浙江大学肖忠华语料库session 10.ppt

Each spoken corpus contains 80,000 words from a comparable and balanced range of spoken genres * 1) Between 1961 and 1991, the modals declined very significantly in frequency in written English in both American and British (The overall percentage losses are –9.5% in BrE and –12.2% in AmE) 2) A roughly similar pattern of falling frequency is observed in both BrE and AmE corpora: The most frequent modals decline least, and the least frequent modals decline most in percentage terms. * Biber et al (1999: 461-3): The progressive to be more common in conversation than in written genres. Biber et al (1999: 476-7): The passive is strongly associated with the written medium. Questions should be excluded from the list of colloquialization phenomena, as the increase of quoted speech in FLOB compared with LOB provides a readier explanation for the increasing occurrence of questions and tag questions. * Diachronic study and language change Corpus Linguistics Richard Xiao lancsxiaoz@ Aims of this session Lecture Corpora vs. diachronic study The state of the art of corpus-based diachronic studies Case study: recent change in English grammar Lab session Using the Time corpus to explore full and bare infinitives in American English between the 1920s and the 2000s Corpora vs. diachronic study The nature of diachronic study determines its reliance on empirical historical data Diachronic study is perhaps one of the few areas which can only be investigated using corpus data (cf. Bauer 2002: 109) The intuitions of modern speakers have little to offer regarding the language used hundreds or even tens of years ago Helsinki corpus and related books Three books based on the Helsinki corpus on the project “English in transition: Change through variation” Early English in the Computer Age: Exploration through the Helsinki Corpus (Rissanen, Kyt? and Palander-Collin 1993) English in Transition: Corpus-based Studies in Linguistic Variation and Genre Styles (Rissanen, Kyt? and Heikkonen 1997)