1887
  1. Home
  2. e-Journals
  3. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
  4. Volume 24, Issue 2
  5. Article
Volume 24, Issue 2
  • ISSN 1384-6655
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9811
USD
Buy:$35.00 + Taxes

Abstract

Abstract

Corpus-based studies of specialized registers typically sample texts using random methods as far as possible, but they disregard social characteristics of the speakers/writers. In contrast, in corpus-based studies of conversation and quantitative sociolinguistic studies, sampling is more typically designed to optimize social representation. To our knowledge, this study is the first to compare linguistic outcomes from random versus sociolinguistic sampling in a specialized register. Our data comes from the biographical radio chat show, (), at different points in time. We constructed two versions of a corpus: a sociolinguistic judgment sample based on guest demographics, and a random sample. We compare grammatical usage between them using an inductive (‘key POS-tags’) method and close manual analysis, uncovering some evidence of significant grammatical differences between the samples and differing patterns of diachronic change. We discuss the implications of our research for corpus design, representativeness and analysis in specialized registers.

© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/ijcl.17117.smi
2019-08-05
2025-04-19

  • From This Site

    /content/journals/10.1075/ijcl.17117.smi
    dcterms_title,dcterms_subject,pub_keyword
    -contentType:Journal -contentType:Contributor -contentType:Concept -contentType:Institution
    10
    5
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Aarts, B., Close, J. & Wallis, S.
    (2013) Choices over time: Methodological issues in investigating current change. InB. Aarts, J. Close, G. Leech & S. Wallis (Eds.), The Verb Phrase in English: Investigating Recent Language Change with Corpora (pp.14–45). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 10.1017/CBO9781139060998.003
     https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139060998.003 [Google Scholar]
  2. Anderwald, L.
    (2002) Negation in Non-standard British English: Gaps, Regularizations, Asymmetries. London/New York, NY: Routledge.
     [Google Scholar]
  3. Argamon, S., Koppel, M., Fine, J., & Shimoni, A. R.
    (2003) Gender, genre, and writing style in formal written texts. Text, 23(3), 321–346. 10.1515/text.2003.014
     https://doi.org/10.1515/text.2003.014 [Google Scholar]
  4. Ball, C. N.
    (1994) Automated text analysis: Cautionary tales. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 9(4), 295–302. 10.1093/llc/9.4.295
     https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/9.4.295 [Google Scholar]
  5. Balossi, G.
    (2014) A Corpus Linguistic Approach to Literary Language and Characterization: Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. 10.1075/lal.18
     https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.18 [Google Scholar]
  6. BBC
    BBC (2004) BBC Charter Review (Radio 4). Retrieved fromhttps://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http:/www.bbccharterreview.org.uk/pdf_documents/r4_0904.pdf (last accessedApril 2019).
  7. Bednarek, M., & Caple, H.
    (2010) News Discourse. London: Continuum.
     [Google Scholar]
  8. Bell, A.
    (1984) Language style as audience design. Language in Society, 13(2), 145–204. 10.1017/S004740450001037X
     https://doi.org/10.1017/S004740450001037X [Google Scholar]
  9. Bell, P., & van Leeuwen, T.
    (1994) The Media Interview: Confession, Contest, Conversation. Kensington: University of New South Wales Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  10. Biber, D.
    (1993) Representativeness in corpus design. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 8(4), 243–257. 10.1093/llc/8.4.243
     https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/8.4.243 [Google Scholar]
  11. (1994) An analytical framework for register studies. InD. Biber & E. Finegan (Eds.) Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register (pp.31–56). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  12. (2006) University Language: A Corpus-based Study of Spoken and Written Registers. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. 10.1075/scl.23
     https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.23 [Google Scholar]
  13. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E.
    (1999) The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.
     [Google Scholar]
