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Part of
The Corpus Linguistics Discourse: In honour of Wolfgang Teubert
Edited by Anna Čermáková and Michaela Mahlberg
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 87] 2018
► pp. 163–184

The individual and the group from a corpus perspective

| University of Auckland

The connection between the individual and the group has been a recurring issue since the earliest investigations into the nature of language. The contribution made here is to provide some empirical data on individual differences in the production of phrases and constructions. For this purpose, we examine some aspects of the speech of five White House press secretaries. The results show that individual speakers reuse favoured constructions and routines, leading to a clear disparity in the frequency of common lexical and grammatical patterns among the different press secretaries. Investigating the extent of idiolectal variation provides a baseline for assessing corpus results based on aggregate data and for understanding the connection between the individual and the group.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The individual and the group
    • 2.1Research on individual speech
    • 2.2Individuals and groups in corpus linguistics
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Negation
    • 3.2Present perfect
    • 3.3Correspondence analysis
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.87.07bar
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