In January, we announced the recipients of the Spoken BNC2014 Early Access Data Grants. Over the next several months, they will use exclusive access to the first five million words of Spoken BNC2014 data to carry out a total of thirteen research projects.
In this series of blogs, we are excited to share more information about these projects, in the words of their authors.
In the fourth and final part of our series, read about the work of Tanja Hessner & Ira Gawlitzek, Karin Axelsson, Andrew Caines et al. and Tanja Säily et al.
Tanja Hessner and Ira Gawlitzek
University of Mannheim, Germany
Women speak in an emotional manner; men show their authority through speech! – A corpus-based study on linguistic differences showing which gender clichés are (still) true by analysing boosters in the Spoken BNC2014
Western world clichés claim that women are emotional and often exaggerate, which is reflected in their speech. In contrast, men’s language is said to be characterised by bluntness. Aiming to shed a bit more light on statements like these, this study is going to consider gender differences on the lexical level.
In order to discover if and, if so, to which extent there really is a difference between female and male speakers, the phenomena of boosters will be investigated in the Spoken BNC2014 early access subset. Boosters such as totally or absolutely are particularly appealing and suitable for analysing gender differences since they are extremely multifaceted and they are indicators not only of lively, but also of emotional and powerful speech. Not only are appropriate boosters investigated by using quantitative methods, but also by analysing the data in a qualitative way.
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Canonical and non-canonical tag questions in the Spoken BNC2014: What has happened since the original BNC?
What is happening to tag questions in British everyday conversation? Are canonical tag questions, where the form of the tag reflects that of the preceding clause (as in She won’t come, will she?), on the way out as the use of innit and other invariant tags is spreading? Who uses innit in 2014? The use of tag questions in the Spoken BNC2014 early access subset will be compared to the use in the demographic part of the original Spoken BNC reflecting the language of the early 1990s.
Andrew Caines1, Michael McCarthy2 and Paula Buttery1
‘You still talking to me?’ The zero auxiliary progressive in spoken British English, twenty years on
With early access to a subset of the Spoken BNC2014, we will be able to assess whether a supposedly ‘ungrammatical’ construction has become more frequently used in conversational British English over the past 20 years. The construction in question is the ‘zero auxiliary’ – for example, the progressive aspect construction may be used with an -ing verb form alone (“you talking to me?”, “What you doing?”, “We going to town”) whereas the standard rule is to combine an auxiliary verb (BE or HAVE) with the -ing form.
In the original Spoken BNC recorded in the early 1990s, the zero auxiliary occurred in one-in-twenty progressive constructions, a rate that rose to one-in-three if second person interrogatives (You talking to me? etc.) were considered alone. Moreover, younger working-class speakers were more likely to use the zero auxiliary than older middle-class speakers. We will investigate how these usage rates compare to the Spoken BNC2014, in the process updating the demographics of zero auxiliary use as well.
Tanja Säily1, Victoria González-Díaz2 and Jukka Suomela3
1University of Helsinki, Finland
3Aalto University, Finland
Variation in the productivity of adjective comparison
The functional competition between inflectional (‑er) and periphrastic (more) comparative strategies in English has received a great deal of attention in corpus-based research. A key area of competition remains relatively unexplored, however: the productivity of either comparative strategy, or how diversely they are used with different adjectives. The received wisdom is that inflection is fully productive, so we might expect to find no variation within the productivity of ‑er. However, recent research using new methods shows sociolinguistic variation in the productivity of extremely productive derivational suffixes. Whether the same variation applies to the productivity of inflectional processes remains an open question.
On the basis of the Spoken BNC2014 early access subset, our project will analyse intra- and extra-linguistic variation in the productivity of inflectional and periphrastic comparative strategies. Intra-linguistic factors include syntactic position, modification preferences, length and derivational type of the adjective. The extra-linguistic determinants focus on gender, age, socio-economic status, conversational setting and roles of the interlocutors. Our research constitutes a timely contribution to current knowledge of adjective comparison and morphological theory-building. If (a) variation in the productivity of inflectional comparison is found and (b) similar change in the productivity of both derivational and inflectional processes is observed, this will support our hypothesis that there is a derivation-to-inflection cline rather than a sharp divide.
Check back soon for more updates on the Spoken BNC2014 project!