Cover not available
Part of
Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics
Edited by Tanja Säily, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin and Anita Auer
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 7] 2017
► pp. 23–52

Exploring part-of-speech frequencies in a sociohistorical corpus of English

| University of Helsinki
| University of Helsinki

We investigate the usefulness of part-of-speech (POS) annotation as a tool in the study of sociolinguistic variation and genre evolution. We analyse how POS ratios change over time in the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (c.1410–1681), which social groups lead the changes, and whether the changes can be connected to colloquialisation with regard to reduced complexity or an increasingly involved style. While we find gentry-led colloquialisation in terms of noun and verb frequencies as well as evidence for gendered styles, the results on structural complexity are more mixed. We argue that POS annotation can be a useful tool when complemented by a thorough textual analysis, but that more fine-grained categories are needed to reach firmer conclusions.

Keywords: part-of-speech frequencies, historical sociolinguistics, language change, genre evolution, colloquialisation, structural complexity, gendered styles, involved text production, exploratory data analysis, correspondence
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1POS ratios in the study of (sociolinguistic) variation
    • 2.2Complexity in the genre of personal correspondence
  • 3.Material and method
    • 3.1PCEEC and ReCEEC
    • 3.2Visualisation
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Complexity in the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence
    • 4.2Colloquialisation and gendered styles
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 19 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.7.02sai
References
Argamon, Shlomo, Moshe Koppel, Jonathan Fine & Anat Rachel Shimoni
2003 Gender, genre, and writing style in formal written texts. Text 23(3). 321–346. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Atzmueller, Martin
2015 Subgroup discovery. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 5(1). 35–49. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bamman, David, Jacob Eisenstein & Tyler Schnoebelen
2014 Gender identity and lexical variation in social media. Journal of Sociolinguistics 18(2). 135–160. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bell, Allan
1984 Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13(2). 145–204. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas
1988 Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1992 On the complexity of discourse complexity: A multidimensional analysis. Discourse Processes 15(2). 133–163. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1995 Dimensions of register variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Jena Burges
2000 Historical change in the language use of women and men: Gender differences in dramatic dialogue. Journal of English Linguistics 28(1). 21–37. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Susan Conrad
2009 Register, genre, and style (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Edward Finegan
1989 Drift and the evolution of English style: A history of three genres. Language 65(3). 487–517. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1997 Diachronic relations among speech-based and written registers in English. In Terttu Nevalainen & Leena Kahlas-Tarkka (eds.), To explain the present: Studies in the changing English language in honour of Matti Rissanen (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki 52), 253–275. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Bethany Gray
2010 Being specific about historical change: The influence of sub-register. Journal of English Linguistics 41(2). 104–134. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 The historical shift of scientific academic prose in English towards less explicit styles of expression: Writing without verbs. In Vijay Bhatia, Purificación Sánchez Hernández & Pascual Pérez-Paredes (eds.), Researching specialized languages (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 47), 11–24. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Bethany Gray & Shelley Staples
2016 Predicting patterns of grammatical complexity across language exam task types and proficiency levels. Applied Linguistics 37(5). 639–668. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carpenter, Bob, Andrew Gelman, Matt Hoffman, Daniel Lee, Ben Goodrich, Michael Betancourt, Marcus Brubaker, Jiqiang Guo, Peter Li & Allen Riddell
2017 Stan: A probabilistic programming language. Journal of Statistical Software 76(1). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chafe, Wallace
1982 Integration and involvement in speaking, writing, and oral literature. In Deborah Tannen (ed.), Spoken and written language, 35–53. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. & Ruqaiya Hasan
