Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

05.06. Olga Buchmüller (HU Berlin): Registers in Russian: a multidimensional study [hybrid]

Perhaps one of the most important contributions to quantitative register research was made by Douglas Biber in 1988. This multidimensional analysis (MDA) identified five distinctive registers in English, based on the distribution and co-occurrence of 64 linguistic features. After decades of register research, in 2020 the field was further enriched by an MDA of Czech (Cvrček et al., 2020). This study applied a comprehensive feature set that encompassed the characteristics of the Slavic language, resulting in eight dimensions of linguistic variation.

In my talk, I will present a comprehensive MDA of a Russian corpus using an extended feature set reflecting the Russian language. This analysis resulted in five interpretable dimensions, with the distinction between spontaneous and prepared communication and between informative and elaborated communication forming the first two dimensions. The results suggest that these distinctions are particularly pronounced in Russian.

Biber, D. (1991). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge University Press.

Cvrček, V., Z. Laubeová, D. Lukeš, P. Poukarová, A. Řehořková, and A. J. Zasina. (2020). Registry v češtině. Praha: NLN.