B03
Register knowledge in Ancient Egypt

Project B03 investigates register emergence and register knowledge in Ancient Egyptian, a language with great diachronic and synchronic variation, for which neither the differentiation between chronolects and registers nor the emergence of registers have been systematically studied. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches will be adopted, which complement one another with respect to revealing promising variables for register identification. The first approach is corpus-based and tackles the question from a quantitative perspective, testing particular morphosyntactic variables to establish register. The second, qualitative approach will investigate cases of purposeful variation and switching of registers in single texts as well as in series of texts which have supposedly either been written by the same person or form a coherent textual body, such as the wall inscriptions within one tomb.