Created by Camille Ann C. Tambal from University of Southeastern Philippines taking Bachelor of Arts in English Major in Language.

1. Different perspective on text
varieties:
Register, Genre and Style

2. Register, Genre and Style
perspective in the book

3. Text Sample 1.5 Newspaper article
Investigators Take Last Look at Subway Wreckage
PHILADELPHIA (AP)
A subway car derailment that killed three people and injured 162 may have been
triggered by a dragging motor that hit a track switch, federal investigators said Thursday.
The altered switch may have sent the last three cars in the six-car train onto another
set of tracks Wednesday, causing one car to be yanked into steel support beams,
said John K. Lauber of the National Transportation Safety Board. Evidence indicated
the motor dropped when a nut came loose, Lauber said, adding that investigators
were told that subway motors had dropped from their supports three times in the last
15 years, most recently just a month ago.
“That probably resulted in the pivoting of the motor under the car ...and that
probably was the initiation of the accident,” he said.
A 37-block section of west Philadelphia’s 12.8-mile subway and elevated train line,
a major commuter artery in the nation’s fifth-largest city, remained closed Thursday
as federal investigators made their final inspection of the wreckage.
Extra buses were pressed into service to handle some of the 100,000 people who
typically ride the line twice a day. [. . .]
[LSWE Corpus]

4. Defining Characteristic Register Genre Style
Textual focus Sample of text excerpts Complete texts Sample of text excerpts
Linguistic characteristics
Any lexico-grammatical
feature
Specialized expressions,
rhetorical organization,
formatting
Any lexico-grammatical
feature
Distribution of linguistic
characteristics
Frequent and pervasive in
texts from the variety
Usually once-occuring in
the text, in a particular
place in the text
Frequent and pervasive in
texts from the variety
Interpretation
Features serve important
communicative functions
in the register
Features are
conventionally associated
with the genre: the
expected format but often
not functional
Features are not directly
functional: they are
preferred because they
are aesthetically valued
Table 1.1 Defining characteristics of registers, genres, and styles

5. Genre and Style in
literary studies

6. Text Sample 1.6 Poetry
CREDO
Goals are funnels
with walls that narrow
and finally at the neck–
the achievement–
a guillotine.
Better than goals are dreams
that can never be attained,
only lived.
Or dreamed.
[Scott Baxter, 2004. Imaginary Summits.]

7. Text Sample 1.7 Drama
RUTH: I’m going down to the school with you.
BEATRICE: Oh, no you’re not! You’re going to keep company with that
corpse in
there. If she wakes up and starts gagging just slip her a shot of
whiskey.
The taxi horn blows outside.
Quick! Grab the plants, Matilda – I’ll get the big thing.
RUTH: I want to go! I promised Chris Burns I’d meet him.
BEATRICE: Can’t you understand English?
RUTH: I’ve got to go!
BEATRICE: Shut up!
RUTH: Almost berserk.I don’t care. I’M GOING ANYWAY!
BEATRICE: Shoving RUTH hard.WHAT DID YOU SAY?
TILLIE: Mother!
[Paul Zindel, 1970. The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds.]

8. Text Sample 1.7 Drama
RUTH: I’m going down to the school with you.
BEATRICE: Oh, no you’re not! You’re going to keep company with that
corpse in
there. If she wakes up and starts gagging just slip her a shot of
whiskey.
The taxi horn blows outside.
Quick! Grab the plants, Matilda – I’ll get the big thing.
RUTH: I want to go! I promised Chris Burns I’d meet him.
BEATRICE: Can’t you understand English?
RUTH: I’ve got to go!
BEATRICE: Shut up!
RUTH: Almost berserk.I don’t care. I’M GOING ANYWAY!
BEATRICE: Shoving RUTH hard.WHAT DID YOU SAY?
TILLIE: Mother!
[Paul Zindel, 1970. The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds.]

9. Text Sample 1.8 Fictional Prose
I was living that year in a house on Yucca Avenue in the Laurel Canyon district. It was
a small hillside house on a dead-end street with a long flight of redwood steps to the
front door and a grove of eucalyptus trees across the way. It was furnished, and it
belonged to a woman who had gone to Idaho to live with her widowed daughter for a
while.
[Raymond Chandler, 1988. The Long Good-bye.]

10. Register, Genre and Style
in previous research

11. Biber (1988), Bhatia 2002, Samraj (2002a,b), Bunton
(2002), Love (2002), and Swales (1990, 2004)
exclusively use the term genre
rather than register.

12. Other studies – e.g., Ure (1982), Ferguson (1983), Hymes
(1984), Health and Langman (1994), Bruthiaux (1994),
(1996), Biber (1995), Conrad (2001), and Biber et al.
1999
exclusively use the term register.

13. e.g., (Wardaugh 1986; Trudgill 1974)
have use the term register to refer
only to occupation varieties.

14. Systematic Functional Linguistics
(Halliday 1985)
the terms register and genre made a
theoretical distinction between them.

15. Style to refer general situational
varieties, similar to our use of register.

16. Register and Genre Variation
as Linguistic Universal