The Australian corpus project

Findings on the distribution of some functional variants in the Australian press

Pam Peters | Macquarie University, University of New South Wales

Peter Collins | Macquarie University, University of New South Wales

David Blair | Macquarie University, University of New South Wales

Alison Brierley

The functional variants of International English are often differently distributed in the different regional standards. With evidence from the corpus of Australian English, this has already been shown for lexical variants such as will/shall, maybe/perhaps etc. In this paper evidence from the Australian corpus is used to discuss a number of variables in

a) morphology

b) the system of conjunction

c) the system of quantifiers.

The redistribution of morphological variants-edl-t (as in burned/burnt), and -wards(s) (as in downward(s)) showed a tendency to assign different grammatical roles to each variant. Among the conjunctions, apart from individual differences the most interesting finding was the higher level overall in the use of subordinating conjunctions, when Australian newspaper data was compared with the equivalent in Britain or America. A possible explanation for this invokes the Hallidayan principle that subordination is actually more common in speech than in writing. The suggestion is that Australian press reporting approximates more closely to spoken than to written norms of language. But on the quantifiers a few/several the corpus provides no support for a new popular use of several, to mean vaguely large number.

Published online: 01 January 1988
https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.11.1.03pet

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Cited by

Cited by other publications

Dash, Niladri Sekhar & S. Arulmozi

2018. In History, Features, and Typology of Language Corpora, ► pp. 187 ff.

Nelson, Gerald

2019. In The Handbook of World Englishes, ► pp. 523 ff.

Peters, Pam & Margery Fee

1989. New configurations: The balance of British and American English features in Australian and Canadian English∗. Australian Journal of Linguistics 9:1 ► pp. 135 ff.

Romaine, Suzanne

1999. In The Cambridge History of the English Language, ► pp. 01 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 august 2020. 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.