  14. Biber, D., & Conrad, S.
    (2009) Register, Genre, and Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 10.1017/CBO9780511814358
     https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511814358 [Google Scholar]
  15. Bourdieu, P.
    (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  16. Bowie, J., Wallis, S. & Aarts, B.
    (2013) The perfect in spoken British English. InB. Aarts, J. Close, G. Leech & S. Wallis (Eds.), The Verb Phrase in English: Investigating Recent Language Change with Corpora (pp.318–52). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 10.1017/CBO9781139060998.014
     https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139060998.014 [Google Scholar]
  17. 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. 10.1075/ijcl.19.1.01bre
     https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.19.1.01bre [Google Scholar]
  18. Burnard, L.
    (2007) (Ed.). Reference Guide for the British National Corpus (XML Edition). Retrieved fromwww.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/docs/URG/ (last accessedApril 2019).
  19. Butler, S.
    (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, NY: Routledge.
     [Google Scholar]
  20. Corbett, J., & Stuart-Smith, J.
    (2012) Standard English in Scotland. InR. Hickey (Ed.) Standards of English: Codified Standards around the World (pp.72–95). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 10.1017/CBO9781139023832.005
     https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139023832.005 [Google Scholar]
  21. Denscombe, M.
    (2014) The Good Research Guide for Small-scale Social Research Projects (5th ed.). Maidenhead: Open University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  22. Finegan, E., & Biber, D.
    (2001) Register variation and social dialect variation: The register axiom. InP. Eckert & J. Rickford (Eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation (pp.235–67). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  23. Garside, R., & Smith, N.
    (1997) A hybrid grammatical tagger: CLAWS4. InR. Garside, G. Leech, A. McEnery (Eds.), Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora (pp.102–121). London: Longman.
     [Google Scholar]
  24. Gimenez, J.
    (2000) Business e-mail communication: some emerging tendencies in register. English for Specific Purposes, 19(3), 237–251. 10.1016/S0889‑4906(98)00030‑1
     https://doi.org/10.1016/S0889-4906(98)00030-1 [Google Scholar]
  25. Gray, B.
    (2015) Linguistic Variation in Research Articles: When Discipline Tells Only Part of the Story. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. 10.1075/scl.71
     https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.71 [Google Scholar]
  26. Hendy, D.
    (2007) Life on Air: A History of Radio Four. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  27. Herring, S., & Paolillo, J. C.
    (2006) Gender and genre variation in weblogs. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 10(4), 493–459. 10.1111/j.1467‑9841.2006.00287.x
     https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2006.00287.x [Google Scholar]
  28. Hoye, L.
    (1997) Adverbs and Modality in English. London: Routledge.
     [Google Scholar]
  29. Hyland, K.
    (2009) Academic Discourse. London: Continuum.
     [Google Scholar]
  30. Ito, R., & Tagliamonte, S. A.
    (2003) Well weird, right dodgy, very strange, really cool: Layering and recycling in English intensifiers. Language in Society, 32(2), 257–279. 10.1017/S0047404503322055
     https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404503322055 [Google Scholar]
  31. Jucker, A., & Landert, D.
    (2015) Historical pragmatics and early speech recordings: Diachronic developments in turn-taking and narrative structure in radio talk shows. Journal of Pragmatics, 79, 22–39. 10.1016/j.pragma.2015.01.010
     https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.01.010 [Google Scholar]
  32. Labov, W.
    (1966) The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.
     [Google Scholar]
  33. Leech, G.
    (2004) Meaning and the English Verb (3rd ed.). London: Longman.
     [Google Scholar]
  34. 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. 10.1075/ijcl.22.3.02lov
     https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22.3.02lov [Google Scholar]
  35. Macaulay, R.
    (2005) Talk that Counts: Age, Gender and Social Class Differences in Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195173819.001.0001
     https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195173819.001.0001 [Google Scholar]
