Marianna Gracheva: Register evolution as cultural constructs: The case of blogs

The Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies would like to invite you to the following talk in our DH Colloquium:

Marianna Gracheva: »Register evolution as cultural constructs: The case of blogs«

Abstract

This talk will present an ongoing project and discuss the 1) goal of studying evolution of registers as culturally recognized text varieties and the recent findings that motivate this goal; 2) preliminary results of a pilot study of blogs as a relatively new register but characterized by a rapidly evolving technlogical landscape (Miller & Shepherd, 2009), whose life cycle—from the late 90s to the present day—is available for study.

In text-linguistics, registers are culturally recognized text varieties, associated with the situation of use. Register research has now documented the existence of functional links between the situational characteristics of individual texts within registers and linguistic variation among those texts (Biber & Egbert, 2023; Egbert et al., 2024). These findings raise new questions about the evolution of registers as cultural constructs. First, as situations evolve, language must reflect language users’ adaptations to new situations. Second, the degree of variation among texts at different points of a register’s existence could reflect language users’ degrees of convergence (or lack thereof) on communicative and linguistic register norms.

We analyze a new corpus of blogs from Blogspot.com spanning the years 1999–2023 (Ntexts = 2,452; Ntokens = ~4,000,000; approx. 100 texts/year).

Our research questions are:
What linguistic features of blogs have become more or less frequent over time?
Have the linguistic features of blogs become more or less stable over time?
To address RQ1, we compute rates of occurrence for 150 lexico-grammatical features (Biber, 1988) and employ corresponding feature analysis (Egbert, 2024) to examine correlations between language use and time. The analysis reveals that features associated with oral/interactive communication and present orientation have increased over time, while features associated with information density, abstractedness, and past time references have decreased. To address RQ2, we examine change in the degree of linguistic variation among texts over time, exploring the use ofcoefficients of variation, borrowed from psycholinguistics (Segalowitz & Segalowitz, 1993), for this question.The results seem toshow a decline in variability in anumber of linguistic features, pointing to increased linguistic stability.The talk concludes by discussing the implications of this research for blogs, specifically, and for diachronic and synchronic register studies, generally.

Further information and other upcoming talks in the Colloquium can be found here.