Registerial cartography: Context-based mapping of text types and their rhetorical-relational organization

2014 by Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen. This paper is concerned with one of the three types of variation inherent in language-viz. register variation, or variation in meaning according to context of use. It reports on a long-term research programme designed to map the registers that collectively make up a language using one parameter within the context of use as the starting point-the field of activity characteristic the context in which a text of a given register unfolds. I present a typology/topology of fields of activity, and go on to show how different types of activity favour different logico-semantic relations in the global organization of texts instantiating different registers. I then also illustrate registerial variation in the lexicogrammatical realization of logico-semantic relations. The part of the long-term research I focus on here is thus concerned with registerial variation relating to the chain of realizations from context (field of activity) to semantics (logico-semantic relations), and from semantics (logico-semantic relations) to lexicogrammatical realizations (with particular attention to congruence, i.e. congruent vs. incongruent realizations). At the end of the paper, I suggest that registerial cartography is an integral part of the development of appliable linguistics, a synthesis approach to language transcending the thesis and antithesis pair of theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics.