Different texts have different characteristics. In this chapter, we first explore the concepts of register, genre and style, which are, in the tradition of Biber, linked to communicative functions and situational characteristics. The co-occurrence of register features and dimensions are introduced as the linguistic indicators of communicative functions. A particularly useful approach to register centres around keyness, which we demonstrate with historical Portuguese data. We then introduce discourse traditions as a historical-linguistic concept closely related to genre and register. We use French literary examples to explain stylistic differences and the link with the Labovian distinction between indicators, markers and stereotypes. This leads to a discussion of indexicality and indexical fields more generally, for which we draw on ancient Greek plays. The chapter continues the discussion of the literary representation of language variation on the basis of English texts comprising dialect, and explains the important concept of enregisterment.

This chapter investigates the diction of the fragments attributed to Ennius’ Saturae by ancient sources and conjecturally by modern editors. While thirty or so transmitted lines naturally do not permit one to paint a conclusive picture of Ennius’ experiment, a little more can be said about the relationship between his Saturae and those of Lucilius, and ultimately about Ennius’ role in the introduction of personal poetry at Rome. Monologic and dialogic utterances and the mixture of metres (iambo-trochaic, hexameter, Sotadean) and registers (comic, informal, mock-epic) will be discussed, using Lucilius as a comparandum. Attention is paid to “early” features of language and style, with reference to Ennius’ diction in his epic and dramatic works.

Chapter 6 aims to help readers understand how variation and change affect language, so that translation practices and decisions are not based on personal biases and lay views about language but, rather, on a principled understanding of how language interacts with society. Another goal is to create awareness of the impact of social and use-related (contextual) factors on language so that translated texts respond to the requirements of the translation instructions. Other sociolinguistic notions reviewed in this chapter, along with their implications for translation are register, dialectal variation, socioeconomic variation, the nature of language change and variation, prestigious varieties vs. stigmatized varieties, and translating in multilingual societies. The discussion of register includes field of activity, medium and level of formality, as well as the implications for translation of not considering these within the context of the translation brief and translation norms. The connection between register selection and linguistic and translation competence is explained. Illustrative examples are used throughout the chapter.

Registers have proved to be powerful proxies for language variation and stylistic change in historical research. This chapter investigates five sub-registers within the domain of scientific discourse: philosophy (humanities), history (social sciences), life sciences and astronomy (natural sciences) and medical texts. With data from the Coruña Corpus of Scientific Writing and the corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts, we carry out a Multi-dimensional analysis of one million words of eighteenth-century scientific English, this leading to the scaling of the five sub-registers along two main dimensions of variation: ‘Involved/Interpersonal versus Narrative/Abstract’ and ‘Complex/Elaborate versus Non-elaborate’ discourse. The analysis confirms, first, that there are substantial differences among sub-registers in terms of the distribution and pervasiveness of distinctive linguistic features, and, second, that fluctuation in prose discourse is a general characteristic of Late Modern English scientific writing.

Chaucer’s works were written during the late fourteenth century, a period which saw considerable changes in the functions of the English language as it came to replace French and Latin as the languages of written record. As well as being an important source for the scholarly understanding of late Middle English, Chaucer’s works shed light on the status of English and its variety of registers and dialects, enabling scholars to gain a deeper awareness of the sociolinguistic connotations of its different forms and usages. The Canterbury Tales, with its array of pilgrims drawn from a variety of professions, social classes and geographical regions narrating a series of tales reflecting a wide range of genres, is a valuable source of evidence for historical pragmatics. This chapter shows the way in which Chaucer’s text offers insights into the conventions of social interaction, including forms of address, politeness and verbal aggression, and the use of discourse markers.

What counts as scientific writing has undergone massive changes over the centuries. Medical writing is a good representative of the register of scientific English, as it combines both theoretical concerns and practical applications. Ideas of health and sickness have been communicated in English written texts for over a thousand years from the Middle Ages to the present, with different traditions and layers of writing reflecting literacy developments and changing thought-styles. This chapter approaches the topic from the perspective of registers and genres, considering how texts are shaped by their functions and communicative purposes and various audiences. Some genres run throughout the history of English: remedy books were already extant in the Old English period. Another core genre, the case study, mirrors wider scientific developments in response to changes in styles of thinking: medieval scholasticism is gradually replaced by a growing interest in increasingly systematic empirical observation. The establishment of learned societies from the seventeenth century onwards gives rise to new genres like the experimental report, and concomitant disciplinary advances and technological developments in the following centuries gradually pave the way for modern evidence-based medicine. Today medical advances are communicated in digital publications to a worldwide readership.

This chapter provides an overview of the language of religious texts in Old, Middle and Early Modern English. We divide religious language into three spheres: Bible language, the language of prayers and the language of texts of religious instruction and discussion. We then discuss the language of religious texts against the background of the impact of the language of the vernacular Bible, particularly before 1500. We argue that, prior to the publication of the King James Bible, there was no specific ‘religious register’ in Old and Middle English, and even in Early Modern English a typically ‘religious style’ is found only as an additional layer in religious texts, which, by and large, follow the general standardising tendencies of the language at the time.

