Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus LinguisticsVol. 14:3 (2009) ► pp.312–337
The BE06 Corpus of British English and recent language change
This paper describes the BE06 Corpus, a one million word reference corpus of general written British English that was designed to be comparable to the Brown family of corpora. After providing a description of the Brown sampling frame, and giving the rationale for building a new corpus, the process of building the BE06 is elaborated upon, with reference to collecting previously published texts from internet sources, defining “British” authors and enabling accessibility of the corpus. Three studies of lexical frequency using BE06 and comparable corpora (LOB, FLOB and BLOB) are then carried out. These involve a comparison of the 20 most frequent lexical items, an examination of pronoun usage, and an investigation of keywords derived from comparing the 1991 FLOB corpus with the BE06. The paper ends with a critical evaluation of the worth of using the same sampling frame for linguistic studies of diachronic variation.
Keywords: diachronic variation, keywords, pronouns, frequency
Cited by
Cited by 56 other publications
Al-Thubaity, Abdulmohsen, Hend Al-Khalifa, Reem Alqifari & Manal Almazrua
2014. Proposed Framework for the Evaluation of Standalone Corpora Processing Systems: An Application to Arabic Corpora. The Scientific World Journal 2014 ► pp. 1 ff. 
Anthony, Laurence & Paul Baker
Baker, Paul
2010. Will Ms ever be as frequent as Mr?. Gender and Language 4:1 ► pp. 125 ff.
Baker, Paul
2011. Times May Change, But We Will Always Have Money: Diachronic Variation in Recent British English. Journal of English Linguistics 39:1 ► pp. 65 ff.
Baker, Paul
Brezina, Vaclav
2018. Collocation Graphs and Networks: Selected Applications. In Lexical Collocation Analysis [Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences, ], ► pp. 59 ff.
Brezina, Vaclav
2018. Statistics in Corpus Linguistics,
Brezina, Vaclav & Dana Gablasova
2015. Is There a Core General Vocabulary? Introducing the New General Service List. Applied Linguistics 36:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Brezina, Vaclav, Abi Hawtin & Tony McEnery
2021. The Written British National Corpus 2014 – design and comparability. Text & Talk 41:5-6 ► pp. 595 ff.
Brezina, Vaclav, Tony McEnery & Stephen Wattam
Brookes, Gavin & Paul Baker
2022. Fear and responsibility: discourses of obesity and risk in the UK press. Journal of Risk Research 25:3 ► pp. 363 ff.
Brookes, Gavin & Tony McEnery
2019. Corpus linguistics for indexing. The Indexer 37:2 ► pp. 105 ff.
Collins, Peter & Xinyue Yao
2018. Colloquialisation and the evolution of Australian English. English World-Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English 39:3 ► pp. 253 ff.
Collins, Peter & Xinyue Yao
2019. AusBrown: A new diachronic corpus of Australian English. ICAME Journal 43:1 ► pp. 5 ff.
Coltman-Patel, Tara & David Wright
2023. Sexualising weight loss in British tabloids. Journal of Language and Discrimination 7:1
Davies, Mark
2017. Using Large Online Corpora to Examine Lexical, Semantic, and Cultural Variation in Different Dialects and Time Periods. In Studies in Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics, ► pp. 19 ff.
Davies, Mark
Davies, Mark & Jong-Bok Kim
2019. Historical shifts with the into-causative construction in American English
. Linguistics 57:1 ► pp. 29 ff.
Dayter, Daria & Sofia Rüdiger
2020. Chapter 3. Talking about women. In Corpus Approaches to Social Media [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 98], ► pp. 63 ff.
Fuster-Márquez, Miguel & Carmen Gregori-Signes
2018. Persuading consumers: The use of conditional constructions in British hotel websites. Discourse & Communication 12:6 ► pp. 587 ff.
Hackert, Stephanie & Dagmar Deuber
2015. American influence on written Caribbean English. In Grammatical Change in English World-Wide [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 67], ► pp. 389 ff.
Hackert, Stephanie & Diana Wengler
2022. Recent Grammatical Change in Postcolonial Englishes: A Real-time Study of Genitive Variation in Caribbean and Indian News Writing. Journal of English Linguistics 50:1 ► pp. 3 ff.
Hasselgård, Hilde
2021. Time adverbials in English and Norwegian news discourse. In Time in Languages, Languages in Time [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 101], ► pp. 201 ff.
Hirota, Tomoharu
2020. Diffusion of do. In Late Modern English [Studies in Language Companion Series, 214], ► pp. 118 ff.
Hocking, Darryl
2021. Artist’s statements, ‘how to guides’ and the conceptualisation of creative practice. English for Specific Purposes 62 ► pp. 103 ff.
Hoffmann, Sebastian
2012. Corpora: English‐Language. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics,
Isaacs, Talia, Jamie Murdoch, Zsófia Demjén & Fiona Stevenson
2022. Examining the language demands of informed consent documents in patient recruitment to cancer trials using tools from corpus and computational linguistics. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine 26:4 ► pp. 431 ff.
Kitis, Eliza & E. Dimitris Kitis
2015. Meaning Ruptures and Meaningful Eruptions in the Service of Rhetoric: Populist Flare-Up Hits the Greek Political Pitch. In The Exercise of Power in Communication, ► pp. 43 ff.
Kreischer, Kim-Sue
2019. The relation and function of discourses: a corpus-cognitive analysis of the Irish abortion debate. Corpora 14:1 ► pp. 105 ff.
Křen, Michal
2017. Grammatical Change Trends in Contemporary Czech Newspapers. Journal of Linguistics/Jazykovedný casopis 68:2 ► pp. 238 ff.
Lam Sut I, Michelle
2023. Introduction. In A Corpus-assisted Multimodal Analysis to Policy Addresses of Macao SAR Government [Corpora and Intercultural Studies, 11], ► pp. 1 ff.
Lehmann, Hans Martin
2018. Lexical preference and variation in the complementation of provide
. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 23:1 ► pp. 55 ff.
Lillis, Theresa, Maria Leedham & Alison Twiner
2020. Time, the Written Record, and Professional Practice: The Case of Contemporary Social Work. Written Communication 37:4 ► pp. 431 ff.
Livesey, Michael
2023. Introducing the ‘conceptual archive’: A genealogy of counterterrorism in 1970s Britain. European Journal of International Security ► pp. 1 ff.
Lundberg, Jonas & Mikko Laitinen
2020. Twitter trolls: a linguistic profile of anti-democratic discourse. Language Sciences 79 ► pp. 101268 ff.
Mair, Christian
2021. Recent advances in the corpus-based study of ongoing grammatical change in English. Text & Talk 41:5-6 ► pp. 763 ff.
Mair, Christian & Geoffrey N. Leech
2020. Current Changes in English Syntax. In The Handbook of English Linguistics, ► pp. 249 ff.
Murphy, M. Lynne
2018. American and British English: Divided by a Common Language?. Journal of English Linguistics 46:4 ► pp. 351 ff.
Owen, Thomas & Taylor Annabell
2018. The Panama Papers in New Zealand media: A modern diachronic corpus assisted discourse study. Discourse, Context & Media 24 ► pp. 117 ff.
Partington, Alan
2010. Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS) on UK newspapers: an overview of the project. Corpora 5:2 ► pp. 83 ff.
Partington, Alan
2018. Intimations of ‘Spring’? What Got Said and What Didn’t Get Said about the Start of the Middle Eastern/North African Uprisings: A Corpus-assisted Discourse Study of a Historical Event. In Exploring Silence and Absence in Discourse, ► pp. 95 ff.
Paterson, Laura L.
2018. ‘You Can Just Give Those Documents to Myself’. In Corpus Approaches to Contemporary British Speech, ► pp. 235 ff.
Paterson, Laura L.
2020. Non-sexist Language Policy and the Rise (and Fall?) of Combined Pronouns in British and American Written English. Journal of English Linguistics 48:3 ► pp. 258 ff.
Pollach, Irene
2012. Taming Textual Data: The Contribution of Corpus Linguistics to Computer-Aided Text Analysis. Organizational Research Methods 15:2 ► pp. 263 ff.
Prentice, Sheryl, Paul Rayson, Jo Knight, Mahmoud El-Haj & Solly Elstein
2022. A Domain Based Approach to Semantic Lexicon Expansion. International Journal of Lexicography 35:3 ► pp. 364 ff.
Rühlemann, Christoph & Martin Hilpert
2017. Colloquialization in journalistic writing. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 18:1 ► pp. 104 ff.
Schalley, Andrea C., Simon Musgrave & Michael Haugh
2014. Accessing Phonetic Variation in Spoken Language Corpora through Non-standard Orthography. Australian Journal of Linguistics 34:1 ► pp. 139 ff.
Schützler, Ole
2020. Frequency changes and stylistic levelling of though in diachronic and synchronic varieties of English – linguistic democratisation?. Language Sciences 79 ► pp. 101266 ff.
SCHÜTZLER, OLE & JENNY HERZKY
2022. Modal verbs of strong obligation in Scottish Standard English. English Language and Linguistics 26:1 ► pp. 133 ff.
Stajner, Sanja, Ruslan Mitkov & Geoffrey Leech
2013. Natural Language Processing methodology for tracking diachronic changes in the 20th century English language. Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science 1:1
Taylor, Charlotte
2013. Searching for similarity using corpus-assisted discourse studies. Corpora 8:1 ► pp. 81 ff.
Walsh, Catherine
2020. Constructing Experts Without Expertise: Fiscal Reporting in the British Press, 2010–2016. Journalism Studies 21:15 ► pp. 2059 ff.
Yao, Xinyue & Peter Collins
2013. Recent change in non-present perfect constructions in British and American English. Corpora 8:1 ► pp. 115 ff.
Yao, Xinyue & Peter Collins
2019. Developments in Australian, British, and American English Grammar from 1931 to 2006: An Aggregate, Comparative Approach to Dialectal Variation and Change. Journal of English Linguistics 47:2 ► pp. 120 ff.
[no author supplied]
2013. Technological solutions to offending. In Understanding and Preventing Online Sexual Exploitation of Children, ► pp. 244 ff.
[no author supplied]
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 august 2023. 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.