1976 Cohesion in English. London & New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Hardie, Andrew
2007 Part-of-speech ratios in English corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12(1). 55–81. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heylighen, Francis & Jean-Marc Dewaele
2002 Variation in the contextuality of language: An empirical measure. Foundations of Science 7(3). 293–340. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hinneburg, Alexander, Heikki Mannila, Samuli Kaislaniemi, Terttu Nevalainen & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg
2007 How to handle small samples: Bootstrap and Bayesian methods in the analysis of linguistic change. Literary and Linguistic Computing 22(2). 137–150. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Geoffrey K. Pullum
(eds.) 2002 The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hudson, Richard
1994 About 37% of word-tokens are nouns. Language 70(2). 331–339. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Karlsson, Fred
2008 Complexity in linguistic theorizing. The Mental Lexicon 9(2). 144–169.Google Scholar
Kohnen, Thomas
2007 ‘Connective profiles’ in the history of English texts. Aspects of orality and literacy. In Ursula Lenker & Anneli Meurman-Solin (eds.), Connectives in the history of English, 289–308. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, William
1982 Building on empirical foundations. In Winfred P. Lehmann & Yakov Malkiel (eds.), Perspectives on historical linguistics: Papers from a conference held at the meeting of the Language Theory Division, Modern Language Assn, San Francisco, 27–30 December 1979 (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 24), 17–92. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1990 The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change. Language Variation and Change 2(2). 205–254. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1994 Principles of linguistic change, volume 1: Internal factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Laslett, Peter
1965 The world we have lost. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.Google Scholar
Lehto, Anu
2015 The genre of Early Modern English statutes: Complexity in historical legal language (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki 97). Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.Google Scholar
Mair, Christian, Marianne Hundt, Geoffrey Leech & Nicholas Smith
2002 Short term diachronic shifts in part-of-speech frequencies. A comparison of the tagged LOB and F-LOB corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 7(2). 245–264. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mäkelä, Eetu, Tanja Säily & Terttu Nevalainen
2016 Khepri – a modular view-based tool for exploring (historical sociolinguistic) data. In Maciej Eder & Jan Rybicki (eds.), Digital Humanities 2016: Conference abstracts, 269–272. Kraków: Jagiellonian University & Pedagogical University.Google Scholar
Markus, Manfred
2001 The development of prose in Early Modern English in view of the gender question: Using grammatical idiosyncracies of 15th and 17th century letters. European Journal of English Studies 5(2). 181–196. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Meurman-Solin, Anneli
2011 Utterance-initial connective elements in early Scottish epistolary prose. In Anneli Meurman-Solin & Ursula Lenker (eds.), Connectives in synchrony and diachrony in European languages (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 8). Helsinki: VARIENG. [URL] (17 December, 2016.)Google Scholar
Nevala, Minna
2004 Address in early English correspondence: Its forms and socio-pragmatic functions (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki 64). Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu
2002 Language and woman’s place in earlier English. Journal of English Linguistics 30(2). 181–199. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg
2003 Historical sociolinguistics: Language change in Tudor and Stuart England (Longman Linguistics Library). London: Pearson Education.Google Scholar
Newman, Matthew L., Carla J. Groom, Lori D. Handelman & James W. Pennebaker
2008 Gender differences in language use: An analysis of 14,000 text samples. Discourse Processes 45(3). 211–236. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Palander-Collin, Minna
1999 Grammaticalization and social embedding: I THINK and METHINKS in Middle and Early Modern English (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki 55). Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.Google Scholar
2000 The language of husbands and wives in seventeenth-century correspondence. In Christian Mair & Marianne Hundt (eds.), Corpus linguistics and linguistics theory. Papers from the twentieth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 20), Freiburg im Breisgau 1999 (Language and Computers: Studies in Practical Linguistics 33), 289–300. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
