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Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 24:2 (2019) ► pp.169–201

Variation and change in a specialized register

A comparison of random and sociolinguistic sampling outcomes in Desert Island Discs

| University of Leicester
| University of Leicester

Corpus-based studies of specialized registers typically sample texts using random methods as far as possible, but they disregard social characteristics of the speakers/writers. In contrast, in corpus-based studies of conversation and quantitative sociolinguistic studies, sampling is more typically designed to optimize social representation. To our knowledge, this study is the first to compare linguistic outcomes from random versus sociolinguistic sampling in a specialized register. Our data comes from the biographical radio chat show, Desert Island Discs (DID), at different points in time. We constructed two versions of a DID corpus: a sociolinguistic judgment sample based on guest demographics, and a random sample. We compare grammatical usage between them using an inductive (‘key POS-tags’) method and close manual analysis, uncovering some evidence of significant grammatical differences between the samples and differing patterns of diachronic change. We discuss the implications of our research for corpus design, representativeness and analysis in specialized registers.

Keywords: register, sociolinguistic judgment sampling, random sampling, representativeness, key-POS
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Corpus sampling and representativeness in register-based and sociolinguistic studies
  • 3.Data and methods
    • 3.1 Desert Island Discs: Register characteristics and suitability for the study
    • 3.2Corpus design
      • 3.2.1The Socio sample
        • i.Gender
        • ii.Age
        • iii.Occupation
        • iv.Education
      • 3.2.2The Random sample
    • 3.3Analytical methods
      • 3.3.1Grammatical analysis: Key POS-tag comparisons
      • 3.3.2Frequency measures
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Overview of synchronic and diachronic key POS-tag comparisons
    • 4.2Case study 1: Adverbs
    • 4.3Case study 2: Verb tenses
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17117.smi
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