Corpus Linguistics and Ling.

Theory 2023; 19(1): 7–21

Article

Susan Conrad*
Register in corpus linguistics: the role and
legacy of Douglas Biber
https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2022-0032
Received April 16, 2022; accepted November 3, 2022; published online November 25, 2022

Abstract: This article provides an overview of Douglas Biber’s work on register

and his central role in establishing register as both an empirical focus and a
theoretical construct in corpus linguistics. I identity four general phases of his
work. Each has a slightly different emphasis, but each also advances intertwined
threads of research that lead to an increased understanding of register variation.
Biber’s work has made major contributions to distinct areas within the study of
registers, from cross-linguistic speech-writing differences to English grammar, but
he has advanced the field especially by integrating the findings from different
areas. He has offered conceptualizations of register that account for findings from
multiple areas of study, and he continues to refine the conceptualization as he
engages in new lines of inquiry today.

Keywords: corpus linguistics; multi-dimensional analysis; register

1 Introduction
This article provides an overview of the pivotal role that Douglas Biber’s work has
played in the development of register as both a research focus within corpus
linguistics and a theoretical construct important for understanding human’s use
of language. Given his prodigious output on multiple fronts, condensing his
contributions into a short article is a daunting task, which could be organized in
numerous ways. I frame my commentary around four developmental phases that
I perceive from having been a periodic collaborator as well as reader of his work
over the past several decades. The phases correspond roughly to spans of years,
but the threads of work within them overlap and intertwine throughout the
phases. Over the years he has also worked with numerous collaborators, and I

*Corresponding author: Susan Conrad, Applied Linguistics, Portland State University, Box 751,
Portland, OR, USA, E-mail: conrads@pdx.edu
8 Conrad

regret if my highlighting of his work has the unfortunate consequence of

downplaying collaborators’ contributions.
Appreciating the importance of Biber’s contributions requires some knowl-
edge of the context in which they arose. Even for people who were active in
linguistics in the 1980s, it can be shocking to remember just how little impact was
felt from either register studies or corpus linguistics. Some research, especially in
sociolinguistics, emphasized linguistic variation related to the situation of use,
and the term register had even been used for situation-related varieties decades
earlier (Reid 1956). However, research was sporadic, using different approaches
and different terms. Crystal and Davy’s (1969) analysis of “styles,” for instance,
was largely consistent with Reid’s discussion of registers. Hymes’ (1974) SPEAKING
framework covered characteristics for analyzing speech situations but used only
the term “speech event” when referring to language varieties associated with
different situations. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) included register as part
of the theory (Halliday 1978: 11); however, SFL’s specified components of field,
tenor, and mode were not widely known or operationalized beyond the SFL
community. At the same time, especially in the United States where Biber worked,
sociolinguists became increasingly focused on variation tied to social and regional
identity, with a goal of identifying variables that did not correspond to meaning
differences or functional differences (e.g., Labov 1972). In short, a field of register
studies with a shared set of goals, definitions, or methodologies had never
coalesced.
Meanwhile, technological limitations severely constrained the scope of
research into language variation. It was not feasible to study numerous linguistic
features or numerous texts in one study when analyses had to be conducted by
hand. Even when corpora such as the LOB and London-Lund were developed in the
1970s, computer technology had yet to catch up with their potential for advancing
linguistic analysis. Biber recalls that even into the 1980s, corpora existed on tapes
that had to be loaded onto a mainframe computer by an operator and even simple
analyses like word frequency lists had to be run overnight (Friginal 2013: 143).
With most large-scale analyses being unfeasible, studies addressing the same
research issue sometimes had very different results as they analyzed different lin-
guistic features or different texts. This was the case for research into writing and
speaking, a growing area of work in the 1970s. Some studies found writing to have
more subordination than speech, but a few found the opposite or little difference;
studies of some grammatical features had inconsistent findings (Biber 1988: Ch. 3).
The linguistic differences, if any, between speech and writing became a “hotly
debated theoretical question” (Biber quoted in Friginal 2013: 143). After having
previously published on phonology, Biber turned to this question, seeing the new
potential for corpora and computational analysis to address it.
 Register in corpus linguistics 9

