Introduction

Linguistic description is central to the analysis of text varieties from the three perspectives used in this book. For the register and style perspectives, the focus is on identification of the pervasive lexico-grammatical features that are especially prevalent in the variety. The key difference between the two perspectives is in the interpretation of observed differences: associated functionally with the situational context in the case of register analysis, or associated with aesthetic effects achieved by particular authors/speakers in the case of style analysis. The genre perspective differs from these other two in the focus of the linguistic analysis itself, describing the conventional devices or rhetorical organizations used to structure complete texts from a variety.

Because it is the most widely applicable, we focus here mostly on the methods for carrying out a register analysis. Previous chapters have introduced the three major steps of register analysis: first, describing the situational characteristics of the register, including distinctive aspects of the context and communicative purpose; second, identifying the distinctive linguistic characteristics of the register; and third, showing how the situational and linguistic descriptions are related to one another by interpreting the functions that the linguistic features serve. In Chapter 2 we introduced a framework for describing the situational characteristics. In this chapter, we introduce the methods for carrying out the second and third steps, the linguistic and functional analyses.

One major analytical problem discussed in the chapter is deciding on the linguistic features to analyze.