Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus LinguisticsVol. 2:1 (1997) ► pp.133–152
Social Differentiation in the Use of English Vocabulary
Some Analyses of the Conversational Component of the British National Corpus
In this article, we undertake selective quantitative analyses of the demographi-cally-sampled spoken English component of the British National Corpus (for brevity, referred to here as the ''Conversational Corpus"). This is a subcorpus of c. 4.5 million words, in which speakers and respondents (see I below) are identified by such factors as gender, age, social group, and geographical region. Using a corpus analysis tool developed at Lancaster, we undertake a comparison of the vocabulary of speakers, highlighting those differences which are marked by a very high X2 value of difference between different sectors of the corpus according to gender, age, and social group. A fourth variable, that of geographical region of the United Kingdom, is not investigated in this article, although it remains a promising subject for future research. (As background we also briefly examine differences between spoken and written material in the British National Corpus [BNC].) This study is illustrative of the potentiality of the Conversational Corpus for future corpus-based research on social differentiation in the use of language. There are evident limitations, including (a) the reliance on vocabulary frequency lists and (b) the simplicity of the transcription system employed for the spoken part of the BNC The conclusion of the article considers future advances in the research paradigm illustrated here.
Cited by (88)
Cited by 88 other publications
Säily, Tanja, Turo Vartiainen, Harri Siirtola & Terttu Nevalainen
2024. Changing styles of letter-writing?. In Unlocking the History of English [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 364], ► pp. 154 ff. 
van Dorst, Isolde, Mathew Gillings & Jonathan Culpeper
2024. Sociopragmatic variation in Britain: A corpus-based study of politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 227 ► pp. 37 ff.
Van Driessche, Laetitia
2024. Susanne Flach and Martin Hilpert (eds.), Broadening the spectrum of corpus linguistics: New approaches to variability and change (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 105). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2022. Pp. vi + 321. ISBN 9789027212665.. English Language and Linguistics 28:2 ► pp. 439 ff.
Vartiainen, Turo & Tanja Säily
2024. Engaging with bad (meta)data in historical corpus linguistics. In Challenges in Corpus Linguistics [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 118], ► pp. 9 ff.
Zhang, Shaomin
2024. Authorship Analysis in Chinese Social Media Texts,
Piersoul, Jozefien & Freek Van de Velde
2023. Men use more complex language than women, but the difference has decreased over time: a study on 120 years of written Dutch. Linguistics 61:3 ► pp. 725 ff.
Zhang, Beibei, Yaqun Fang, Fan Yu, Jia Bei & Tongwei Ren
2023. Proceedings of the 2023 ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval, ► pp. 289 ff.
Andersen, Gisle
2022. Utilising heterogeneous language resources for term extraction in maritime domains. Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 28:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Baker, Paul & Gavin Brookes
2022. Analysing Language, Sex and Age in a Corpus of Patient Feedback,
Bernaisch, Tobias
2022. Comparing Generalised Linear Mixed-Effects Models, Generalised Linear Mixed-Effects Model Trees and Random Forests. In Data and Methods in Corpus Linguistics, ► pp. 163 ff.
Leone, Ljubica
2022. A Corpus-based Investigation of Modals in Spoken British English: Gender Variation and Change in the Years 1994 and 2014. English Studies 103:8 ► pp. 1318 ff.
Robinson, Jeffrey D., Christoph Rühlemann & Daniel Taylor Rodriguez
2022. The Bias Toward Single-Unit Turns in Conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction 55:2 ► pp. 165 ff.
Schneider, Gerold
2022. Recent changes in spoken British English in verbal and nominal constructions. In Broadening the Spectrum of Corpus Linguistics [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 105], ► pp. 172 ff.
Shiel, Lisha, Zsófia Demjén & Vaughan Bell
2022. Illusory social agents within and beyond voices: A computational linguistics analysis of the experience of psychosis. British Journal of Clinical Psychology 61:2 ► pp. 349 ff.