2 Phase 1: co-occurring linguistic features and

multiple registers (1984–1998)
Biber’s impact on register analysis began with his multi-dimensional analysis
(MDA) of spoken and written registers in English (Biber 1984, 1986, 1988). Biber
recognized major issues in previous research that led to the contradictory findings
about speech and writing: different individual features were studied, some fea-
tures were not clearly defined, and different specific varieties of speech or writing
were included. Biber recognized that the emerging power of computers could be
applied to study the features of speech and writing more comprehensively.
Consistent with his work throughout all periods, he integrated his technical
knowledge of computational analysis with his linguistic knowledge, creatively
using computational results to address the research issue.
Selecting and supplementing LOB and London-Lund texts, Biber designed a
corpus to represent 23 spoken and written registers. With computer algorithms, he
could operationalize linguistic features and consistently count them in texts.
Needing a more specific part-of-speech tagger than those currently available, Biber
developed his own. Using computers made it possible to study more linguistic
features in more texts than previously feasible. Biber’s 1988 MDA study covered
67 features in slightly under 1,000,000 words, which might sound limited today
but in the 1980s was immense. Even more innovative were the next steps in the
analysis. Using a factor analysis, Biber identified the co-occurrence patterns
among the linguistic features. He posited that such patterns would have
underlying functional bases, related to communicative purpose, production
circumstances, and other aspects of situational context. Based on previous
research and the use of the features in the texts in the study, Biber identified
these underlying functional correlates of the linguistic variation, interpreting
continua such as involved versus informational production, non-narrative
versus narrative concerns, and elaborated versus situation-dependent refer-
ence. The registers of speech and writing could now be compared on these
multiple dimensions of variation in English. Taken together, the characteristics
of the study – the use of a representative corpus, the number of registers and
linguistic features, the identification of linguistic co-occurrence patterns, the
functional interpretations of the linguistic patterns, the multiple comparisons
among registers – made the MDA approach radically different from previous
research.
Findings from the multi-dimensional analysis of English immediately revealed
the importance of register variation. Each register had a different profile on the
dimensions. Biber highlighted a message that he would repeat again and again
10 Conrad

over the years: Any general description of a language would hide important dif-
ferences about the language used in different situations, and any single perspective
on a register gave an incomplete representation of it. Other better-known corpus
work of the time, especially the COBUILD project (Sinclair 1991), was not covering
register variation.
During this phase, Biber also started work on a more specific thread of
research within the study of speech-writing differences: the nature of gram-
matical complexity. In the 1988 MDA of English, grammatical complexity was
represented by different features on different dimensions, with spoken registers
as well as written registers having grammatical complexity, but of different
kinds. More focused work was required to understand complexity more fully.
Biber’s (1992) study of discourse complexity used confirmatory factor analysis to
test the predictive adequacy of theoretically motivated models of complexity. The
findings showed that spoken registers were more unified in their complexity
profile, while written registers had more variation, suggesting speech may
constrain grammatical complexity in some ways. This study was one step on an
empirical path and associated theorizing that continue in Biber’s work
throughout the phases.
Though his first MDA study was of English, Biber was immediately interested in
investigating other languages, too, recognizing that the question of speech-writing
differences was fundamental to human language, not just to a single, specific lan-
guage. His next book, Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-Linguistic Compar-
ison (Biber 1995) included MD analyses of Nukulaelae Tuvaluan, Somali, and Korean
which had appeared in other articles and his students’ dissertations. The book’s
concluding chapter discusses the possibility of cross-linguistic universals of register
variation. Most intriguing was the finding of some systematic linguistic variation
related to real-time production circumstances for spoken texts versus time for careful
production with planning and editing for written texts.
Another thread of research Biber started in this phase concerned the his-
torical development of registers. His work on Somali examined the linguistic
consequences of literacy there, showing that the range of linguistic diversity
increased when written registers were added (Biber and Hared 1991). Studying
English from 1650 to the present, he found patterns that first reflected writers
taking advantage of the careful production circumstances of writing to produce
discourse that had more integration of information and more precise meanings,
but later written registers splitting into those for more specialized audiences and
those for more popular, general audiences (Biber 1995: Ch. 8; Biber and Finegan
1989a; Biber and Finegan 1997).
In this first phase of work, and at the beginning of the next phase, Biber sought
to reach an audience of traditional sociolinguists, trying to integrate register into
 Register in corpus linguistics 11