  36. Magee, S.
    (2012) Desert Island Discs: 70 Years of Castaways from one of BBC Radio 4’s Best-loved Programmes. London: Bantam.
     [Google Scholar]
  37. McEnery, T., & Hardie, A.
    (2012) Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  38. Milroy, L., & Gordon, M.
    (2003) Sociolinguistics: Methods and Interpretation. Oxford: Blackwell. 10.1002/9780470758359
     https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470758359 [Google Scholar]
  39. Montgomery, M.
    (2007) The Discourse of Broadcast News: A Linguistic Approach. Abingdon: Routledge.
     [Google Scholar]
  40. Ndaji, F., Little, J., & Coe, R.
    (2016) A Comparison of Academic Achievement in Independent and State Schools: Report for the Independent Schools Council. Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring, University of Durham. www.isc.co.uk/media/3140/16_02_26-cem-durham-university-academic-value-added-research.pdf (last accessedApril 2019).
     [Google Scholar]
  41. Nevalainen, T. & Raumolin-Brunberg, H.
    (Eds.) (2003) Sociolinguistics and Language History: Studies Based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
     [Google Scholar]
  42. O’Keeffe, A.
    (2005) You’ve a daughter yourself? A corpus-based look at question forms in an Irish radio phone-in. InA. Barron & K. Schneider (Eds.), The Pragmatics of Irish English (pp.339–366). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 10.1515/9783110898934.339
     https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110898934.339 [Google Scholar]
  43. Rayson, P.
    (2008) From key words to key semantic domains. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 13(4), 519–549. 10.1075/ijcl.13.4.06ray
     https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.13.4.06ray [Google Scholar]
  44. Sankoff, D.
    (2005) Problems of representativeness. InU. Ammon, N. Dittmar, K. J. Mattheier & P. Trudgill (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society (2nd ed., Vol.2, pp.998–1002). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
     [Google Scholar]
  45. Sankoff, D., & Laberge, S.
    (1978) The linguistic market and the statistical explanation of variability. InD. Sankoff (Ed.), Linguistic Variation: Models and Methods (pp.239–250). New York, NY: Academic Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  46. Sankoff, D., Cedergren, H., Kemp, W., Thibault, P. & Vincent, D.
    (1989) Montreal French: Language, class and ideology. InR. W. Fasold & D. Schiffrin (Eds.), Language Change and Variation (pp.107–118). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins. 10.1075/cilt.52.06san
     https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.52.06san [Google Scholar]
  47. Scannell, P.
    (1989) Public service broadcasting and modern public life. Media, Culture and Society, 11(2): 134–166. 10.1177/016344389011002002
     https://doi.org/10.1177/016344389011002002 [Google Scholar]
  48. Scott, M.
    (1997) PC Analysis of key words – and key key words. System, 25(2), 233–245. 10.1016/S0346‑251X(97)00011‑0
     https://doi.org/10.1016/S0346-251X(97)00011-0 [Google Scholar]
  49. Smith, N. & Waters, C.
    (2018) From broadcast archive to language corpus: Designing and investigating a sociohistorical corpus from Desert Island Discs. ICAME Journal, 42, 167–189. 10.1515/icame‑2018‑0008
     https://doi.org/10.1515/icame-2018-0008 [Google Scholar]
  50. Tolson, A.
    (2006) Media Talk: Spoken Discourse on TV and Radio. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  51. Weiner, E. J. & Labov, W.
    (1983) Constraints on the agentless passive. Journal of Linguistics, 19(1), 29–58. 10.1017/S0022226700007441
     https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226700007441 [Google Scholar]
  52. Zappavigna, M.
    (2012) Discourse of Twitter and Social Media. London: Bloomsbury.
     [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.1075/ijcl.17117.smi
Loading
Variation and change in a specialized register
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 24, 169 (2019); https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17117.smi
/content/journals/10.1075/ijcl.17117.smi
/content/journals/10.1075/ijcl.17117.smi
Loading

Data & Media loading...

  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): key-POS; random sampling; register; representativeness; sociolinguistic judgment sampling

Most Cited

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was successful
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error