Summary

The main aim of the research is to carry out an investigation of areas of change in grammatical usage in 20th Century British English, focussing on the verb phrase. The study will be based on a package of four corpora sampled at regular intervals: 1991 – 1961 – 1931 – 1901. Two sub-goals are to: a) Compile a new corpus of British English called Lancaster1901 focussing on the beginning of the twentieth century. b) Enhance the encoding and annotation of Lancaster1901 and the three existing corpora (Lancaster1931, LOB and FLOB), and release the enhancements to the academic community. The proposed research contributes in two important ways to the study of the history of English during one of its most rapid phases of development. It provides a package of corpora across the whole twentieth century; and it allows us to deepen the analysis by systematically taking into account the contribution of semantic factors in the distributional behaviour of grammatical categories. Together these developments will help us to provide a comprehensive picture of changing grammatical usage in British English in the twentieth century.

Principal Investigator - Lancaster

Paul Rayson

Co-investigators

Geoffrey Leech (Linguistics, Lancaster University), Martin Wynne (Oxford University Computing Services)

Researchers

Nick Smith

Research Theme

Cooperative & Interactive Systems

Related Publications

Smith, N., Leech, G. and Rayson, P. (2006), "The expression of obligation and necessity in British English across the twentieth century: developments in matching corpora". 14th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (14 ICEHL), Bergamo, Italy, 21-25 August 2006.

Rayson, P. and Smith, N., (2006), "The key domain method for the study of language varieties", The Third Inter-Varietal Applied Corpus Studies (IVACS) group International Conference on "LANGUAGE AT THE INTERFACE". University of Nottingham, UK, 23-24 June 2006 HTML

Smith, N., Leech, G. and Rayson, P., (2006), "Exploring grammatical change across the twentieth century: A backward step permits further advance". 27th conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME) University of Helsinki, Finland, 24-28 May, 2006

Smith, N., Rayson, P., Leech, G., and Wynne, M., (2005), "Changing English across the twentieth century: enhancements to an existing family of corpora", Poster presented at the Digital Resources for the Humanities conference (DRH 2005), Lancaster University, UK,