Collins, Peter
2021. Cultural keywords in World Englishes: A GloWbE-based study. ICAME Journal 45:1 ► pp. 5 ff.
Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania, Tanja Säily & Yuri Bizzoni
2021. Registerial Adaptation vs. Innovation Across Situational Contexts: 18th Century Women in Transition. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 4
Love, Robbie
2021. Swearing in informal spoken English: 1990s–2010s. Text & Talk 41:5-6 ► pp. 739 ff.
Rühlemann, Christoph & Martin Schweinberger
2021. Which word gets the nuclear stress in a turn-at-talk?. Journal of Pragmatics 178 ► pp. 426 ff.
Su, Hang
2021. Changing patterns of apology in spoken British English. Pragmatics and Society 12:3 ► pp. 410 ff.
Zhu, Shucheng, Xi Wang & Pengyuan Liu
2021. Who Killed Sanmao and Virginia Woolf? A Comparative Study of Writers with Suicidal Attempt Based on a Quantitative Linguistic Method. In Chinese Lexical Semantics [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 12278], ► pp. 408 ff.
Angelopoulou, Georgia, Erin L. Meier, Dimitrios Kasselimis, Yue Pan, Dimitrios Tsolakopoulos, George Velonakis, Efstratios Karavasilis, Nikolaos L. Kelekis, Dionysios Goutsos, Constantin Potagas & Swathi Kiran
2020. Investigating Gray and White Matter Structural Substrates of Sex Differences in the Narrative Abilities of Healthy Adults. Frontiers in Neuroscience 13
Davis, Boyd H. & Margaret A. Maclagan
2020. UH as a pragmatic marker in dementia discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 156 ► pp. 83 ff.
Desagulier, Guillaume
2020. Multivariate Exploratory Approaches. In A Practical Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, ► pp. 435 ff.
Jeaco, Stephen
2020. Key words when text forms the unit of study. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 25:2 ► pp. 125 ff.
Revis, Melanie & Tobias Bernaisch
2020. The pragmatic nativisation of pauses in Asian Englishes. World Englishes 39:1 ► pp. 135 ff.
Rühlemann, Christoph & Stefan Th. Gries
2020. Speakers advance-project turn completion by slowing down: A multifactorial corpus analysis. Journal of Phonetics 80 ► pp. 100976 ff.
Rühlemann, Christoph & Stefan Th. Gries
2021. How do speakers and hearers disambiguate multi-functional words?. Functions of Language 28:1 ► pp. 55 ff.
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Katharina Pabst
2020. ACoolComparison: Adjectives of Positive Evaluation in Toronto, Canada and York, England. Journal of English Linguistics 48:1 ► pp. 3 ff.
Brezina, Vaclav
2018. Statistics in Corpus Linguistics,
Karibayeva, Buadat & Salima Kunanbayeva
2018. Kazakh power distance dimension in business discourse. Social Semiotics 28:2 ► pp. 286 ff.
Motschenbacher, Heiko
2018. Corpus linguistics in language and sexuality studies. Journal of Language and Sexuality 7:2 ► pp. 145 ff.
Fuchs, Robert
2017. Do women (still) use more intensifiers than men?. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22:3 ► pp. 345 ff.
Fuchs, Robert
2020. Sociolinguistic Variation in Intensifier Usage in Indian and British English. In Gender in World Englishes, ► pp. 47 ff.
Laws, Jacqueline, Chris Ryder & Sylvia Jaworska
2017. A diachronic corpus-based study into the effects of age and gender on the usage patterns of verb-forming suffixation in spoken British English. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22:3 ► pp. 375 ff.
Säily, Tanja, Turo Vartiainen & Harri Siirtola
2017. Exploring part-of-speech frequencies in a sociohistorical corpus of English. In Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 7], ► pp. 23 ff.
Gorman, Kyle, Lindsay Olson, Alison Presmanes Hill, Rebecca Lunsford, Peter A. Heeman & Jan P. H. van Santen
2016. Uhandumin children with autism spectrum disorders or language impairment. Autism Research 9:8 ► pp. 854 ff.
Lijffijt, Jefrey, Terttu Nevalainen, Tanja Säily, Panagiotis Papapetrou, Kai Puolamäki & Heikki Mannila
2016. Significance testing of word frequencies in corpora. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 31:2 ► pp. 374 ff.
Säily, Tanja
2016. Sociolinguistic variation in morphological productivity in eighteenth-century English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 12:1
Dewaele, Jean-Marc
2015. British ‘Bollocks’ versus American ‘Jerk’: Do native British English speakers swear more – or differently – compared to American English speakers?. Applied Linguistics Review 6:3 ► pp. 309 ff.
