Prototypicality of Register Texts: The Language and Communicative Situation of Central and Peripheral Exemplars

The study examines lexico-grammatical variation among English texts within registers, empirically testing the claim that linguistic variation among texts is attributable to the situation of use. To this end, the study relies on prototype theory and identifies linguistically central texts, that is, representative of the register central trend, and peripheral texts that deviate linguistically from the central tendency. The study then identifies the basis for this linguistic variation. The findings show that register texts vary in their prototypicality, and linguistic variation among texts is explained in functional terms through communicative differences among texts. The identified patterns of functional correspondence between linguistic and communicative variation are demonstrated consistently in four registers.