ABSTRACT

This chapter is an introduction to the whole volume. It first offers a brief reflection on sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics, highlighting challenges and opportunities of combining these two fields. Next, the chapter emphasises the importance of the Spoken BNC2014 as an update of the original Spoken BNC1994. The Spoken BNC2014 better reflects current spoken British English than its predecessor, which is now over twenty years old. The Spoken BNC2014 Sample used in the empirical studies in this volume is described and information is provided about different subcorpora based on social and regional characteristics of the speakers in the corpus. The chapter finishes with an overview of the volume providing the reader with the information about the structure of the book as well as the focus of the individual chapters.