Colloquium

Register and the function puzzle: Why register competence is not the whole story

Nico Lehmann (A06) – Register and the function puzzle: Why register competence is not the whole story

In this talk, I review different perspectives on register from the literature and relate them to the CRC’s goal to investigate register knowledge. The main issue is that not all perspectives on register are compatible with the notion of speaker choice, from which follows that register variation is not all about register knowledge. The make-up of registers includes at least two types of intra-individual variation: selections between variants and unrelated “functional” features (Biber 2019). While Biber (Gray 2013) calls the first type non-functional, I claim that both variations are inherently functional in nature. For this purpose, I will address the question of what we mean by function on different levels.