Corpus Analysis and Register Variation: A Field in Need of an Update

This study reviews the development of research on register variation (RV) over the last century to the present, emphasizing the influence of corpus analyses on its greatest advances and also on its major weaknesses and ambiguities. In search of practical and useful methods to analyse language registers, in the second part of the paper, the authors sketch a different approach to RV which has been used over the last ten years in language teaching at university level and professional communication training.