Dewaele, Jean-Marc
2016. Thirty shades of offensiveness: L1 and LX English users’ understanding, perception and self-reported use of negative emotion-laden words. Journal of Pragmatics 94 ► pp. 112 ff.
Dewaele, Jean-Marc
2017. Self-reported frequency of swearing in English: do situational, psychological and sociobiographical variables have similar effects on first and foreign language users?. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 38:4 ► pp. 330 ff.
Ishikawa, Yuka
2015. Gender Differences in Vocabulary Use in Essay Writing by University Students. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 192 ► pp. 593 ff.
Liang, Maocheng
2015. Patterned Distribution of Phraseologies within Text: The Case of Research Articles. In Corpus Linguistics in Chinese Contexts, ► pp. 74 ff.
Sea-Eun Jhang, KIM ShinHo & 이성민
2015. A Comparative Analysis of Key Semantic Domains Extracted from Maritime Law English Corpus Related with Oil Spill through the Use of Wmatrix. The Jungang Journal of English Language and Literature 57:3 ► pp. 443 ff.
Bestgen, Y.
2014. Inadequacy of the chi-squared test to examine vocabulary differences between corpora. Literary and Linguistic Computing 29:2 ► pp. 164 ff.
Blaxter, Tam T.
2014. Applying keyword analysis to gendered language in theÍslendingasögur. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 37:2 ► pp. 169 ff.
Brezina, Vaclav & Miriam Meyerhoff
BROWN, DAVID WEST & TEO SHI JIE
2014. Singapore English and styling the Ah Beng. World Englishes 33:1 ► pp. 60 ff.
Provasi, Joëlle, David I. Anderson & Marianne Barbu-Roth
2014. Rhythm perception, production, and synchronization during the perinatal period. Frontiers in Psychology 5
Tottie, Gunnel
Aull, Laura L. & David West Brown
2013. Fighting words: a corpus analysis of gender representations in sports reportage. Corpora 8:1 ► pp. 27 ff.
Napoli, Donna Jo, Jami Fisher & Gene Mirus
2013. Bleached taboo-term predicates in American Sign Language. Lingua 123 ► pp. 148 ff.
Granier-Deferre, Carolyn, Sophie Bassereau, Aurélie Ribeiro, Anne-Yvonne Jacquet, Anthony J. DeCasper & Georges Chapouthier
2011. A Melodic Contour Repeatedly Experienced by Human Near-Term Fetuses Elicits a Profound Cardiac Reaction One Month after Birth. PLoS ONE 6:2 ► pp. e17304 ff.
Kendall, Tyler
2011. Corpora from a sociolinguistic perspective. Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada 11:2 ► pp. 361 ff.
Lijffijt, Jefrey, Panagiotis Papapetrou, Kai Puolamäki & Heikki Mannila
2011. Analyzing Word Frequencies in Large Text Corpora Using Inter-arrival Times and Bootstrapping. In Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6912], ► pp. 341 ff.
Nawrot, Monika
2011. Automatic Author Attribution for Short Text Documents. In Human Language Technology. Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6562], ► pp. 468 ff.
Saily, T., T. Nevalainen & H. Siirtola
2011. Variation in noun and pronoun frequencies in a sociohistorical corpus of English. Literary and Linguistic Computing 26:2 ► pp. 167 ff.
Baker, Paul
2010. Will Ms ever be as frequent as Mr?. Gender and Language 4:1 ► pp. 125 ff.
Gabrielatos, Costas, Eivind Nessa Torgersen, Sebastian Hoffmann & Susan Fox
2010. A Corpus-Based Sociolinguistic Study of Indefinite Article Forms in London English. Journal of English Linguistics 38:4 ► pp. 297 ff.
Nokkonen, Soili
2010. ‘How many taxis there needs to be?’ The sociolinguistic variation of need to in spoken British English. Corpora 5:1 ► pp. 45 ff.
Rühlemann, Christoph
2010. Conversational Grammar- Feminine Grammar? A Sociopragmatic Corpus Study. Journal of English Linguistics 38:1 ► pp. 56 ff.