more general theories of language variation. Using evidence from MDA work and
other phonological, lexical, and grammatical studies, he and Finegan advanced
“an integrated theory” of register and social dialect variation (Finegan and Biber
1994), later called the “Register Axiom” (Finegan and Biber 2001). They argued that
the empirical evidence showed that variation due to the situation of use (in other
words, register variation) underlay much of what had been identified as social
dialect variation. The argument was criticized on many levels, a primary one being
emphasis given to writing (Bell 1995; Preston 2001). Biber’s interest in a wide range
of registers, function-related linguistic differences, and corpus techniques was not
well received by the traditional sociolinguistics community, where quantitative
studies usually focused on analyses of variants that had no impact on meaning,
data was typically gathered in sociolinguistic interviews, and spontaneous speech
was given primacy over all other language. As his research progressed, Biber
addressed traditional sociolinguistics audiences less and instead moved to audi-
ences in more general descriptive linguistics, applied linguistics, and especially
the developing field of corpus linguistics.
Early in the development of corpus linguistics, Biber started conducting
studies to help improve corpus design and research methods. In the early 1990s,
his was some of the rare work that addressed reliable sample sizes and repre-
sentativeness empirically (Biber 1990, 1993). In this first phase, too, and as a
contrast with traditional variationist studies, he began emphasizing “the unit of
analysis” for corpus studies – specifically, a feature or a text (Biber et al. 1998:
Methodology Box 8). This issue would gain even more importance over the years.

3 Phase 2: expansion of register analysis and its

audience (1999–2008)
In the second phase, work was expanding greatly in corpus linguistics overall.
Biber, independently and with a variety of colleagues, produced publications
and presentations that emphasized the importance of register for all linguistic
descriptions and established many strands of research that are now regularly
studied through a register lens.
One important publication during this phase was the Longman Grammar of
Spoken and Writing English (Biber et al. 1999). Although Quirk et al.’s (1985)
reference grammar had mentioned a few quantitative analyses of the Survey of
English Usage; the Longman Grammar was on an entirely different scale with
hundreds of corpus analyses throughout the book. Most of the analyses compared
grammar features’ use in conversation, fiction, newspapers, and academic writing.
12 Conrad

The book remains the only reference grammar where register comparisons are
integrated throughout. That it has been redesigned and newly published 20 years
later (Biber et al. 2021b) is a testament to its importance and usefulness. Yet when
Biber took on the project years earlier, few people could envision how it would
work. As told to me when I started working on the project in 1994, the then-head of
the Longman dictionary division thought their dictionary corpus ought to be useful
for a grammar, too, and asked Biber if he could take on the project. Although the
general concept of a corpus-based reference grammar was agreed upon, no one
could predict exactly how the concept would translate into a book. Again, Biber’s
computational expertise and research design insights were critical. Biber would
work out the analytical processes for the major corpus investigations, using both
automatic and interactive computer programs, and, with his students, write pro-
grams and conduct the corpus analyses. Meanwhile, he also coordinated the work
of the team of authors and wrote his own chapters. Further complicating the
project was the slow speed of computers as compared to today. I remember, for
example, running the first lexical bundle analysis. This analysis could be done
almost instantaneously today, but in the early 1990s, we left the program to run on
a Friday afternoon. We expected it would take some time over the weekend since
the analysis required moving through every text four words at a time, comparing
the sequence to all sequences already stored, and either adding to the count or
adding the new sequence to the dictionary. Only on Monday, when we arrived to
find the computer still running, did we realize we had forgotten to write a line in the
code to show what file was being processed. Doug and I stood there staring down at
the computer, debating whether to kill the program and potentially lose a week-
end’s worth of work or let it keep going in what could be an endless loop. (Luckily,
we decided to let it run and it finished before the end of the day.) Overall, the size,
complexity, and initial ambiguity of the project would have overwhelmed many
researchers. Randolph Quirk’s comment in the forward was no exaggeration: “The
co-authors were lucky in being led by a man of such determination, vision, energy,
and a fine track record in corpus theory and computational practice.”
Besides the new reference grammar, strands of work that had begun previ-
ously expanded in this phase. Biber continued to research grammatical complexity
(Biber 2003). Multi-dimensional analysis was also becoming more widely known,
with a collection highlighting the variety of domains it had been applied to (Conrad
and Biber 2001) along with more studies of other languages (e.g., Spanish, Biber
et al. 2006) and specialized domains (e.g., outsourced call centers, Friginal 2008).
Many MDA studies found that the expression of stance figured prominently in
a dimension, and the study of stance itself was also an interest of Biber’s. Begun in
the first phase (e.g., Biber and Finegan 1989b), his study of stance diversified in this
second phase. The Longman Grammar highlighted how certain grammatical
 Register in corpus linguistics 13