PCEEC = Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, tagged version 2006 Annotated by Arja Nurmi, Ann Taylor, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk & Terttu Nevalainen. Compiled by the CEEC Project Team. York: University of York & Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Distributed through the Oxford Text Archive. [URL] (17 December, 2016.)Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik
1985 A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
R Core Team
2016 R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. [URL] (17 December, 2016.)Google Scholar
Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena & Terttu Nevalainen
2007 Historical sociolinguistics: The Corpus of Early English Correspondence. In Joan C. Beal, Karen P. Corrigan & Hermann L. Moisl (eds.), Creating and digitizing language corpora, volume 2: Diachronic databases, 148–171. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rayson, Paul, Geoffrey Leech & Mary Hodges
1997 Social differentiation in the use of English vocabulary: Some analyses of the conversational component of the British National Corpus. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 2(1). 133–152. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rescher, Nicholas
1998 Complexity: A philosophical overview. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.Google Scholar
Säily, Tanja, Terttu Nevalainen & Harri Siirtola
2011 Variation in noun and pronoun frequencies in a sociohistorical corpus of English. Literary and Linguistic Computing 26(2). 167–188. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Santorini, Beatrice
2016 Annotation manual for the Penn Historical Corpora and the York-Helsinki Corpus of Early English Correspondence. [URL] (17 December, 2016.)Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah
1987 Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Siirtola, Harri, Poika Isokoski, Tanja Säily & Terttu Nevalainen
2016 Interactive text visualization with Text Variation Explorer. In Ebad Banissi, Mark W. McK. Bannatyne, Fatma Bouali, Remo Burkhard, John Counsell, Urska Cvek, Martin J. Eppler, Georges Grinstein, Wei Dong Huang, Sebastian Kernbach, Chun-Cheng Lin, Feng Lin, Francis T. Marchese, Chi Man Pun, Muhammad Sarfraz, Marjan Trutschl, Anna Ursyn, Gilles Venturini, Theodor G. Wyeld & Jian J. Zhang (eds.), Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Information Visualisation (IV 2016), 330–335. Los Alamitos, California, CA: IEEE Computer Society. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Siirtola, Harri, Terttu Nevalainen, Tanja Säily & Kari-Jouko Räihä
2011 Visualisation of text corpora: A case study of the PCEEC. In Terttu Nevalainen & Susan M. Fitzmaurice (eds.), How to deal with data: Problems and approaches to the investigation of the English language over time and space (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 7). Helsinki: VARIENG. [URL] (17 December, 2016.)Google Scholar
Siirtola, Harri, Tanja Säily, Terttu Nevalainen & Kari-Jouko Räihä
2014 Text Variation Explorer: Towards interactive visualization tools for corpus linguistics. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 19(3). 417–429. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smitterberg, Erik
2008 The progressive and phrasal verbs: Evidence of colloquialization in nineteenth-century English? In Terttu Nevalainen, Irma Taavitsainen, Päivi Pahta & Minna Korhonen (eds.), The dynamics of linguistic variation: Corpus evidence on English past and present (Studies in Language Variation 2), 269–289. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tannen, Deborah
1991 You just don’t understand: Women and men in conversation. New York: Morrow and Company.Google Scholar
Taylor, Ann
2007 The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. In Joan C. Beal, Karen P. Corrigan & Hermann L. Moisl (eds.), Creating and digitizing language corpora, volume 2: Diachronic databases, 196–227. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Ann & Beatrice Santorini
2006 The Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence. University of York. [URL] (17 December, 2016.)
Vartiainen, Turo, Tanja Säily & Mikko Hakala
2013 Variation in pronoun frequencies in early English letters: Gender-based or relationship-based? In Jukka Tyrkkö, Olga Timofeeva & Maria Salenius (eds.), Ex philologia lux: Essays in honour of Leena Kahlas-Tarkka (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki 90), 233–255. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Leiwo, Martti
2020. L2 Greek in Roman Egypt: Intense language contact in Roman military forts. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 6:2 DOI logo
Rudnicka, Karolina
2018. Variation of sentence length across time and genre. In Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 85], ► pp. 219 ff. DOI logo
Saario, Lassi, Tanja Säily, Samuli Kaislaniemi & Terttu Nevalainen
2021. The burden of legacy: Producing the Tagged Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension (TCEECE). Research in Corpus Linguistics 9:1 ► pp. 104 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.