Corpus Approaches to Contemporary British Speech

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.

Author Biography

Vaclav Brezina is Senior Research Associate at the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University. He also designed a number of different tools for corpus analysis such as BNC64, Lancaster vocabulary tool and Lancaster statistical tool. He is involved in the development of the Trinity Lancaster Corpus of spoken learner production and the Spoken BNC2014.

Robbie Love is a PhD Research Student at the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University. He is heavily involved in the compilation of the Spoken BNC2014 and is responsible for a series of critical methodological investigations into the application of spoken corpora for sociolinguistic research.

Karin Aijmer is Professor Emerita in English linguistics at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her most recent publications include A Variational Pragmatic Analysis (2013), A Handbook of Corpus Pragmatics, with Christoph Rühlemann (2014) and Pragmatics: An Advanced Resource Book for Students, with Dawn Archer and Anne Wichmann (2012).