features, such as that-clause complements to adjectives, almost always fulfill

stance-related functions. It also included a chapter focused solely on the gram-
matical marking of stance, including differences among registers (Biber et al. 1999:
Ch. 12). Biber also investigated stance in more specific domains, such as university
registers (Biber 2006: Ch. 5), and with respect to historical change (Biber 2004).
In this phase Biber integrated more lexical work into his investigation of
registers. After first appearing in the reference grammar, work on lexical bundles
was refined and expanded to university speech and writing (Biber et al. 2004a;
Biber and Barbieri 2007) and Spanish (Tracy-Ventura et al. 2007). Biber and
colleagues also refined the technique of using changes in vocabulary to auto-
matically identify topically coherent chunks of discourse – Vocabulary-based
Discourse Units – which could then be analyzed with MDA or other approaches
(Biber et al. 2004b). Thus, differences between registers, and the fundamental
question of differences between speech and writing, gained more empirical
evidence from a lexical perspective in addition to the continuing grammar work.
Although corpus linguistics was growing in this phase, it – and especially
quantitative analysis – was still unknown or viewed suspiciously by many
people. Biber and Conrad’s (2001) “Quantitative corpus research – Much more
than bean counting” was a short piece in TESOL Quarterly reflective of this time.
The title speaks for itself, but the piece also speaks to another contribution of
Biber: reaching out to audiences interested in teaching, to show them that reg-
ister analysis had important implications for their work. In this phase, in addition
to the reference grammar, Biber’s work on university spoken and written registers
was especially important for those interested in academic contexts (e.g., Biber
et al. 2002; Biber 2006).
By the early 2000s, it was also clear that the internet and electronic registers
were presenting some challenges for studying register. Biber turned his attention
to the emerging web registers not simply to describe the new registers but also to
understand what they meant for the concept of register. Most traditional regis-
ters, such as academic prose or newspapers, were treated as though they had
fairly consistent situational characteristics. They often included subregisters, but
those, too, were usually named categories expected to have certain topics and
purposes (e.g., editorials or travel sections within newspapers). On the other
hand, some new electronic registers, such as blogs, were named simply for their
virtual place on the internet and could have any content or purpose. These new
registers required detailed empirical analysis not just for their linguistic char-
acteristics but also for their situational characteristics. In this phase, Biber did
initial studies of web registers (e.g., Biber and Kurjian 2007), starting a thread
of work that would, in later phases, lead to important developments in the
conceptualization of register.
14 Conrad

4 Phase 3: a definition of register and a deepening

of the field (2009–2016)
At this point, the importance of register variation had become established empiri-
cally, but the construct remained vague. For years scholars had been trying to sort
through how the terms were used (e.g., Lee 2001). Genre and register, especially, but
also style, were used in confusing, inconsistent ways. The inconsistencies occurred
not just across the field but even in individual author’s work, including Biber’s.
A major development in the third phase was an explicit definition of register,
which was published in Register, Genre and Style (Biber and Conrad 2009).
Although we had discussed register for years, reaching a definition involved
many long phone calls and failed attempts. We sought first to distinguish register
and genre as different kinds of texts, which was the typical thinking of the day.
However, each attempt at a definition proved problematic when we tried it with
concrete examples. Sometimes, a few examples would work, and we would have
a working definition for the time being, only to think of problems later. This
process went on so long I dreaded hearing my telephone ring. In those days, my
office phone distinguished off-campus calls from on-campus calls by giving a
double ring. Hearing the double ring in the afternoon after a long morning’s
discussion of a definition, I would stare at the phone in dismay: no doubt Doug
had already found another problem with our current attempt and was ready to try
a new definition. I felt ready to ban the term register from any future study, but he
was still calmly, persistently working on the problem. Eventually, he suggested
we were failing because we were thinking about register and genre in the wrong
way: register was not a type of text that was distinctly different from a genre, but
rather a perspective on linguistic variation, an approach to analysis. Once said,
this seemed obvious, but it came only with Doug’s unwavering commitment to
work through the problem and thereby advance the field of register studies.
Biber and Conrad (2009/2019) define the register approach as a perspective on
linguistic variation that analyzes frequent, pervasive linguistic features in texts,
tying them to their functions for the situational context. Categories of texts, such as
academic prose and newspaper editorials, can be studied as registers (analyzing
pervasive linguistic features) or as genres (analyzing different characteristics, such
as rare but characteristic expressions and rhetorical organization). With the defi-
nition of register analysis, an updated framework for situational characteristics,
and an outline of the register analysis process, the book facilitated more studies of
register variation. However, the work was not an endpoint. Biber and colleagues
went on to advance the conceptualization of register and the description of
 Register in corpus linguistics 15

