Cover not available

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

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

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
Published online: 5 August 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17117.smi
Abstract
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.
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
References (52)
References
Aarts, B., Close, J. & Wallis, S. (2013). Choices over time: Methodological issues in investigating current change. In B. Aarts, J. Close, G. Leech & S. Wallis (Eds.), The Verb Phrase in English: Investigating Recent Language Change with Corpora (pp. 14–45). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anderwald, L. (2002). Negation in Non-standard British English: Gaps, Regularizations, Asymmetries. London/New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Argamon, S., Koppel, M., Fine, J., & Shimoni, A. R. (2003). Gender, genre, and writing style in formal written texts. Text, 23 (3), 321–346. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ball, C. N. (1994). Automated text analysis: Cautionary tales. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 9 (4), 295–302. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
BBC (2004). BBC Charter Review (Radio 4). Retrieved from [URL] (last accessed April 2019).
Bednarek, M., & Caple, H. (2010). News Discourse. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bell, A. (1984). Language style as audience design. Language in Society, 13 (2), 145–204. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bell, P., & van Leeuwen, T. (1994). The Media Interview: Confession, Contest, Conversation. Kensington: University of New South Wales Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, D. (1993). Representativeness in corpus design. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 8 (4), 243–257. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1994). An analytical framework for register studies. In D. Biber & E. Finegan (Eds.) Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register (pp. 31–56). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, D., & Conrad, S. (2009). Register, Genre, and Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bowie, J., Wallis, S. & Aarts, B. (2013). The perfect in spoken British English. In B. Aarts, J. Close, G. Leech & S. Wallis (Eds.), The Verb Phrase in English: Investigating Recent Language Change with Corpora (pp. 318–52). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brezina, V., & Meyerhoff, M. (2014). Significant or random? A critical review of sociolinguistic generalisations based on large corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 19 (1), 1–28. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Burnard, L. (2007) (Ed.). Reference Guide for the British National Corpus (XML Edition). Retrieved from [URL] (last accessed April 2019).
Butler, S. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Corbett, J., & Stuart-Smith, J. (2012). Standard English in Scotland. In R. Hickey (Ed.) Standards of English: Codified Standards around the World (pp. 72–95). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Denscombe, M. (2014). The Good Research Guide for Small-scale Social Research Projects (5th ed.). Maidenhead: Open University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Finegan, E., & Biber, D. (2001). Register variation and social dialect variation: The register axiom. In P. Eckert & J. Rickford (Eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation (pp. 235–67). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Garside, R., & Smith, N. (1997). A hybrid grammatical tagger: CLAWS4. In R. Garside, G. Leech, A. McEnery (Eds.), Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora (pp. 102–121). London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gimenez, J. (2000). Business e-mail communication: some emerging tendencies in register. English for Specific Purposes, 19 (3), 237–251. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hendy, D. (2007). Life on Air: A History of Radio Four. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Herring, S., & Paolillo, J. C. (2006). Gender and genre variation in weblogs. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 10 (4), 493–459. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hoye, L. (1997). Adverbs and Modality in English. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hyland, K. (2009). Academic Discourse. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ito, R., & Tagliamonte, S. A. (2003). Well weird, right dodgy, very strange, really cool: Layering and recycling in English intensifiers. Language in Society, 32 (2), 257–279. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jucker, A., & Landert, D. (2015). Historical pragmatics and early speech recordings: Diachronic developments in turn-taking and narrative structure in radio talk shows. Journal of Pragmatics, 79 1, 22–39. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1966). The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leech, G. (2004). Meaning and the English Verb (3rd ed.). London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Love, R., Dembry, C., Hardie, A., Brezina, V., & McEnery, T. (2017). The Spoken BNC2014: Designing and building a spoken corpus of everyday conversations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22 (3), 319–344. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Macaulay, R. (2005). Talk that Counts: Age, Gender and Social Class Differences in Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Magee, S. (2012). Desert Island Discs: 70 Years of Castaways from one of BBC Radio 4’s Best-loved Programmes. London: Bantam.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McEnery, T., & Hardie, A. (2012). Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Milroy, L., & Gordon, M. (2003). Sociolinguistics: Methods and Interpretation. Oxford: Blackwell. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Montgomery, M. (2007). The Discourse of Broadcast News: A Linguistic Approach. Abingdon: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ndaji, F., Little, J., & Coe, R. (2016). A Comparison of Academic Achievement in Independent and State Schools: Report for the Independent Schools Council. Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring, University of Durham. [URL] (last accessed April 2019).
Nevalainen, T. & Raumolin-Brunberg, H. (Eds.) (2003). Sociolinguistics and Language History: Studies Based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
O’Keeffe, A. (2005). You’ve a daughter yourself? A corpus-based look at question forms in an Irish radio phone-in. In A. Barron & K. Schneider (Eds.), The Pragmatics of Irish English (pp. 339–366). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rayson, P. (2008). From key words to key semantic domains. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 13 (4), 519–549. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sankoff, D. (2005). Problems of representativeness. In U. Ammon, N. Dittmar, K. J. Mattheier & P. Trudgill (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society (2nd ed., Vol. 2 1, pp. 998–1002). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sankoff, D., & Laberge, S. (1978). The linguistic market and the statistical explanation of variability. In D. Sankoff (Ed.), Linguistic Variation: Models and Methods (pp. 239–250). New York, NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sankoff, D., Cedergren, H., Kemp, W., Thibault, P. & Vincent, D. (1989). Montreal French: Language, class and ideology. In R. W. Fasold & D. Schiffrin (Eds.), Language Change and Variation (pp. 107–118). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Scannell, P. (1989). Public service broadcasting and modern public life. Media, Culture and Society, 11 (2): 134–166. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Scott, M. (1997). PC Analysis of key words – and key key words. System, 25 (2), 233–245. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Smith, N. & Waters, C. (2018). From broadcast archive to language corpus: Designing and investigating a sociohistorical corpus from Desert Island Discs . ICAME Journal, 42 1, 167–189. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tolson, A. (2006). Media Talk: Spoken Discourse on TV and Radio. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Weiner, E. J. & Labov, W. (1983). Constraints on the agentless passive. Journal of Linguistics, 19 (1), 29–58. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zappavigna, M. (2012). Discourse of Twitter and Social Media. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (6)

Cited by six other publications

Love, Robbie
2024. Introduction: Innovation in spoken corpus linguistics. Research in Corpus Linguistics 12:2 ► pp. i ff. DOI logo
Salameh Jiménez, Shima
2024. Linguistic change in the 20th century. In Language Change in the 20th Century [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 340], ► pp. 17 ff. DOI logo
Smith, Nicholas, Cristiano Broccias & Cathleen Waters
2024. Addressing comparability and retrieval issues in conversation corpora: A case study on the spoken British National Corpora (1994 and 2014), using the past perfect. Research in Corpus Linguistics 12:2 ► pp. 80 ff. DOI logo
Sönning, Lukas
2024. Down-sampling from hierarchically structured corpus data. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 29:4 ► pp. 507 ff. DOI logo
Egbert, Jesse & Douglas Biber
2023. Key feature analysis: a simple, yet powerful method for comparing text varieties. Corpora 18:1 ► pp. 121 ff. DOI logo
Smith, Nicholas
2020. Conversationalization and democratization in a radio chat show: a grammar-led investigation. Language Sciences 79 ► pp. 101269 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 december 2025. 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.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue