Abstract
The paper draws data from four matching one-million word corpora, namely Brown (US, 1961), LOB (GB, 1961), Frown (US, 1992) and FLOB (GB, 1991), in order to provide an integrated description of synchronic (regional and stylistic) variation and short-term diachronic change in written Standard English. The analysis of a fairly large number of morphosyntactic variables shows that instances of direct structural change are rather rare in the period under review. Nevertheless there are numerous statistically significant diachronic developments which, taken together, provide evidence for a coherent discourse-pragmatic trend, the ‘colloquialisation’ of the norms of written English. This linguistic development is argued to be driven by a more general sociocultural trend, the shift of public taste towards greater informality.
Highlights
The degree of public interest in linguistic change taking place in presentday English is in inverse proportion to the reliability of the methods used to study the phenomenon, namely anecdotal commentary by observers, travellers or returning expatriates
The ‘classic’ case of the type of investigation envisaged is the linguistic comparison of corresponding sections of text in subsequent translations of the Bible
The Biblical corpus has remained constant in size and composition, so that the presence of new forms or shifts in the distribution of variant forms are either due to chance or a direct reflection of linguistic change and innovation
Summary
The degree of public interest in (and the amount of writing on) linguistic change taking place in presentday English is in inverse proportion to the reliability of the methods used to study the phenomenon, namely anecdotal commentary by observers, travellers or returning expatriates This is in stark contrast to research on Old and Middle English, which is inevitably based on the more or less systematic analysis of some part of the extant corpus of written texts. Corpus-linguistic research on modem English was crucially promoted in the early nineteen-sixties by the Brown and LOB corpora – two matching samples of the American and British written standards. Grammatical change, especially in the domain of high-frequency phenomena, will be the most promising area to look for results
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