British Spoken Research Articles

Tag Questions in English Spoken Discourse: Corpus-Based Linguistic and Pragmatic Analysis

Based on an integrative methodology that combines quantitative and qualitative methods of linguistic research, the authors consider grammatical forms, syntactic types and pragmatic functions of the tag question in British spoken discourse. The research material included samples of dialogues with tag questions taken from British contemporary fiction and the Spoken BNC2014. Drawing on the theory of linguistic metarepresentation and using corpus analysis tools the authors presented the model under study in structural-syntactic and functional-pragmatic perspectives and obtained reliable data on discourse realization of tag question models, specified their standard and common usage polarity status, distinguished bi- and monopolarity variations. An analysis of the tag question types that are distinguished as the combinations of the predicative and auxiliary parts shows that the most frequent type of tag question is the one formed with an affirmative predicative part and a negative tag. The corpus-based approach allowed obtaining quantitative data on frequencies of tag questions in British spoken discourse, retrieving the repertoire of tag questions with their grammatical representation. It is shown that in the corpus under study the most frequent form of the tag question is the form isn't it?. The least frequent forms of tag questions are the ones formed with the have verb, as well as the modal verbs will, may, can, which supports the thesis that tag questions are losing ground in British spoken discourse. Discourse-pragmatic analysis of utterance contexts with tag questions highlighted its discourse value in the British tradition of conversation, as they perform the following communicative functions: informational; etiquette; interpersonal-relation-corrective (focus-positive or focus-negative).

Data from ‘The Dative Alternation Revisited: Fresh Insights from Contemporary British Spoken Data’

The dataset covers the so-called “dative alternation”. The dative alternation (also referred to as the ditransitive or double-object construction) refers to parallel constructions that have broadly similar meaning but different syntax: i. he gave it to the board” ii. “I gave her my old one” In i., the verb “give” takes a noun phrase (the pronoun “it”) and a prepositional phrase as arguments (“to the board”), while in ii. the verb takes two noun phrases (“her” and “my old one”) as arguments. In the dataset, we refer to i) as “VNPP” and ii) as “VNN”. We refer to the indirect object role as “recipient” (“her” in i. and “the board” in ii.) and the direct object as “theme” (“it” in i. and “my old one” in ii.). The dataset was collected from the Early-Access Subset (EAS) of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 [1] for use in a sociolinguistic study of competing linguistic constructions [2]. The corpus is now publicly available via CQPweb at https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/bnc2014spoken . The dative alternation is a topic of active research in linguistics, but few studies have made datasets available. Meta-studies, creation of specialised NLP tools, and comparisons of results will benefit from better access to this dataset.

British Cultural Complexity: An Entropy-based Approach

The present study aimed to investigate the complexity of British culture across the twentieth century. Different from previous studies concerning cultural complexity that used written texts as the experimental data, the present study employed a large data-set of speeches and debates from the British parliament, with the intention of examining the change of British cultural complexity from the perspective of spoken texts. Interestingly, the findings of this study were largely in accordance with those of previous studies that were based on written texts. First, this study confirmed the argument that culture is cumulative in nature. In addition, this study showed that longer N-grams generate higher entropy values. Nonetheless, discrepancies were found in this study, such as the different impacts of crises on the growth of cultural complexity in Britain and America. Furthermore, comparisons with previous studies indicated a lower complexity of British spoken culture than its written counterpart. We have provided possible explanations as well as the implications for future research.

Social Gradience in British Spoken Latin

Social Gradience in British Spoken Latin