The ubiquity of digital communication, and perhaps American culture, have influenced the conversation of British speakers
meanings), Twitter has formed a strong foothold in the lexicon of British English speakers. As well as this, the data collected so far has allowed the researchers to begin to track how attitudes towards issues in British society have changed since the early 1990s. Whether or not speakers in the present day data are behaving more healthily than their 1990s predecessors, the researchers found that, aside from the occurrence
“ Women seem much less likely
to be described based on their appearance or sexualised
of the word treadmill in the list of words which have risen in use the most drastically, the word calories is twice as frequently spoken as it was in the 1990s data. And the word carbs is said to have become much more popular in present day speech. Professor McEnery, Dr Dembry and their team predict that this is symptomatic of an increased awareness of food consumption in the country that has allowed such words to become more salient in every day speech.
” Other strands of the research so far attempted
to answer the question ‘What do speakers of British English love?’ The findings suggest that the objects of British English speakers’ love have shifted during the 20-year gap between the British National Corpus projects. In the 1990s data, when speakers used the word love, they were most likely to refer to other people in their lives, like members
of their family. Twenty years later, the researchers claim that material objects like cheese, gardens and clothes are more likely to be awarded the love of the speakers in the data collected so far. The researchers have also used the data from
the Spoken BNC2014 to track how attitudes towards women have changed over time. In the 1990s British National Corpus, the most commonly used adjectives to describe women were old, young, stupid, pretty, big, naked, nice, silly, married, and beautiful. In the Spoken BNC2014 data, the adjectives are old, young, other, little, many, international, different, crazy, and fifty-year-old. “The most striking difference is that women seem much less likely to be described based on their appearance or, worse, sexualised. So we can see real change taking place before our very eyes in the data already,” said Robbie Love, a researcher on the project. In this sense, the researchers claim, a corpus the size of the Spoken BNC2014, once complete, could be as useful, if not more useful, than survey data for gauging the tastes and opinions of the public. The Spoken British National Corpus 2014
project is ongoing, and the researchers invite you to participate by emailing corpus@cambridge. org. For every hour of good-quality recording you contribute, you will be paid £18. n
i
Contact Professor Tony McEnery, ESRC-funded Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science, Lancaster University Email
a.mcenery@
lancaster.ac.uk Telephone 01524 510851 ESRC Grant Number ES/K002155/1 Web
cass.lancs.ac.uk/?page_id=1386
SOCIETY NOW AUTUMN 2014 25
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32