The Spoken BNC2014 Love, Robbie; Dembry, Claire; Hardie, Andrew ...
International journal of corpus linguistics,
01/2017, Volume:
22, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Abstract
This paper introduces the Spoken British National Corpus 2014, an 11.5-million-word corpus of orthographically transcribed conversations among L1 speakers of British English from across the ...UK, recorded in the years 2012–2016. After showing that a survey of the recent history of corpora of spoken British English justifies the compilation of this new corpus, we describe the main stages of the Spoken BNC2014’s creation: design, data and metadata collection, transcription, XML encoding, and annotation. In doing so we aim to (i) encourage users of the corpus to approach the data with sensitivity to the many methodological issues we identified and attempted to overcome while compiling the Spoken BNC2014, and (ii) inform (future) compilers of spoken corpora of the innovations we implemented to attempt to make the construction of corpora representing spontaneous speech in informal contexts more tractable, both logistically and practically, than in the past.
In this article, we examine methods that participants use to resolve troubles in the realization of practical courses of action. The concept of recruitment is developed to encompass the linguistic ...and embodied ways in which assistance may be sought-requested or solicited-or in which we come to perceive another's need and offer or volunteer assistance. We argue that these methods are organized as a continuum, from explicit requests, to practices that elicit offers, to anticipations of need. We further identify a class of subsidiary actions that can precede recruitment and that publicly expose troubles and thereby create opportunities for others to assist. Data are in American and British English.
Sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that ‘urban contact dialects’ tend to diffuse beyond the speech communities in which they first emerge. However, no research has attempted to explore the ...distribution of these varieties across an entire nation nor isolate the social mechanisms that propel their spread. In this paper, we use a corpus of 1.8 billion geo‐tagged tweets to explore the spread of Multicultural London English (MLE) lexis across the United Kingdom. We find evidence for the diffusion of MLE lexis from East and North London into other ethnically and culturally diverse urban centres across England, particularly those in the South (e.g. Luton), but find lower frequencies of MLE lexis in the North of England (e.g. Manchester), and in Scotland and Wales. Concluding, we emphasise the role of demographic similarity in the diffusion of linguistic innovations by demonstrating that this variety originated in London and diffused into other urban areas in England through the social networks of Black and Asian users.
Social class is one of the key axes of sociolinguistic variation, but the speech of those at the top of the class spectrum—the elite—is rarely studied. While T‐glottalling has spread widely across ...British English accents, a competing variant—T‐tapping—has attracted little scholarly attention in the United Kingdom. This article presents a study of elite speech by examining sociolinguistic variation in T‐tapping among adolescent speakers of Standard Southern British English. Data were collected from interviews with teenagers aged 16–19 at two schools in Hampshire, UK. T‐tapping is led by those who previously attended private school and is used more by boys than girls in formal speech. The findings suggest that T‐tapping may be used to index a combination of authority and informality, which is invoked by elite speakers to assert themselves from a position of privilege while maintaining an image of openness and approachability.
SAMENVATTING
Sociale klasse is een van de belangrijkste factoren in sociolinguïstische variatie, maar de spraak van degenen aan de top van het klassenspectrum – de elite – wordt zelden onderzocht. Terwijl T‐glottalisatie zich in accenten van het Brits Engels wijdverspreid is, heeft een concurrerende variant – ‘T‐tapping’ (het vervangen van t door de alveolaire tap) – in het Verenigd Koninkrijk weinig wetenschappelijke aandacht gekregen. Dit artikel bespreekt een sociolinguïstisch onderzoek naar T‐tapping bij adolescente sprekers van Standaard Zuidelijk Brits Engels. De gegevens zijn verzameld aan de hand van interviews met jongeren van 16 tot 19 jaar op twee scholen in Hampshire in het Verenigd Koninkrijk. T‐tapping wordt meer gebruikt door leerlingen die vóór hun huidige school op een privéschool hebben gezeten, en in formele registers ook meer door jongens dan door meisjes. De bevindingen suggereren dat T‐tapping gebruikt kan worden om een combinatie van autoriteit en informaliteit te indexeren, waarop elitesprekers zich beroepen om zich te doen gelden vanuit een bevoorrechte positie, terwijl zij een imago van openheid en aanspreekbaarheid kunnen behouden.
The instruction of embodied skills often involves pair-like sequences consisting of an instructor's directive to perform an embodied action and a learner's (attempted) bodily performance of that ...action. This study explores the organization of such sequences in horse-riding lessons. Whereas in most of the studied data, learners' performances of instructed actions are accompanied by continuing instructor talk, this study focuses on those rarer occasions when instructors observe learners in silence. The data show that silent observation often occurs at the beginning of an instructional sequence and also during instructed activities that are preparatory, operational, or otherwise not under evaluation. Instructors can abandon their initial silence when local events call for verbal support, showing that learners' embodied actions are continuously susceptible to verbal commentary. In addition to silence, instructors also use embodied conduct to demarcate instruction and compliance and to position themselves as scrutinizing observers. The data are in British English.
Efforts to combat continuing gender inequalities in academia need to be informed by evidence about where differences occur. Citations are relevant as potential evidence in appointment and promotion ...decisions, but it is unclear whether there have been historical gender differences in average citation impact that might explain the current shortfall of senior female academics. This study investigates the evolution of gender differences in citation impact 1996–2018 for six million articles from seven large English‐speaking nations: Australia, Canada, Ireland, Jamaica, New Zealand, UK, and the USA. The results show that a small female citation advantage has been the norm over time for all these countries except the USA, where there has been no practical difference. The female citation advantage is largest, and statistically significant in most years, for Australia and the UK. This suggests that any academic bias against citing female‐authored research cannot explain current employment inequalities. Nevertheless, comparisons using recent citation data, or avoiding it altogether, during appointments or promotion may disadvantage females in some countries by underestimating the likely greater impact of their work, especially in the long term.
Abstract This study offers a cross-cultural pragmatics perspective on invitations. It explores invitation se Q uences in a symmetrical invitation-refusal situation, performed by 20 female native ...speakers of British English and 20 female native speakers of Japanese, from a discursive approach using role plays. The qualitative analysis of the data obtained from the adapted version of conversation analysis revealed some similarities and differences in turn designs of the English and the Japanese invitations. Although pre-sequences were highly frequent in the English data, they were more so in the Japanese data. The analysis of the linguistic formats of the invitations in the two sets of data revealed that an approach to handle uncertainty seen in the cases where the invitation was initiated with a preface differed – the English speakers used a syntactic solution whereas the Japanese speakers used a sequential solution. These findings highlight the importance of analysing speech acts in situated interactions.
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