Operator and negative contraction in spoken British English: a change in progress

Abstract

There is a growing interest among corpus linguists in changes of morphology and syntax in standard varieties of English. So-called ‘comparative corpus linguistics' (Leech et al. 2009) is now seen as an extension of a method that has been used in historical (socio-)linguistics for some time, and which involves plotting current changes in English grammar based on comparisons of well-matched corpora of English. Apart from the growing number of papers on this new corpus-based approach (Mair and Hundt 1995, 1997; Hundt and Mair 1999; Leech 2003, 2004; Smith 2003; Leech and Smith 2006, Smith and Leech, this volume, among others), we have now at our disposal three monographs that take a corpus-based approach to changes in progress in contemporary English (Bauer 1994; Mair 2006; Leech et al. 2009). Most of this new research enterprise has made use of the Brown family of corpora of written English, i.e. Brown, FROWN, LOB, FLOB and others representing different regional varieties of the language. However, it is widely acknowledged that face-to-face spoken interaction is the source of most grammatical changes, and it is in this medium that changes spread faster. Only recently have scholars started to make use of comparable corpora to study on-going grammatical changes in spoken English. For example, Leech (2003, 2004) has supplemented the study of contemporary written English with the use of two ‘mini-corpora' for studying language change in recent spoken British English. These subcorpora are based on the recently released Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE), a corpus compiled by Bas Aarts and colleagues at University College London that is based on the London-Lund Corpus (LLC) and the British Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB). The present paper shows the possibilities of using parts of LLC and ICE-GB in a trend study that combines a real time and an apparent time approach to one aspect of the grammar of negation in present-day English, viz. the variability between operator and negative contraction. This is a feature that has been disregarded by previous studies of grammatical change in contemporary standard varieties of English. Standard varieties of English show variation in the way present tense forms of BE 2 (is, are), HAVE (have, has, had), will, and would realize verbal negation by means of the negative particle NOT: (1) Full or uncontracted forms; (2) Negative contraction; (3) Operator contraction: