Re: "Register" a grammatical term

Ray Brown wrote:

>>>Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> wrote:
>>>
>>>Could someone with access to Trask's and Crystal's
>>>lingyuistic dictionaries be so kind to look up how
>>>they define "register" as a grammatical term?
>>>
>>>Thanks,
>>
>>Crystal:
>>(1) A term used in phonetics to refer to the voice quality produced
>
>[etc. snipped]
>
>Charlie has given you in full the two definitions given by Crystal. Neither
>of them are, as you will have read, are uses as _grammatical_ terms.
>
The 2nd def. given by Crystal in Charlie's post accords with my knowledge
and use of the term; IIRC it's been in use since at least the 70s, when
people like Derek Bickerton began looking seriously at pidgins/creoles (and
stigmatized dialects like AAVE) and the associated bi- or poly-dialectism.
For example, those Jamaicans (and others Caribbean islanders) who can switch
from pure local creole to the Queen's English (and points in between) at the
drop of a hat-- and then realized that, well, we all do something like that
when the occasion demands.

Perhaps "grammatical term" should be interpreted as "term used by linguists"
:-))))))

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