Volume 7, Issue 1 - Special Issue. Corpus linguistics and sociolinguistic inquiry

This paper is based on data from the LANCHART (Language Change in Real Time) corpus. LANCHART is ‘data-based’ in that transcripts are orthographically normalized and both transcripts and annotations are time stamped and stored in a database. The corpus is structured according to generation, gender, geography, class, and time of recording. The socio-linguistic issue treated is the relationship between genre, as defined in the context of a so-called Discourse Context Analysis, and a particularly frequent and significant phonetic variable, viz. the (æ) variable in Modern Danish. Through repeated searches in the corpus we show that genres do have an effect on phonetic variation and that they frequently develop in real time, at least with regard to the patterning of the selected phonetic variable. The results are discussed in the context of intra-individual variation within the sociolinguistic interview, i.e., the timehonored style problem.

The MAONZE (Māori and New Zealand English) database consists of audio recordings that have been collected for the purpose of analyzing sound change over time in the Māori language. The database contains the Māori and English speech of nearly 70 male and female speakers of different age groups from a range of tribal areas. The time depth of the database is provided by the speech of 18 men and women born in the late 19 th century and recorded in the mid to late 20 th century. This paper describes the database and discusses issues surrounding its creation and use.

This paper reports on changes in the system of speech and thought introducers that are brought about by the adoption of innovations. Quantitative variationist analysis of a newly created corpus that spans 5 decades of conversational recordings in North-Eastern England investigates three questions: (1) What effect do extralinguistic and intralinguistic variables have on the relative distribution of the variants diachronically? (2) What are the determinants of change? (3) To what extent do different strategies of variable definition, in particular choices about the inclusion of internal states, determine the outcome of the investigation? Innovative methodology allows me to pinpoint the loci of the change that has been sparked by the intrusion of innovations, both in terms of repository of forms but also regarding the constraints that condition the whole system.

This article analyses the use of particular pragmatic markers in two corpora of spoken London English: the Linguistic Innovators Corpus (LIC) and the Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT). We found variation according to sex, ethnicity and geographical location, with a different distribution for each pragmatic marker. The innovative pragmatic marker you get me was most frequent among male non-Anglo Hackney residents, indicating innovation in inner London. We argue that a number of pragmatic markers, most notably you get me , should be regarded as elements of Multicultural London English, along with other features that have already been documented.

The first aim of this work is to examine gender-based variation in the productivity of the nominal suffixes - ness and - ity in present-day British English. Possible interpretations are presented for the findings that - ity is used less productively by women, while with - ness there is no gender difference. The second aim is to analyse the validity of hapax-based measures of productivity in sociolinguistic research. It is discovered that they require a significantly larger corpus than type-based ones, and that the category-conditioned degree of productivity P is unusable when comparing subcorpora based on social groups. Otherwise, hapax legomena remain a theoretically well-founded component of productivity measures.

The Carolinas Conversations Collection is a password-protected digital collection of transcribed audio and video recordings of conversations about health, supported by the National Libraries of Medicine. It has two cohorts: 125 unimpaired multiethnic older speakers with any of 12 chronic conditions and a longitudinal set of 400 conversations with 125 persons having dementia. Information about health literacy, health status, and cognitive function requires high standards for privacy and confidentiality, and restricted data use agreements. Since contents are housed in an adaptation of the well-established ONZE Miner, users can search and perform online analysis of sound, word or syntax with increasing specificity.

With the move towards the sharing of linguistic data, sociolinguists are now considering, more than ever, methods for creating corpora that maintain requisite ethical principles while still allowing for data to be used by researchers from around the globe. This paper examines the guiding principles used to create a sociolinguistic corpus that would permit sharing without compromising commitments to informants, from the interview stage to transcription, verification, and anonymization. We consider and adapt theory and practice from fields such as corpus linguistics, anthropology, and sociology.