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SUMMARY:Marianna Gracheva: Register evolution as cultural constructs: 
 The case of blogs
UID:95ea-b22c-c22f-2493@www.dhss.phil.fau.eu
DESCRIPTION:The Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies wo
 uld like to invite you to the following talk in our DH Colloquium: Mar
 ianna Gracheva: »Register evolution as cultural constructs: The case 
 of blogs« Abstract This talk will present an ongoing project and disc
 uss the 1) goal of studying evolution of registers as culturally recog
 nized 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 landscap
 e (Miller & Shepherd\, 2009)\, whose life cycle—from the late 90s to
  the present day—is available for study. In text-linguistics\, regis
 ters are culturally recognized text varieties\, associated with the si
 tuation 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 (Bi
 ber & Egbert\, 2023\; Egbert et al.\, 2024). These findings raise new 
 questions about the evolution of registers as cultural constructs. Fir
 st\, as situations evolve\, language must reflect language users’ ad
 aptations to new situations. Second\, the degree of variation among te
 xts at different points of a register’s existence could reflect lang
 uage users’ degrees of convergence (or lack thereof) on communicativ
 e and linguistic register norms. We analyze a new corpus of blogs from
  Blogspot.com spanning the years 1999–2023 (Ntexts = 2\,452\; Ntoken
 s = ~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 s
 table over time? To address RQ1\, we compute rates of occurrence for 1
 50 lexico-grammatical features (Biber\, 1988) and employ corresponding
  feature analysis (Egbert\, 2024) to examine correlations between lang
 uage use and time. The analysis reveals that features associated w
DTSTART:20250204T181500Z
DTEND:20250204T194500Z
LOCATION:Werner-von-Siemens-Straße 61 (Room 3.17)\, 91052 Erlangen
DTSTAMP:20260413T041606Z
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