ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 provides an overview of the analytical methods shared by most of the Register-Functional (RF) complexity studies included in the book, including the following characteristics: a focus on patterns of register variation; analysis of the full range of structural devices and syntactic functions associated with grammatical complexity; the application of specialized computer programs to automate analyses when possible; the application of quantitative methods to document the frequency of use of complexity features, typically using a text-linguistic approach; and the emphasis on qualitative/functional interpretation, with special attention paid to the communicative functions of complexity features in texts and registers. In addition to sections on the TxtLx approach to register variation and the grammatical foundation of RF complexity studies, the chapter includes relatively detailed descriptions of the computational tools used for the analyses, the interactive coding required to achieve high rates of accuracy, and the research designs and statistical techniques used in most RF studies.
