another piece of evidence that the world is made of stories, not atoms.
从Biber的
University Language:A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers中摘出的关于register与genre的区别,从两个角度来分辨:
1. the object of study; 2. the characteristics of language and culture that are investigated.
从第一个角度来说,register用于refer to a general kind of language associated with a domain of use, such as a 'legal register','scientific register',or'bureaucratic register'; 而genre用于refer to a culturally recognized 'message type' with a conventional internal structure, such as a biology research article or a business memo.
从第二个角度来说,register主要研究lexico-grammatical features, showing how the use of particular words, word types, and grammatical features vary systematically in accord with the situation of use; genre主要研究socio-cultural actions,如genres are "how things get done when language is used to accomplish them"(Martin说的),也即genre关注的是issues of ideology and social power.
在国外的研究中style好像多指作家的个人风格,不是一个社会群体里约定的套路。