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My answer was NOT in relation to registers, but to social and sexolectal variation. Cécile Bauvois Assistante Service des Sciences du langage "Angus B. Grieve-Smith" a écrit : > I'd like to thank everyone who responded to my request for > information. The bottom line is that no one seems to have duplicated > Biber's methodology exactly. > > Jean-Marc Dewaele has an article coming out which contains a > mild critique of Biber, which I am going to read: (2001) Une > distinction mesurable: corpus oraux et écrits sur le continuum de la > deixis, Journal of French Language Studies, 11, 179-199. > > Cecile Bauvois just finished her dissertation where she > compared registers, but did not use Biber's methodology because it is > not appropriate for testing a strong hypothesis. > > Aidan Coveney compares registers in his article: 'Vestiges of > NOUS & the 1st person plural verb in informal spoken French', Language > Sciences, vol. 22, 2000. > > Dulcie Engel performed a study of past tense variation in > newspaper articles for her 1990 book Tense and Text (Routledge, London, > New York). > > Kate Beeching is studying the distribution of forms like hein > and quoi based on social variables. > > Sylviane Granger referred me to the work of Bronckart, who has > studied variation in discourse, but not with a formal corpus > methodology. Bronckart J.-P. Le fonctionnement des discours, Delachaux > & Niestlé, Lausanne, 1985. > > A number of people mentioned the formal variationist methodology > (i.e. Sankoff's VARBRUL and related analyses) as being similar to > Biber's work. It seems like both use factor analysis to study > variation, but the primary difference is that Biber's work focuses on > register and genre, while VARBRUL usually looks at other variables such > as age, class and gender. > > I found it interesting that while everyone seems to find both > Biber's and the VARBRUL methodologies useful in concept, no one seems to > be satisfied with either of them; almost everyone that wrote to me > mentioned that they rejected one or the other methodology for a good > reason. > > I'm specifically interested in differences between spoken and > written French, and the related dimensions of standard/non-standard, > formal/informal, conversational/recorded and prestigious/non- > prestigious. For investigating those, I think that Biber's methodology > comes as close as anything else I've seen, but as I said before, it has > problems. > > I want to thank everyone again for giving me some great reading > material. Please let me know if you hear of anything else in this area. > > -- > -Angus B. Grieve-Smith > Linguistics Department > University of New Mexico > [log in to unmask]