Abstract
This article explores the interrelatedness of societal changes and changes in language practices. By using a combination of corpus linguistic and socio-pragmatic methods, we track diachronic changes in word patterns and interpret findings in the framework of democratization. The data comes from a small and representative corpus of British English (ARCHER-3.1) and from three “big data” sets (Google Books, British Library Newspapers and The Economist). We suggest that data triangulation, including sociohistorical contextualization, allows us to conclude that especially from the mid-nineteenth century onwards words signaling social status and referring to individuals have decreased and from the first decades of the twentieth century onwards words referring to collectivities of people have increased.
Highlights
This article explores the interrelatedness of societal changes and changes in language practices
We suggest that data triangulation, including sociohistorical contextualization, allows us to conclude that especially from the mid-nineteenth century onwards words signaling social status and referring to individuals have decreased and from the first decades of the twentieth century onwards words referring to collectivities of people have increased
We advocate for methodological triangulation, and our aim is to show that using different data sets and quantitative and qualitative methods including sociohistorical contextualization allows us to trace democratization processes in changing word patterns
Summary
This article explores the interrelatedness of societal changes and changes in language practices. By using a combination of corpus linguistic and socio-pragmatic methods, we track diachronic changes in word patterns and interpret findings in the framework of democratization. We advocate for methodological triangulation, and our aim is to show that using different data sets and quantitative and qualitative methods including sociohistorical contextualization allows us to trace democratization processes in changing word patterns (for triangulation, see Kranich et al, this issue). Comparing consecutive centuries of British English data in ARCHER-3.1 with keyword analysis, we observed several differences including changes in words referring to people. Comparing similarities and differences between words in corpora with statistical methods entails many problems and insecurities, which have been discussed, for example, in Kilgarriff (2001) and more recently in Lijffijt et al (2016)
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