_{Sociolinguistics}

Grammatical Markers

Registers show grammatical variation. That is, they differ in their use of certain grammatical structures. In English for example, different registers show high variability in the occurrence of sentence-final prepositions:

That’s the teacher I was telling you about vs. That’s the teacher about whom I was telling you.

Studies into register variation have shown that there is usually a characteristic difference between spoken and written registers concerning the use of sentence-final prepositions:

An example: some syntactic features characteristic of legalese (the register of the legal profession):

(Information taken and adapted from Finegan, 2004)

(See also Semantic Markers for more information on the typical features of legalese).