variety (religion, literature, ethno-history), some in the domain of the L-variety (conversation, jokes/stories, intimacy/courtship, machine-mechanical, building/structure trades etc.) and certain registers (loftier-tech, college-educational activity) may be in the domain of a totally unlike language.

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Harold Schiffman
Wed Jan 29 12:05:21 EST 1997

What Does Register Mean In Linguistics,

Source: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/messeas/regrep/node2.html

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