In any society, communicative activities are organized into models of
conduct that differentiate specific social practices from each other and
enable people to communicate with each other in ways distinctive to
those practices. The articles in this volume investigate a series of
locale-specific models of communicative conduct, or registers of
communication, through which persons organize their participation in
varied social practices, including practices of politics, religion,
schooling, migration, trade, media, verbal art, and ceremonial ritual.
Drawing on research traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, the
authors of these articles bring together insights from a variety of
scholarly disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, folklore,
literary studies, and philology. They describe register models
associated with a great many forms of interpersonal behavior, and,
through their own multi-year and multi-disciplinary collaborative
efforts, bring register phenomena into focus as features of social life
in the lived experience of people in societies around the world.