This textbook introduces students to the ways in which techniques from corpus linguistics can be used to aid sociolinguistic research. Corpus linguistics shares with variationist sociolinguistics a quantitative approach to the study of variation or differences between populations. It may also complement qualitative traditions of enquiry such as interactional sociolinguistics.This text covers a range of different topics within sociolinguistics:*Analysing demographic variation*Comparing language use across different cultures*Examining language change over time*Studying transcripts of spoken interactions*Identifying attitudes or discourses.Written for undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociolinguistics, or corpus linguists who wish to use corpora to study social phenomena, this textbook examines how corpora can be drawn on to investigate synchronic variation, diachronic change and the construction of discourses. It refers to several classic corpus-based studies as well as the author's own research. Original analyses of a number of corpora including the British National Corpus, the Survey of English Dialects and the Brown family of corpora are complemented by a new corpus of written British English collected around 2006 for the purposes of writing the book.Techniques of analysis like concordancing, keywords and collocations are discussed, along with corpus annotation and statistical procedures such as chi-squared tests and clustering. Paul Baker takes a critical approach to using corpora in sociolinguistics, outlining the limitations of the approach as well as its advantages.

In Corpus Linguistics and Sociolinguistics, Beke Hansen analyses variation and change in the modal systems of three second-language varieties of English in Asia by taking a sociolinguistic approach to corpus data. Her study focuses on the modal and semi-modal verbs of strong obligation and necessity in Hong Kong English, Indian English, and Singapore English based on the relevant ICE component corpora. She adopts a typologically-informed perspective on variation in World Englishes by comparing the structures of the speakers’ first languages with the structures of the emergent varieties in the expression of epistemic modality. Beyond this, she analyses language change by constructing apparent-time scenarios to compensate for the lack of diachronic corpora in World Englishes.

Corpus Linguistics and the Analysis of Sociolinguistic Change demonstrates how particular styles and varieties of language are chosen and represented in the media, to reveal changing language ideologies and sociolinguistic change. Drawing on a corpus of ads broadcast on an Irish radio station between 1977 and 2017, this book shows how corpus linguistic tools can be creatively employed, in conjunction with frameworks and concepts such as audience and referee design and indexicality, and examines how accents and dialects (vernacular and prestige) are exploited in the ads across the decades. In addition, this book: illustrates the key principles of corpus design for sociolinguistics studies and offers a framework for future diachronic corpus studies of advertising on social media; provides a model for analysing corpus data at both inter-varietal and intra-varietal levels in terms of both accent and dialectal features and explores the efficacy of using particular corpus linguistic tools; identifies key factors which can be used by researchers as evidence for sociolinguistic change and links these factors to relevant theories and frameworks; demonstrates how corpus tools can be used to compare advertising discourse with naturally occurring discourse, with particular reference to markers of (pseudo) intimate discourse. Building on the growing body of research relating to variation and change in Irish English, this book is key reading for researchers and advanced students undertaking research within the areas of sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics.

Throughout history, linguists and literary scholars have been impelled by curiosity about particular linguistic or literary phenomena to seek to observe them in action in original texts. The fruits of each earlier enquiry in turn nourish the desire to continue to acquire knowledge, through further observation of newer linguistic facts. As time goes by, the corpus linguist operates increasingly in the awareness of what has gone before. Corpus Linguistics, thirty years on, is less an innocent sortie into corpus territory on the basis of a hunch than an informed, critical reassessment of existing analytical orthodoxy, in the light of new data coming on stream. This volume comprises twenty-two articles penned by members of the ICAME (International Computer Archive of Modern and Mediaeval English) association, which together provide a critical and informed reappraisal of the facts, data, methods and tools of Corpus Linguistics which are available today. Authors reconsider the boundaries of the discipline, exploring its areas of commonality with Sociolinguistics, Language Variation, Discourse Linguistics, and Lexical Statistics and showing how that commonality is potentially of immense benefit to practitioners in the fields concerned. The volume culminates in the report of a timely and novel expert panel discussion on the role of Corpus Linguistics in the study of English as a global language. This encompasses issues such as English as an international lingua franca, 'norms' for global English, and the question of 'ownership', or who qualifies as a native speaker.