situational characteristics, especially as work on web registers increased in the

next developmental phases.
During this third phase, Biber continued to publish about research design in
corpus studies, further explaining the importance of the unit of analysis (Biber and
Jones 2009) and differentiating between variationist and text linguistic approaches
to studying language use (e.g., Biber 2012). Through empirical evidence, Biber
shows that the variationist approach hides the extent of register variation. Register
variation is more fully represented with the text linguistic approach, which char-
acterizes texts, not the behavior of individual linguistic features. His discussion is
not simply a criticism of many traditional sociolinguistic studies; the variationist
approach is also used in many grammar studies in corpus linguistics.
During this phase, Biber’s work on grammatical complexity also intensified.
It highlighted the difference between the compressed features and phrasal
complexity typical of informational writing, especially academic writing, versus
the clausal complexity typical of speech, especially conversation. In particular,
two articles challenged the traditional view of academic writing as complex in
clause structure and expressing explicit meaning (Biber and Gray 2010; Biber
et al. 2011). In addition to the results of MD analyses and some features in the
Longman Grammar, these articles were forerunners of what became known in the
next phase as the Register-Functional approach to grammatical complexity. At
this point, what was clear was that the work was shaking up some traditional
thought. The 2011 article in TESOL Quarterly had the provocative title “Should we
use characteristics of conversation to measure grammatical complexity in L2
writing development?” Again Biber was arguing to TESOL professionals that the
findings from register analysis were important for them.
Multi-dimensional analysis work continued to flourish in this phase. The
year 2013 was the 25th anniversary of Biber’s first MDA book, and a special issue
of Corpora (Friginal 2013) and an edited volume (Berber-Sardinha and Veirano-
Pinto 2014) celebrated the diversity of current MDA research. Biber (2014)
summarized the evidence for cross-linguistic universals of register variation,
adding to the four languages in his 1995 book with reference to MDA studies of
Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Taiwanese, Czech, Bagdani, and many special-
ized domains of English. In particular, there was commonality in a dimension
that had phrasal features versus clausal features, pronouns, and colloquial
features, with a corresponding function of an informational focus versus a
personal/involved focus. Continuing the thread of work examining registers on
the web, Biber and colleagues also added a new aspect to MDA studies: having
readers code situational characteristics in texts so that types of texts could be
identified empirically (e.g., Biber and Egbert 2016).
16 Conrad

