CRC 1412/2: Register: Language-Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation

The CRC 1412 Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation investigates aspects of the register knowledge of the speakers of a language. Competent speakers can adapt their linguistic behavior on every linguistic level in response to the current situation: Situational and functional parameters such as the purpose of an utterance, the relationship between speaker and hearer, or the mode (among many others) are responsible for lexical choices such as the one between mom and mother, the proportion of metaphors, the complexity of sentences, the way a text is organized, or even the proportion of schwa endings in German 1st person singular verbs. In multilingual situations, situational parameters often influence the choice of language. We are thus concerned with intraindividual linguistic variation. In Phase I of CRC Register, we used and expanded corpus-linguistic and experimental methods to carefully investigate situational and functional parameters and their influence on specific linguistic parameters. We found register effects to be pervasive but saw interesting differences between the linguistic levels. Building on the many and fascinating findings from Phase I, the focus of Phase II is on the integration of such register variation in models of grammar, language acquisition, language processing, and language change. Some register knowledge is acquired early—even relatively young children adapt their linguistic behavior to different situations—but at the same time, register knowledge changes and expands over the entire lifespan (especially, but not only, in the case of formal registers). In order to be able to behave register-appropriately themselves and to understand register-appropriate behavior in others, speakers must, on the one hand, know which alternatives (mom/mother, around 8 o’clock/7:49 am, ich lache/ich lach ‚I laugh‘, etc.) are available and, on the other, understand which situational and functional parameters favor which alternative. Both aspects can change over time, such that register must also be recognized as an essential factor in language change. In sum, the CRC aims to model aspects of linguistic register knowledge, together with grammatical knowledge, on a range of phenomena on all linguistic levels, and in diverse languages and language stages. To that end, we will integrate verbal models, formal models, and statistical models.