Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

7.2 The social distribution of registers
Unit 7 Language and context: register
Section 2 Language variation

It is important to remember that each of us is able to control the appropriate register for a wide variety of contexts and that we each have, in addition, a passive familiarity with a range of others (e.g. of advertising, of income tax returns, of legal documents) that we are rarely called upon actively to use. But the range of registers we feel comfortable with (both actively and passively) may be affected by a number of factors, including our age, social background, education, gender, race and work status. Register positions, or can be used to position, the participants of a dialogue differently according to who those participants are. Thus the conventional distinction between register and dialect as that between language according to use and language according to user (see Unit 6, Language and place) seems to break down when considering how the relative social roles in any communication situation govern, or are governed by, the register adopted. The registers we become familiar with and learn how to manipulate in higher education, for example, might well be alienating to those who have not had access to them. (In fact, one of the purposes of any degree course is to familiarize the student with the special register of the discipline being studied. In the study of literature, students are generally required to write essays in a formal and sometimes impersonal register that includes the use of a specialized critical vocabulary and excludes words and phrases that they might be accustomed to using in other contexts.)

Although linguistic usages usually change with time, some historical periods, societies or professions try to preserve the ’purity’ of particular registers and maintain rigorous hierarchical distinctions between them. In the early twenty-first century it is possible to see how institutions such as the Church and the law have been relatively successful in maintaining their field-specific registers virtually unchanged across the centuries. Consider, for example, the following extract from a legal notice printed in the Glasgow Herald:

Notice is Hereby Given, That . . . the sheriff at Campbeltown, by Interlocutor dated 30th December, 1986, ordered all parties desirous to lodge Answers in the hands of the Sheriff Clerk at Castlehill, Campbeltown within 8 days after intimation, advertisement or service, and in the meantime, until the prayer of the Petition had been granted or refused, nominated Alistair White to be Provisional Liquidator of the said Company on his finding caution before extract.

From this example, we can see that the legal register is relatively opaque to the non-specialist. It is possible to offer different reasons why this should be so: one response might be to say that the legal profession maintains its register in order to intimidate the general public and force us to employ lawyers and solicitors to represent us in legal matters; another response might argue that such intricate and highly specific language is necessary in order to prevent potentially costly or crucial ambiguities. (See the discussion of archaism in Unit 5, Language and time.)

Leaving these questions aside, however, a brief analysis of some of the features of the legal register that are displayed in this text can serve as a model for the way we might analyse any register:

✵ Vocabulary: The most obvious feature of this text is its field-specific words and phrases, as seen in ’Provisional Liquidator’ and ’finding caution before extract’. There are also archaisms (’desirous’), and highly Latinate vocabulary (’Interlocutor’, ’intimation’, ’Petition’, ’nominated’, ’Provisional’, ’caution’, ’extract’).

✵ Syntax (sentence structure): Syntax makes an equal contribution to this register (and to its opacity): remarkably, the complete notice is made up of a single complex sentence with an array of subordinate clauses whose interrelations with each other are acutely difficult to follow.

✵ Typography (the appearance of the printing): Archaic typography is also a feature of this register, since it makes extensive use of capitalization for words that are no longer capitalized in modern English.

Institutions that seek to preserve their particular registers in this way and to isolate them from the linguistic changes taking place in the society surrounding them may be said to employ ’conservative’ registers. Compared with these, areas such as advertising, journalism, pop music, TV and texting have more ’open’ or ’liberal’ registers that change frequently, sometimes invent new words and phrases, and often borrow from each other and from the ’conservative’ registers that surround them.