Re: "Register" a grammatical term

That was my thought, that "grammatical" is being (mis)used (overly)
broadly.  There are grammatical aspects of register, but its not a
grammatical phenomenon...



On 8/18/08, ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...> wrote:
> 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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Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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