Linguistic patterns of textual organization across registers

Workshop at the 48th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS 2026) | Trier, Germany | 24–27 February 2026

Description

Register refers to linguistic patterns associated with particular situational contexts (Seoane & Biber, 2021, p. 2) where the linguistic patterns are clusters of features having a greater-than random likelihood to co-occur. In register studies, the focus has traditionally been on the aggregative analysis of lexico-grammatical features in entire texts, thus neglecting the dynamic unfolding of situations – linked by the above definition to register – over time. However, the situational characterisation of a text as unfolding over time should not only allow predictions about characteristic linguistic features but also when these features can be expected to occur in the unfolding text. In linguistics, this sequential character has been mainly linked to genre, defined as a goal-oriented activity enacting social practices of a culture that exhibits a recurring structure in the form of stages or moves (Swales, 1990, Martin & Rose, 2008). These approaches, however, tend to neglect the well-documented linguistic variation across registers, as well as recent progress in large language models (LLM), which have been applied to text structure segmentation (e.g. Braud et al., 2023).

This workshop aims to bring together research from all three fields – register, genre, and computational linguistics – to explore the interface between them and the possibility of integrating the temporal dynamics of textual organisation with the situational patterning reflected in register.

We invite theoretical and empirical submissions that cover the cross-section of register studies with linguistic approaches such as rhetorical structure theory, genre/move analysis, interactional linguistics and computational approaches to discourse structure as well as quantitative linguistics and LLM research.

Submissions

Please submit your abstract by e-mail to dgfs2026-quantor@collocations.de. Abstracts should not exceed 1 page (DIN A4, 2.5 cm margins, 12 pt font, 1.5 line spacing). References should follow the APA7 citation style. Presentations will be 20 minutes with 10 minutes for discussion.

Note that at DGfS conferences, delegates are expected to attend a single workshop during the entire conference and are not allowed to present their work at multiple workshops (but they may be listed as co-authors of other talks at the conference).

Important dates

17 Aug 2025	Deadline for abstract submission
15 Sep 2025	Notification of acceptance
24–27 Feb 2026	Conference dates

Organisation

Stephanie Evert, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg
Stella Neumann, RWTH Aachen University
Gerold Schneider, University of Zürich

Contact: dgfs2026-quantor@collocations.de

References

Braud, C., Liu, Y. J., Metheniti, E., Muller, P., Rivière, L., Rutherford, A., & Zeldes, A. 2023. The DISRPT 2023 shared task on elementary discourse unit segmentation, connective detection, and relation classification. In Proceedings of the 3rd Shared Task on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2023), 1–21. Toronto, Canada.

Martin, J. R. & Rose, D. 2008. Genre relations: Mapping culture. Equinox.

Seoane, E. & Biber, D. 2021. A corpus-based approach to register variation. In E. Seoane & D. Biber (Eds.), Corpus-based approaches to register variation, 2–17. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Swales, J. M. 1990. Genre Analysis. English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: CUP.