International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 22, Issue 3, 2017

This paper introduces the Spoken British National Corpus 2014, an 11.5-million-word corpus of orthographically transcribed conversations among L1 speakers of British English from across the UK, recorded in the years 2012–2016. After showing that a survey of the recent history of corpora of spoken British English justifies the compilation of this new corpus, we describe the main stages of the Spoken BNC2014’s creation: design, data and metadata collection, transcription, XML encoding, and annotation. In doing so we aim to (i) encourage users of the corpus to approach the data with sensitivity to the many methodological issues we identified and attempted to overcome while compiling the Spoken BNC2014, and (ii) inform (future) compilers of spoken corpora of the innovations we implemented to attempt to make the construction of corpora representing spontaneous speech in informal contexts more tractable, both logistically and practically, than in the past.

This study investigates how age, gender, social class and dialect influence how frequently speakers of British English use intensifiers (e.g. very) in private conversations and whether this has changed over the last two decades. With data drawn from over 600 speakers and 4M words included in the Spoken British National Corpus (1994 and 2014 Sample), it is the most comprehensive study of intensifier usage to date, taking into account 111 intensifier variants. Results show that, in most age groups and social classes, men use intensifiers less frequently than women, and gender differences have diminished to a very limited extent, notably for the middle class. Moreover, intensification rate has increased across the board over time. This could be due to a shift towards a stereotypically more feminine communicative style as the perception of gender roles has changed, a process by which the middle class might have been particularly affected.

The aim of this paper is to ascertain the degree to which lexical diversity, density and creativity in everyday spoken British English have changed over a 20-year period, as a function of age and gender. Usage patterns of four verb-forming suffixes, -ate, -en, -ify and -ize, were compared in contemporary speech from the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 Sample (Spoken BNC2014S) with its 20-year old counterpart, the BNC1994’s demographically-sampled component (the Spoken BNC1994DS). Frequency comparisons revealed that verb suffixation is denser in the Spoken BNC2014S than in the Spoken BNC1994DS, with the exception of the -en suffix, the use of which has decreased, particularly among female and younger speakers in general. Male speakers and speakers in the 35–59 age range showed the greatest type diversity; there is evidence that this peak is occurring earlier in the more recent corpus. Contrary to expectations, female rather than male speakers produced the largest number of neologisms and rare forms.

Since the late twentieth century, the usage of intensifiers, such as absolutely, very or slightly, has been investigated in relation to gender. Whereas previous literature has widely agreed that women and men do indeed use intensifiers differently, there has been some disagreement as to which gender uses them more frequently. Taking up this discussion, this study explores authentic data provided in the Spoken BNC2014S by investigating 39 intensifiers. After establishing the ten most frequently used intensifiers by women and men, these are subcategorized and investigated for gender and age effects. The results generally support earlier findings, however, they also illustrate that there is much interindividual variation and variation regarding individual intensifiers and that there are fascinating interactions with other variables such as age.

This paper brings together the study of sociolinguistic variation and the area of grammatical analysis by investigating demonstrative cleft constructions in spoken British English such as That’s what I wanted to talk about and This is where I saw him. Using the Spoken BNC2014S, I ask whether speaker characteristics, including gender, age, education and occupation, might be correlated with the use of demonstrative clefts and with various aspects of their structure (preference for the distal or proximal demonstrative pronoun, use of negative polarity, and use of stance adverbs). Findings suggest that in British English, demonstrative cleft use is more likely to be present in the speech of male compared to female speakers, working adults in higher-skilled occupations compared to semi-skilled adults, and in adults of middle age compared to younger adults. This work shows that even highly abstract grammatical constructions can be sensitive to speaker preferences and linguistic communicative style.