The present study deals with variation in discourse relations in different registers of English and German. Our previous analyses have been concerned with the systemic contrasts between English and German, cf. Kunz & Steiner (2013 a/b), Kunz & Lapshinova (to appear) and have addressed some cross-linguistic differences with regard to textual realizations of selected subtypes of cohesion. In our current work, our focus is on the empirical analysis of cross-linguistic variation between registers. In order to obtain a more comprehensive picture, we investigate three main types of cohesion in combination: co-reference, substitution and conjunction and their subtypes, cf. Halliday & Hasan (1976). We extract instantiations of cohesive devices from an English-German corpus of spoken and written registers. The data is analyzed with statistical procedures which show that subcorpora can be grouped along particular combinations of cohesive devices.

The present study is concerned with contrasts in cohesion between English and German, with a special focus on the investigation of cohesive reference. Employing system-based as well as corpus-based methods, we are adding a contrastive to the hitherto dominating monolingual perspectives. Methodologically, we are furthermore attempting to complement the pre-existing system-based accounts with an empirical text-based approach. The paper starts with an overview of different approaches to cohesion, situating and clarifying our own concepts. We then look in more detail at the conceptualizations of cohesive reference and its subcategories before discussing the cohesive resources systemically available in the two language systems for the creation of personal and demonstrative reference. We finally present some preliminary findings from our corpus-linguistic study. These not only test some initial hypotheses derived from the systemic comparison, but also reveal some interesting tendencies with respect to textual frequency and function in the two languages, the registers investigated, and in originals compared to translations. Our study aims at conceptual clarifications, systemic comparisons and some initial textual evidence that may be valuable for basic research as well as language teaching and translator training.

This paper focuses on the interaction of chains of coreference identity with other types of relations, comparing English and German data sets in terms of language, mode (written vs. spoken) and register. We first describe the types of coreference and the chain features analysed as indicators of textual coherence and topic continuity. After sketching the feature categories under analysis and the methods used for statistical evaluation, we present the findings from our analysis and interpret them in terms of the contrasts mentioned above. We will also show that for some registers, coreference types other than identity are of great importance.

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