Engineering registers in the 21st century

Following an exploration of engineering programmes in higher education, and a review of literature on engineering registers, genres and disciplines, this paper asks if there is a register for engineering. Word frequencies, n-grams and frequent n-grams in context were analysed in a 7.3 million word corpus created from four sections (Introduction, Materials & Methods, Results & Discussion, Conclusion) of over 1000 articles in civil, electrical and mechanical engineering. From the perspective of systemic functional linguistics, this reveals how engineering is construed through language that reflects the social context of high impact, open access, multi-modal, 21st century, international journal article publication, with multiple author roles, and prescribed genres, where reviewers focus on problem solving and facts, rather than persuasive claims.