浙江大学肖忠华语料库session 12.ppt

Distribution of amplifiers across social classes The frequency of amplifiers declines steadily from AB to C1, and then to C2/DE, but the contrast between C1 and DE is not as marked as those for AB versus C1, and for C1 versus C2 DE shows a higher frequency than C2 because the swear term included in this study, bloody, is much more frequent in the data for DE than for other classes Bloody is a frequent amplifier (over 100 instances per M words) used by all social classes except AB, with its NF increasing steadily from higher to lower class AB (70.24), C1 (169.89), C2 (226.47), DE (300.98) LL=612.64 for 3 d.f., p0.001 Tag questions: Sociolinguistic variation Forms of tag questions Its a joke isnt it? Still, I cant win them all, can I? Pragmatic functions of tag questions (Holmes 1983) Facilitating Softening Challenging BNCWeb signup / login http://bncweb.lancs.ac.uk/bncwebSignup/user/login.php Extracting tag questions in the BNC BNCWeb Distribution Encoded metadata Speaker gender Speaker age Speaker social class For a full study of tag questions, see Tottie, Gunnel and Sebastian, Hoffmann (2006) Tag Questions in British and American English. Journal of English Linguistics. 34(4):283-311 Extra practice with BNCweb Some facts (Daily Mail, 19/01/2009) 87% of Britons swear on a daily basis They swear 14 times a day on average Extra practice with the BNCweb Questions Do female speakers swear more often than males? Which age groups swear frequently and which tend to avoid swearing? Is swearing related to the social class of the speaker? Do people swear more often when they speaker or write? Extra practice with the BNCweb Case study: sociolinguistic variation of f**k in the BNC ‘one of the most interesting and colourful words in the English language today’ that can be used to describe pain, pleasure, hatred and even love (Andersson and Trudgill, 1992: 60) Tips: search for {fuck} so-called “lemma” search For a full study of the swear word, see McEnery, Tony and Xiao, Ric