ABSTRACT

Featuring contributions from an international team of leading and up-and-coming scholars, this innovative volume provides a comprehensive sociolinguistic picture of current spoken British English based on the Spoken BNC2014, a brand new corpus of British speech. The book begins with short introductions highlighting the state-of-the-art in three major areas of corpus-based sociolinguistics, while the remaining chapters feature rigorous analysis of the research outcomes of the project grounded in Spoken BNC2014 data samples, highlighting English used in everyday situations in the UK, with brief summaries reflecting on the sociolinguistic implications of this research included at the end of each chapter. This unique and robust dataset allows this team of researchers the unique opportunity to focus on speaker characteristics such as gender, age, dialect and socio-economic status, to examine a range of sociolinguistic dimensions, including grammar, pragmatics, and discourse, and to reflect on the major changes that have occurred in British society since the last corpus was compiled in the 1990s. This dynamic new contribution to the burgeoning field of corpus-based sociolinguistics is key reading for students and scholars in sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, pragmatics, grammar, and British English.

part I|30 pages

Short Introductions to Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics and the BNC2014

chapter 1|7 pages

Corpus Linguistics and Sociolinguistics

Introducing the Spoken BNC2014

chapter 2|6 pages

The Spoken BNC2014

The Corpus Linguistic Perspective

chapter 3|11 pages

Current British English

The Sociolinguistic Perspective

part II|126 pages

Discourse, Pragmatics and Interaction

chapter 5|27 pages

Politeness Variation in England

A North-South Divide?

chapter 6|36 pages

‘That’s Well Bad’

Some New Intensifiers in Spoken British English

chapter 8|37 pages

Yeah, Yeah Yeah or Yeah No That’s Right

A Multifactorial Analysis of the Selection of Backchannel Structures in British English

part III|99 pages

Morphosyntax

chapter 10|24 pages

The Dative Alternation Revisited

Fresh Insights From Contemporary British Spoken Data

chapter 11|26 pages

‘You Still Talking to Me?’‘You Still Talking to Me?’

The Zero Auxiliary Progressive in Spoken British English Twenty Years On

chapter 12|21 pages

‘You Can Just Give Those Documents to Myself’

Untriggered Reflexive Pronouns in 21st-Century Spoken British English