The vernacular historiographical tradition has evolved since the ninth century through merging core genres like annals, chronicles and historical narrative with empirical antiquarian treatises. It became clearly distinguished from religious and fictional writing only in post-medieval times, thus also adapting its concept of truth and its methods. While its earlier history is best described by way of a discourse tradition (Koch), a Wengerian community of practice emerges in the late modern period. Starting off as a purely narrative text-type, historiographical writing developed into a typical narrative–expository–argumentative conglomerate over the early and late modern periods. The heteroglossia so typical of historiography becomes less literary or dramatic and more evidential in nature, also evolving citation styles and footnotes. The evaluative and ideological potential of historiography is present from the start and realised by such means as group/person labels, evaluative lexis and superlatives.

The chapter deals with fidelity of content, specifically concepts and register. I first discuss the querelle (‘dispute’) between those who favoured word-for-word translations and those who believed in updating or beautifying the ancient text for their contemporary audience, as captured in the phrase ‘les belles infidèles’, an approach which involves the notion of ‘compensation’. I then ask how translators tackle key concepts in Virgil’s oeuvre, such as the untranslatable pietas of the Aeneid, along with specific challenges that arise from Virgil’s Latin texts, such as puns and the incomplete lines. I investigate how translators attempt to match the various registers of the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, then I consider the lens provided by the theoretical spectrum of domestication and foreignization, with examples including Aeneid translations in Italian, English, Romanian, German, Brazilian Portuguese and Russian, concluding with Chew’s uncategorizable Georgics.

In this chapter, I discuss the semantic evolution of Type II-CPs. As in Section 6.1, I first explore whether CPs that have morphologically and semantically related simple verbs pattern differently from those that have only morphologically related simple verbs (Section 7.1). In a next step, I turn to an in-depth analysis of those CPs containing the light verbs take (Section 7.1.1) and make (Section 7.1.2), respectively. Other factors that may impinge on the evolution of the CPs are the frequencies of the light verbs (discussed in Section 7.2) and the frequencies of the head nouns outside the CPs (being the topic of Section 7.3). The chapter is rounded off by a synthesis, which gives the most important findings and looks at the prediction strength that can be assigned to the simple verbs.

The use of the English language in many countries around the world greatly facilitates international communication. However, linguists have long pointed out that differences between established and emerging dialects of English may lead to miscommunication, especially because many users of the language may not be aware of many of these differences. Such issues may be particularly acute in high-stakes communicative endeavours such as persuading others to change their opinion or engage in a certain action. Psychologists have previously explored this construct mainly in experimental settings, whereas the present chapter uses a large database (‘corpus’) of natural language. The chapter thus provides an empirical, corpus-based analysis of the linguistic expression of persuasion across 21 international dialects (‘varieties’) of English from countries where English is widely used as a first or second language. Results indicate that there are substantial differences in the degree of overt expression of persuasion, with South Asian varieties of English indicating the lowest levels and (West) African varieties that greatest level of overt persuasion. The chapter concludes by discussing possible explanations of these patterns, implications for international communication as well as avenues for more detailed analyses of particular linguistic features involved in persuasion.

Chapter 8 provides a select introduction to register, genre, and style. The multidimensional analysis of style reveals a gradual drift from “literate” to “oral” over time. Attention is given here to the news and religious registers. The news register has seen the rise of the newspaper, leading to the introduction of new publication types, such as television, radio, and internet news, and new genres, such as editorials, obituaries, or weather forecasts. The religious register has a long history and has been remarkably stable. Two religious genres, prayers and sermons, have changed little in respect to function, structure, and linguistic characteristics. The function of recipes remains constant (i.e., instructions on how to prepare or do something), thus accounting for the imperative as the defining linguistic form, but we find differences in the content of recipes (medicinal vs. culinary), in the audience of recipes (e.g., the professional vs. the amateur cook), in the structural elements found in recipes (e.g., separation of the ingredients and the procedural steps), and in characteristic linguistic features (e.g., the introduction of null objects and telegraphic style).

The chapter investigates the factors motivating the choice of mood in Early Latin indirect questions. Under what conditions would the speaker use the indicative rather than the subjunctive? subjunctive? Some factors have already been identified, such as exclamatory-style phrases, the degree of detachment of the indirect question, the head verb’s meaning and its mood. The present study submits that variation in mood can be motivated by (literary) register and the social identity of speaker and addressee. The question is addressed first by building a complete corpus of indirect questions in Early Latin drama, with each form tagged with the relevant markers (metrical context, status of speaker and addressee, etc.); from this corpus of data, instances in which indicative is most definitely retained as a rule are excluded, and instances are examined in which either mood was in principle allowable, with a view to identifying patterns. Attention is paid to style, metre, character type, and genre. This methodology enables a sociolinguistic approach to the question and considerations about the developments in usage over time.

Handbooks of Latin usually draw attention to the presence of Greek loanwords from the very earliest stages of the Latin language. Greek loans feature in texts of all types, in a wide range of different spheres: words for flora and fauna, food and drink, aspects of trade, law and administration. The last major study of the Greek loanwords in Latin (Biville ) concentrated on the ways in which Greek sounds were represented in Latin, but did not have so much to say about the place of Greek loanwords within the vocabulary of Latin as a whole. This chapter gives a survey of Greek loanwords in Republican Latin, in both literary and epigraphic documents, with several different research questions in mind. Is it possible to unearth different chronological strata of loanwords? Can learned and vulgar loans be separated in Republican Latin, and how well integrated were Greek loans into Latin? Do phonological and semantic aspects of the words reveal anything about the source of the loans? Why do some Greek loanwords make it into the higher registers of Roman poetry (and sometimes prose) and others not, and how do these conventions come about?