Corpus Approaches to Contemporary British Speech

Sociolinguistic Studies of the Spoken BNC2014

Vaclav Brezina, Robbie Love, Karin Aijmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351975728
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

Featuring contributions from an international team of leading and up-and-coming scholars, this innovative volume provides a comprehensive sociolinguistic picture of current spoken British English based on the Spoken BNC2014, a brand new corpus of British speech. The book begins with short introductions highlighting the state-of-the-art in three major areas of corpus-based sociolinguistics, while the remaining chapters feature rigorous analysis of the research outcomes of the project grounded in Spoken BNC2014 data samples, highlighting English used in everyday situations in the UK, with brief summaries reflecting on the sociolinguistic implications of this research included at the end of each chapter. This unique and robust dataset allows this team of researchers the unique opportunity to focus on speaker characteristics such as gender, age, dialect and socio-economic status, to examine a range of sociolinguistic dimensions, including grammar, pragmatics, and discourse, and to reflect on the major changes that have occurred in British society since the last corpus was compiled in the 1990s. This dynamic new contribution to the burgeoning field of corpus-based sociolinguistics is key reading for students and scholars in sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, pragmatics, grammar, and British English.

Part I

Short Introductions to Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics and the BNC2014

1 Corpus Linguistics and Sociolinguistics

Introducing the Spoken BNC2014

Vaclav Brezina, Robbie Love and Karin Aijmer

1.1 Sociolinguistics Meets Corpus Linguistics

Systematic, large-scale exploration of sociolinguistic features in everyday language use has been made possible by the availability of corpora representing informal speech, such as the demographically sampled spoken component of the British National Corpus (the Spoken BNC1994DS) and indeed the new Spoken BNC2014 (see Section 1.2). These corpora include rich metadata about social characteristics of the speakers and a large volume of data, which can be analysed using different techniques. Sociolinguistic exploration of large corpus data is, however, not without its challenges (e.g., Brezina & Meyerhoff, 2014). Language represents a dynamic system with variation occurring simultaneously at multiple levels, reflecting both conscious and unconscious choices by speakers as well as the requirements of the mode of communication, genre and a specific linguistic context (see Chapter 3 in this volume). Capturing socially meaningful variation is therefore a difficult task, requiring a good understanding of social and linguistic processes as well as familiarity with the dataset. The analysis often needs to shift between showing general patterns in the data and providing specific examples of language use to arrive at an interpretation that does justice to the complexity of the data. Bringing corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics together (cf. Baker, 2010) to investigate current spoken British English creates a unique opportunity to gain insight into everyday language use of people from different parts of the UK and different ‘corners’ of society. It is a fascinating exploration to which this volume intends to contribute.

1.2 The Spoken BNC2014: Full Dataset and Sample

For over twenty years, the British National Corpus (BNC) has been one of the most widely known corpora used as a representative sample of current British English. Focusing on the five-million-token Spoken BNC1994DS, Love, Dembry, Hardie, Brezina, and McEnery (2017) show that no other orthographically transcribed spoken corpus compiled since its release has matched it in its size, representativeness or usefulness. However, as Love, Dembry, Hardie, Brezina, and McEnery (2017) argue, a new dataset reflecting current usage is needed to better serve the requirements of the research community than the aging Spoken BNC1994DS.

The Spoken BNC2014 is a response to this need. Publicly released in September 2017, initially via CQPweb (Hardie, 2012), the corpus is a result of collaboration between the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS)¹ at Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press (CUP).) Love, Dembry, Hardie, Brezina, and McEnery (2017) describe in greater detail how the Spoken BNC2014 was designed and built within the Lancaster/Cambridge partnership; the BNC2014 user guide (Love, Hawtin, and Hardie 2017) includes information about the structure of the full 11.5-million-word corpus.

The studies in this volume are based on a five-million-token sample of the Spoken BNC2014 data, referred to as the Spoken BNC2014 Sample (Spoken BNC2014S), which contains transcripts from conversations recorded between 2012 and 2015. The Spoken BNC2014S was made available on a competitive basis to the authors of this volume, who focused on a variety of sociolinguistic applications (see Section 1.3). The Spoken BNC2014S consists of 4,784,691 tokens (including punctuation), approximately 60% of which were produced by female speakers and 40% by male speakers. A wide range of age groups are represented in the dataset, with the largest proportion (41%) in the data being produced by speakers between 19 and 29. Information is also available about the speaker’s socio-economic status and region. A detailed break-down of these categories is provided in the Appendix at the end of this chapter.

1.3 Sociolinguistic studies of the Spoken BNC2014

This volume offers four short theoretical/methodological pieces and eight empirical studies. It demonstrates a corpus-based sociolinguistic approach to the Spoken BNC2014 and provides a snapshot of sociolinguistic variation in spoken British English in the 2010s, often contrasted with the situation in the 1990s. The volume is divided into three broad sections: (i) Introductions, (ii) Discourse, Pragmatics and Interaction, and (iii) Morphosyntax.

