The British National Corpus as a sociolinguistic dataset: Exploring individual and social variation
Project: The British National Corpus (BNC) as a sociolinguistic dataset: Exploring individual and social variation
Funding: ESRC grant no. EP/P001559/1.
Team: Vaclav Brezina (PI), Dana Gablasova (Co-I), Tony McEnery (Co-I), Miriam Meyerhoff (Co-I), Susan Reichelt (RA)
Twitter: #BNC64
The project focuses on speaker age as a sociolinguistic variable and aims at providing new insights into theories of language change on community, generation, and individual levels. Research conducted as part of the project will not only further our understanding of how language develops over time, but will also add to current debates on how to conduct large-scale corpus research within sociolinguistic parameters.
Alongside new research, the project also provides teaching materials with practical applications of sociolinguistic theory in corpus contexts at the secondary-school level (A-level courses of English language) and in EFL/ESL classes.
The goals of the project summarized:
- Novel research on different aspects of sociolinguistic variation in British English.
- Diachronic analysis of British English over the period of 20 years (using the BNC and the new BNC2014).
- Online platform for carrying out sociolinguistic analyses for researchers and teachers.
- Corpus-based teaching materials on sociolinguistics