126 andrew w. pitts
discourse is realized by the interpersonal metafunction. and the mode of
a discourse is realized by the textual metafunction.44
halliday’s work, though distinct in many ways, has been recognized as
potentially useful for informing or developing audience design theory.45
the primary distinction between halliday’s register based analysis of style
and Bell’s audience design model is that halliday’s is more wide ranging.
audience design accounts for style-shift only at the interpersonal level.
But there are enough field studies that show topicality (ideational mean-
ing) and literary structuring (textual meaning) due to text type (context
of culture; genre) to conclude that style-shifts probably result from shifts
within a combination of register components. thus, halliday’s model
seems more suitable for assessing the wide range of register-based factors
related to style-shift rather than circumventing analysis within the tenor
of the discourse or making other metafunctions derivative of it.
Douglas Biber on Register: Formalizing Situational Components
douglas Biber has done the most extensive work on register and regis-
ter variation. Based on previous studies, Biber distinguishes eight com-
ponents of register, many of them with subcomponents listed in fig. 2
below. reorganized according to halliday’s metafunctions, they are:46
[mode:] (1) primary channel (linguistic medium), (2) format/permanency
(level of publication), (3) setting (institutional vs. personal), [tenor:]
(4) addressor, (5) addressee, [field:], (6) factuality, (7) purposes and
(8) topics.47 a great advantage to the categories proposed here by Biber is
that most of them are formally encoded in Paul’s letters, so they provide
a formal way of tracking and comparing social variation within the Paul-
ine corpus. the primary channel will always be +written for Paul, though
literary structure shifts slightly in terms of epistolary form between the
Pastorals and the other letters we have in Paul’s name. as for format,
44 m. a. K. halliday, “functions of language,” in halliday and hasan, Language, Con-
text, and Text, 18–23.
45 for example, coupland (Style, 13), one of the leading voices in audience design mod-
els of style, acknowledges this. though coupland does value halliday’s contribution, he
criticizes him for what he views as an unhelpful distinction between dialect and register,
which ends up introducing confusion into what we mean by style.
46 an idea inspired by o’donnell, Corpus Linguistics, 19.
47 douglas Biber, “representativeness in corpus design,” LLC 8 (1993): 243–57 (245);
cf. douglas Biber, Variation across Speech and Writing (cambridge: cambridge university
Press, 1988), 29, which articulates a slightly different list of components: (1) participant
roles and characteristics; (2) relations among participants; (3) setting, (4) topic, (5) pur-
pose, (6) social evolution, (7) relations of participants to the text and (8) channel.