This textbook introduces the fundamental concepts and methods of corpus linguistics for students approaching this topic for the first time, putting specific emphasis on the enormous linguistic diversity represented by approximately 7,000 human languages and broadening the scope of current concerns in general corpus linguistics. Including a basic toolkit to help the reader investigate language in different usage contexts, this book: Shows the relevance of corpora to a range of linguistic areas from phonology to sociolinguistics and discourse Covers recent developments in the application of corpus linguistics to the study of understudied languages and linguistic typology Features exercises, short problems, and questions Includes examples from real studies in over 15 languages plus multilingual corpora Providing the necessary corpus linguistics skills to critically evaluate and replicate studies, this book is essential reading for anyone studying corpus linguistics.

World Englishes is a vibrant research field that has attracted scholars from many different linguistic subdisciplines. Emphasizing the common ground of all research on World Englishes, the 22 articles in this collected volume, selected from more than a hundred papers presented at the 2007 conference of the International Association for World Englishes in Regensburg, cover a broad range of topics which together reflect the state of the art of research in this field. The volume focuses on regions as diverse as Africa, the Caribbean, the Antipodes and Asia, but also promotes a globally comparative perspective by analyzing selected characteristics of the English language across a wide range of varieties. Methodologically, a number of different approaches are applied, including corpus linguistic studies, socio-phonetics as well as historical discourse analysis. Due to its wide scope, the book is of interest not only to World Englishes scholars but also to sociolinguists as well as applied, contact or corpus linguists.

Provides an overview of a dynamic and rapidly growing area with a widely applied methodology. This handbook covers the historical development of the field and its growing influence and application in other areas. It is suitable for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates.

In the last decade, the availability of corpora and the technological advancements of corpus tools have increased dramatically. Applied linguists have greater access to data from around the world and in a variety of languages through websites, blogs, and social networking sites, and there is a high level of interest among these scholars in applying corpora and corpus-based methods to other research areas, particularly sociolinguistics. This innovative guidebook presents a systematic, in-depth account of using corpora in sociolinguistics. It introduces and expands the application of corpora and corpus approaches and tools in sociolinguistic research, surveys the growing number of studies in corpus-based sociolinguistics, and provides instructions and options for designing and developing corpus-based studies. Readers will find practical information on such contemporary topics as workplace registers, megacorpora, and using the web as a corpus. Vignettes, case studies, discussion questions, and activities throughout further enhance students’ involvement with the material and provide opportunities for hands-on practice of the methods discussed. Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics is a comprehensive and accessible guide, a must-read for any student or scholar interested in exploring this popular and promising approach to sociolinguistic research.

"In Corpus Linguistics and Sociolinguistics, Beke Hansen analyses variation and change in the modal systems of second-language varieties of English by taking a sociolinguistic approach to corpus data. Her study focuses on the modal and semi-modal verbs of strong obligation and necessity in the South- and Southeast Asian varieties Indian English, Hong Kong English, and Singapore English based on the relevant ICE component corpora. She adopts a typologically-informed perspective on variation in World Englishes by comparing the structures of the speakers' first languages with the structures of the emergent varieties in the expression of epistemic modality. Beyond this, she analyses language change by constructing apparent-time scenarios to compensate for the lack of diachronic corpora in World Englishes"--Provided by publisher.

Age is by far the most underdeveloped of the sociolinguistic variables in terms of research literature. To-date, research on age has been patchy and has generally focused on the early life-stages such as childhood and adolescence, ignoring, for the most part, healthy adulthood as a stage worthy of scrutiny. This book examines the discourse of adulthood and accounts for sociolinguistic variation, with regards to age and gender, through the exploration of a 90,000 word age-and gender-differentiated spoken corpus of Irish English. The book explores both the distribution and use of a number of high frequency pragmatic features of spoken discourse that appear as key items in the corpus. Part 1 of the book provides an introduction, a theoretical overview of age as a sociolinguistic variable and a description on how to compile a small spoken corpus for sociolinguistic research. Part 2 consists of five chapters which investigate and explore key features such as hedges, vague category markers, intensifiers, boosters and high-frequent items of taboo language in relation to the variables, age and gender. The book is of interest to undergraduates or postgraduates taking formal courses in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, pragmatics or discourse analysis. It is also of interest to students and researchers interested in using corpus linguistics in sociolinguistic research.