5 Phase 4: register analysis as an accepted and

dynamic field of study (2017 to the present)
In the fourth, current phase, register has become still more established as a field
of study; empirical investigations of registers have diversified greatly; and,
within corpus linguistics, register as a theoretical construct has continued to be
refined. Wider recognition of the importance of register was clear with the launch
of the journal Register Studies in 2019. Research is now conducted by scholars
with diverse interests using diverse methodologies, as in this journal issue. A
recent edited volume (Biber and Seoane 2021) also includes corpus-based register
variation studies with diverse theoretical frameworks, such as information the-
ory, systemic functional linguistics, and probabilistic grammar. A book focused
on MDA methodology also marked the established importance of that technique
(Berber-Sardinha and Veirano-Pinto 2019). In this phase, Biber’s legacy – register
as a field with empirical and theoretical importance – is firmly established. At the
same time, Biber continues to refine, shape, and expand the field.
Several threads of Biber’s work from previous phases have already been
consolidated and advanced in book form during this phase. For corpus design,
Egbert et al. (2022) emphasize how to increase and evaluate representativeness,
which is crucial for studying registers; the book fleshes out ideas Biber began
presenting over 35 years. Advancing ideas about grammatical complexity, Biber
et al. (2022) present the Register-Functional (RF) approach, which argues we need
to use three parameters to understand grammatical complexity: structure types,
syntactic functions, and functional patterns. The approach grew out of the findings
from all phases reviewed above and from numerous types of studies – MDA, the
Grammar of Spoken and Written English, diachronic studies, other text linguistic
studies and, most recently, studies of writing development in children and second
language students. With its combination of previously published work and new
synthesis of it, the book exemplifies the accretive nature of Biber’s contributions to
register analysis: work in each phase has answered some questions and led to
others, which are then pursued, and finally synthesized into a theoretical approach
that accounts for the empirical findings.
During this phase, registers on the searchable web have been covered in a
book (Biber and Egbert 2018) and additional articles (e.g., Biber et al. 2020). As
foreshadowed in previous phases, this work has important implications for the
analytical framework for register studies. The diversity in situational characteris-
tics within individual web registers was stimulus to reconsider the approach to
situational characteristics for all registers. The authors argue for analyzing situa-
tional characteristics in a continuous space rather than as categorical descriptions.
 Register in corpus linguistics 17

The web register studies are innovative in using manual coding and statistical
analysis of situational characteristics, a technique that can be applied to studying
other registers. Again the work highlights Biber’s commitment to accounting for
empirical evidence and to trying new techniques to solve research questions.
Future years are sure to see the impact this work has on studying register variation
and defining the construct of register.
Biber and colleagues have also started new areas of work in this phase. A
notable one concerns the thorny issue of conversational discourse. Although
conversation has long been acknowledged as having chunks with different
purposes and topics, this phenomenon tended to be addressed in intensive
studies of turns, as in conversation analysis, and not systematically addressed in
most corpus studies. Using some techniques from the web register studies, Biber
et al. (2021a) and Egbert et al. (2021) present a system for the functional seg-
menting of conversation – an advancement that will surely lead to understanding
the situational and linguistic variation in conversation more fully.

6 Conclusion
The phases of Biber’s work constitute a developmental arc that has resulted in
register gaining empirical and theoretical status in studies of language use. Other
scholars have worked on register variation, but none have so consistently argued
its importance, produced so much empirical evidence, or worked so persistently
to improve both research methods and the conceptualization of register. Some
scholars work in just one area, focusing for instance on cross-linguistic studies,
diachronic studies, academic registers, or methodological improvements, but
Biber has been prolific in numerous areas. Although each area is interesting on
its own, he saw each contributing empirical evidence to the larger picture of how
human language varies based on situations of use.
Biber’s contribution to register studies has also extended to being exceed-
ingly generous with his time and expertise in mentoring the next generation.
Many of his publications are collaborations with his students. Look at current
professionals whose work explores or applies register variation, and you will find
a remarkable number of his former students, whether university faculty, lan-
guage teachers, journal editors, book authors, principal investigators on major
grants, or computer programmers. The specific skills and opportunities offered
by his mentoring are invaluable. Yet, from my perspective almost 30 years after
having been his graduate student, an even greater, longer-lasting impact of his
mentoring actually comes from something else: experiencing his general attitude
toward research and problem-solving. He makes clear through his own actions
18 Conrad

that you can commit to a challenging research goal without knowing exactly how
you are going to accomplish it all and even realizing that you probably don’t
already know everything you will need to know. In other words, the appropriate
response to an important theoretical or practical problem that intrigues you is
to dive in and keep figuring out ways to work on it.
Not just his students but also international collaborators, visitors to Northern
Arizona University’s corpus linguistics lab, and even conference attendees who
have talked with him have benefitted from Doug sharing his expertise and his
enthusiasm for research. I have lost track of the number of people who have
spoken or emailed with him and later told me they didn’t expect someone so
smart and well-known to be so nice and helpful. In sum, Douglas Biber’s legacy
extends not just throughout the literature about register, but throughout the
human community as well.

Acknowledgments: I am grateful to the guest editors for their helpful comments on

drafts of this article.

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