How stable are multivariate findings about register variation across varieties of English? On the replicability of Geometric Multivariate Analysis

Abstract Registers reflect the constraints of systematically recurring situational contexts and are therefore embedded in the lingua-culture in which these situations occur. Consequently, when a language – such as English – is used in widely differing cultural contexts, the question arises whether registers in different varieties of the language might not actually reflect cultural differences between similar types of situations. Previous studies have shown that varieties of English fall into different clusters and that informal spoken texts in particular reflect differences between the varieties. With a focus on register variation across varieties of English, Neumann & Evert (2021) suggest that register-related patterns of variation are much more pronounced than differences between varieties. However, they also observe divergence between texts in the same register from different varieties. The generality of both findings is limited, though, because their analysis was based on only three varieties of English. Our paper aims at exploring these questions more thoroughly by drawing on a larger set of nine components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) preprocessed for comparability (Lehmann & Schneider 2012) and by focusing the interpretation on registers that are expected to be more strongly affected by cultural differences. To this end, we extract the same set of 41 lexico-grammatical features from the ICE components as Neumann & Evert (2021), building on the corpus queries made available in their online supplement. In three steps, we first reproduce the geometric multivariate analysis (GMA) of Neumann & Evert (2021) and then replicate it in two increasingly different approaches. These methodological variations allow us to explore to what extent the results of Neumann & Evert (2021) depended on their specific choice of three ICE components and how stable the results of the exploratory analysis with the chosen multivariate approach are.