I Introductions to Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics and the Spoken BNC2014

In addition to this introduction, the first section of this volume comprises three short contributions, which offer a reflection about the state of the art in corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics and provide context to the empirical chapters that follow. McEnery offers a compelling account of the major design decisions when building the Spoken BNC2014; this chapter lays out principles of spoken corpus design and highlights the importance of data in corpus linguistics. Busse’s contribution outlines different sociolinguistic perspectives on British English with the focus on the current debates in the field. Finally, Hardie highlights some of the main features to be found in CQPweb—the online corpus analysis system which hosts the Spoken BNC2014.

II Discourse, Pragmatics and Interaction

This section is devoted to studies dealing with language use in context and the dynamics of discourse. In Chapter 5, Culpeper and Gillings focus on a well-known stereotype about British politeness. Whilst politeness in Britain is often thought of as a monolithic phenomenon characterised by indirectness, there is an assumption in lay discourse that northerners are perceived as having very different politeness practices from southerners, practices which, broadly, are characterized by friendliness. The authors put this assumption to the test by selecting fourteen key British formulaic politeness expressions, each belonging to one of three different types of politeness (tentativeness, deference or solidarity), and then examining their frequencies in the combined north and south components of the Spoken BNC2014S and the Spoken BNC1994DS.

In Chapter 6, Aijmer draws attention to new and unusual intensifiers in present-day English which appear to be in the process of undergoing delexicalisation and grammaticalisation. The following intensifiers fit into this category of intensifiers: fucking, super, dead, real, well (good) and so(+NP), in their roles as intensifiers before adjectives. Aijmer’s method involves a comparison of the intensifiers in the Spoken BNC1994DS and Spoken BNC2014S.

The aim of Axelsson’s contribution (Chapter 7) is to provide an in-depth analysis of the frequencies and formal features of tag questions (including instances with innit) as well as their distribution across gender, age, dialect and socio-economic status. This study complements the evidence in her previous work, which is based on the BNC1994DS. The study thus explores diachronic change in informal discourse and its dynamics.

In Chapter 8, the final chapter in this section, Wong and Kruger examine structural categories derived from the number of words, non-words and partial forms that contribute to a backchannel. They seek to establish the factors that condition the selection of various backchannel structures in British English, using a multifactorial method. With the help of corpus annotation, they identify backchannel structures, and then use grammatical and speaker metadata associated with each utterance as predictors of backchannel choice.

III Morphosyntax

The final section in this volume is concerned with morphosyntactic features in British speech. Säily, González-Díaz and Suomela’s chapter (Chapter 9) is a contribution which investigates the use of adjective comparison. It focuses on the productivity of two comparative strategies in English: the inflectional -er and the periphrastic more strategy. The study builds on recent research using novel methodologies that shows sociolinguistic variation in the productivity of extremely productive derivational suffixes.

Jenset, McGillivray and Rundell’s contribution (Chapter 10) investigates English verbs whose argument structure preferences include the dative alternation (Give me the money/Give the money to me). Although this is a well-researched topic, most published work draws either on introspection or on data from written sources. Using contemporary unscripted spoken data will therefore take the research into fresh territory and will bring new insights about the dative alternation in spoken English with attention being paid to sociolinguistic variation.

Caines, McCarthy and Buttery (Chapter 11) investigate zero auxiliary use in progressive aspect interrogatives in spoken British English, e.g., You talking to me? Where we going? What you been doing? The authors outline the situation of the progressive aspect in English, including the zero auxiliary, and offer two comparable empirical studies on the use of zero auxiliary in British speech, one dealing with data from the 1990s, the other with 2010s data.

Finally, Paterson (Chapter 12) explores the use of untriggered reflexives in current British English from the sociolinguistic perspective, i.e., the use of untriggered reflexives by particular demographic groups (defined by age, gender, etc.). The analysis provides a snapshot of current usage of untriggered reflexives and facilitates comparison with the existing corpus-based research of this grammatical phenomenon.

Note

1The Spoken BNC2014 compilation project was supported by the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science, ESRC grant reference ES/K002155/1.

References

Baker, P. (2010). Sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Brezina, V., & Meyerhoff, M. (2014). Significant or random? A critical review of sociolinguistic generalisations based on large corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 19(1), 1–28.

Hardie, A. (2012). CQPweb—combining power, flexibility and usability in a corpus analysis tool. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 173, 380–409.

Love, R., Dembry, C., Hardie, A., Brezina, V., & McEnery, T. (2017). The spoken BNC2014: Designing and building a spoken corpus of everyday conversations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(3), 319–344.

Love, R., Hawtin, A., & Hardie, A. (2017). The British national corpus 2014: User manual and reference guide (version 1.0). Lancaster: ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science.

Appendix:...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Short Introductions to Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics and the BNC2014
• Part II Discourse, Pragmatics and Interaction
• Part III Morphosyntax
• Contributors
• Index