Definition and Scope of Registers

[Guild of English Students]

Register is a broad concept that covers all forms and kinds of
communication in terms of the linguistic forms used, the activities
performed, the participants and their roles in the communication, the
medium of communication, and the interconnectivity between one
linguistic form and another. The term ‘register’ took a root from
Wegener’s (1885:252) bid to analyze language along “field of content
distinguished by general subject matter, participants’ interest, etc’.
This view, merging with Malinowski (1923 [also 1953]) and Firth
(1937), culminates in a clean conception of the context of situation,
itself the spring board for recent scholarly interest and excurses in
register. Gregory (1967) identifies dialectal variety and diatypic
varieties as two main categories of language variety differentiation.
Diatype, also called register, is described by Gregory (ibid: 177) as
“the linguistic reflection of recurrent characteristics of user’s use
of language in situation.”

Three diatypic manifestations; ‘field of discourse’, ‘mode of
discourse’ and ‘tenor of discourse’ (Gregory (ibid); Halliday (1978)).

Definitions of register in the literature have tilted towards
determining meaning by exploring situational usage, which employs
features of language such as lexico-grammar and phonology (cf Halliday
and Hassan 1991, Martin 1997, Oluruntoba-Oju, 1999, etc). Martin
(1997: 234) is thus right to define register as “a theoretical
explanation of the commonsense observation that we use language
differently in different situations”. Stockwell (2002) also correctly
opines that register has social motivation, and that participants in a
discourse negotiate socially to be able to use language appropriately.
In his words, “the context of use is the crucial determinant in
identifying register. In this way, slight differences in linguistic
style can be ascribed to close differences in social function” (ibid:
7).

There are two perspectives on register usage, viz narrow and broad.
The narrow perspective equals register with jargon, such that the
terms available for describing particular fields of specialization
form the register of such fields. Thus, “thermodynamics” (physics) and
“injection” (medicine) are told from each other because they point to
different specializations. The broad perspective, on the other hand,
sees register as “a sort of social genre of linguistic usage
“(Stockwell 2002:7). Register here is sometimes described as a
sociolect; for example, the language of a newspaper article. Another
is the language of academic prose.