The Genres Speak; Using Large Corpora to Profile Generic Registers

Here's the abstract:

This article shows how useful the evidence retrievable from large and easily available corpora can be in identifying the distinguishing lexical and phrasal characteristics of generic registers. Here attention is directed toward the lexical register of two genres of “disposable writing”: news writing (in Part I) and romance fiction (in Part II, where it is contrasted with its near neighbour, “sexy” fiction). But use of corpus evidence on register profiling is still at a relatively early stage, so that a number of large topics merit further discussion here: What words and phrases are characteristic of individual genres and how much more common are they in the genres than in other writings? Are there national differences in the “style” of genres? What is the functional basis or rationale for these genre “styles”? These questions are explored along the way to proposing that registers be viewed as genres’ fashions of speaking. The study also uncovers one distinctive aspect of romance writing not widely recognised, namely its extremely heavy and varied use of inquit tags.