Rühlemann, Christoph
2019. How Long Does it Take to Say ‘Well’? Evidence from the Audio BNC. Corpus Pragmatics 3:1 ► pp. 49 ff.
Rühlemann, Christoph
Rühlemann, Christoph
Siirtola, Harri, Kari-Jouko Räihä, Tanja Säily & Terttu Nevalainen
2010. Proceedings of the first international workshop on Intelligent visual interfaces for text analysis, ► pp. 33 ff.
Sunderland, Jane
2010. Theorizing Gender Perspectives in Foreign and Second Language Learning. In Gender Perspectives on Vocabulary in Foreign and Second Languages, ► pp. 1 ff.
DeCasper, Anthony J. & Phyllis Prescott
2009. Lateralized processes constrain auditory reinforcement in human newborns. Hearing Research 255:1-2 ► pp. 135 ff.
Lam, Phoenix
2009. The making of a BNC customised spoken corpus for comparative purposes. Corpora 4:2 ► pp. 167 ff.
Nowson, Scott
2009. Proceedings of the 1st international CIKM workshop on Topic-sentiment analysis for mass opinion, ► pp. 17 ff.
Tam, Jenny & Craig H. Martell
2009. 2009 IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing, ► pp. 33 ff.
Watson, Patrick G., Penny Duquenoy, Margaret Brennan, Matt Jones & James Walkerdine
2009. Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group: Design: Open 24/7, ► pp. 313 ff.
Barbieri, Federica
2008. Patterns of age‐based linguistic variation in American English1. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12:1 ► pp. 58 ff.
Hughes, Danny, Paul Rayson, James Walkerdine, Kevin Lee, Phil Greenwood, Awais Rashid, Corinne May-Chahal & Margaret Brennan
2008. Supporting Law Enforcement in Digital Communities through Natural Language Analysis. In Computational Forensics [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5158], ► pp. 122 ff.
Seale, Clive & Jonathan Charteris-Black
2008. The Interaction of Class and Gender in Illness Narratives. Sociology 42:3 ► pp. 453 ff.
Seale, Clive, Jonathan Charteris-Black, Carol Dumelow, Louise Locock & Sue Ziebland
2008. The Effect of Joint Interviewing on the Performance of Gender. Field Methods 20:2 ► pp. 107 ff.
Thelwall, Mike
2008. Fk yea I swear: cursing and gender in MySpace. Corpora 3:1 ► pp. 83 ff.
Goldschmidt, Nils & Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
2007. What Do Economists Talk About? A Linguistic Analysis of Published Writing in Economic Journals. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 66:2 ► pp. 335 ff.
Mehl, Matthias R., Simine Vazire, Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, Richard B. Slatcher & James W. Pennebaker
2007. Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men?. Science 317:5834 ► pp. 82 ff.
Oakes, M. P. & M. Farrow
2007. Use of the Chi-Squared Test to Examine Vocabulary Differences in English Language Corpora Representing Seven Different Countries. Literary and Linguistic Computing 22:1 ► pp. 85 ff.
Wiggers, Pascal & Leon J. M. Rothkrantz
2007. Exploratory Analysis of Word Use and Sentence Length in the Spoken Dutch Corpus. In Text, Speech and Dialogue [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4629], ► pp. 366 ff.
Gries, Stefan Th.
2006. Exploring variability within and between corpora: some methodological considerations. Corpora 1:2 ► pp. 109 ff.
Oberlander, Jon & Alastair J. Gill
2006. Language With Character: A Stratified Corpus Comparison of Individual Differences in E-Mail Communication. Discourse Processes 42:3 ► pp. 239 ff.
Botley, Simon & Tony Mcenery
2001. Demonstratives in English. Journal of English Linguistics 29:1 ► pp. 7 ff.
Botley, Simon & Tony Mcenery
2001. Proximal and Distal Demonstratives. Journal of English Linguistics 29:3 ► pp. 214 ff.
Oakes, Michael, Robert Gaaizauskas, Helene Fowkes, Anna Jonsson, Vincent Wan & Micheline Beaulieu
2001. Proceedings of the 24th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, ► pp. 440 ff.
Rayson, Paul, Luke Emmet, Roger Garside & Pete Sawyer
2001. The REVERE Project: Experiments with the Application of Probabilistic NLP to Systems Engineering. In Natural Language Processing and Information Systems [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1959], ► pp. 288 ff.
Rayson, P., R. Garside & P. Sawyer
2000. Assisting Requirements Recovery from Legacy Documents. In Systems Engineering for Business Process Change, ► pp. 251 ff.
[no author supplied]
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 17 october 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.