George Kodie Frimpong

The interface between register and dialectal variation has received little scholarly attention. Using parallel corpus data (ICE Ghana and ICE Great Britain) I intend to investigate aspects of the language of eight registers/genres with the hope of uncovering what functional impetus influences grammatical choices across native and non-native varieties of English. The central argument of register theory is that "speakers using the same register are doing similar communicative tasks; therefore in most basic respects the characteristic language features used in a given situation are similar across speakers from different dialects" (Biber & Conrad 2009: 12). Using the two frameworks of register theory by Biber & Conrad (2009) and Halliday & Matthiessen (2004); the dynamic model of Schneider (2003; 2007) and the ideational metafunction of systemic functional linguistics, I explore the functional motivation behind the distribution of sentence and clause patterns; the structure of the noun phrase and transitivity patterns across the registers.