Cover not available

Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 28:3 (2023) ► pp.407–429

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

A year to remember?

Introducing the BE21 corpus and exploring recent part of speech tag change in British English

ORCiD logo with link | Lancaster University
Open Access logo
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Lancaster University.

Published online: 23 May 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22007.bak
Abstract
This paper describes the collection and analysis of the most recent edition of the Brown family, the BE21 corpus, consisting of 1 million words of written British English texts, published in 2021. Using the Coefficient of Variance, the frequencies of part of speech tags in BE21 are compared against the other four British members of the Brown family (from 1931, 1961, 1991 and 2006). Part of speech tags that are steadily increasing or decreasing in all five or the latest three corpora are examined via concordance lines and their distributions in order to identify long-standing and emerging trends in British English. The analysis points to the continuation of some trends (such as declines in modal verbs and titles of address), along with newer trends like the rise of first person pronouns. The analysis indicates that more general trends of densification, democratisation and colloquialisation are continuing in British English.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Existing research on the Brown family
  • 3.Method
  • 4.Analysis
  • 5.Conclusions
  • References
References (23)
References
Anthony, L. (2022). AntConc (Version 4.2.0) [Computer software]. Waseda University. [URL]
Baker, P. (2010). Will Ms ever be as frequent as Mr? A corpus-based comparison of gendered terms across four diachronic corpora of British English. Gender and Language, 4(1), 125–129. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2017). American and British English: Divided by a Common Language? Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, D., Johnasson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, D. (2003). Compressed noun-phrase structures in newspaper discourse: The competing demands of popularization vs. economy. In J. Aitchison & D. M. Lewis (Eds.), New Media Language (pp. 169–181). Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brezina, V., Weill-Tessier, P., & McEnery, A. (2020). #LancsBox (Version 5) [Computer software]. [URL]
Clark, D. (2022, March 28). Gini coefficient of the UK 1977–2021. Statista. [URL]
Collins, P., & Yao, X. (2018). Colloquialisation and the evolution of Australian English. English World-Wide, 39(3), 253–277. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Francis, W. M., & Kučera, H. (1979). Brown Corpus Manual, revised version. Brown University. [URL]
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). Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goodman, S. (1996). Market forces speak English. In S. Goodman & D. Graddol (Eds.), Redesigning English: New Texts, New Identities (pp. 141–163). Open University/Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goody, J. (2004). Review of The Labyrinth of Kinship. New Left Review, 361, 127–139.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kruger, H., & Smith, A. (2018). Colloquialization versus densification in Australian English: A multidimensional analysis of the Australian Diachronic Hansard Corpus (ADHC). Australian Journal of Linguistics, 38(3), 293–328. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leech, G., & Fallon, R. (1992). Computer corpora – what do they tell us about culture? ICAME Journal, 161, 29–50.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leech, G., Hundt, M., Mair, C., & Smith, N. (2009). Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Love, R., & Curry, N. (2021). Recent change in modality in informal spoken British English: 1990s – 2010s. English Language and Linguistics, 25(3), 537–62. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mair, C. (1997). Parallel corpora. A real-time approach to the study of language change in progress. In M. Ljung (Ed.), Corpus-based Studies in English: Papers from the Seventeenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (pp. 195–209). Rodopi.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McEnery, T., & Brezina, V. (2022). Fundamental Principles of Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Oakes, M. (2009). Corpus linguistics and language variation. In P. Baker (Ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Corpus Linguistics (pp. 159–183). Continuum. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Potts, A., & Baker, P. (2012). Does semantic tagging identify cultural change in British and American English? International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 17(3), 295–324. 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
Siewierska, A. (1984). The Passive: A Comparative Linguistic Analysis. Croom Helm.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sinha, A. K. (1974). How passive are passives? In M. W. La Galy, R. A. Fox, & A. Bruck (Eds.), Papers from the Tenth Regional Meeting (pp. 631–643). Chicago Linguistic Society. [URL]
Cited by (6)

Cited by six other publications

Lillis, Theresa & Maria Leedham
2025. Who is the ‘I’? An exploration of social work professional written discourse and implications for social work education. Social Work Education 44:2 ► pp. 210 ff. DOI logo
Habibullah Pathan, Oksana I. Aleksandrova, Urooj F. Alvi & Muhammad Khalid
2025. A Corpus-Based Study of Vocabulary Distribution in Omani High School English Textbooks. RUDN Journal of Language Studies, Semiotics and Semantics 16:2 ► pp. 543 ff. DOI logo
Wei, Yundi & Maowei Chen
2025. Tracing the Evolution of Tourist Perception of Destination Image: A Multi-Method Analysis of a Cultural Heritage Tourist Site. Sustainability 17:12 ► pp. 5476 ff. DOI logo
Boyi, HE & LIU Guangliang
2024. 2024 International Conference on Optimization Computing and Wireless Communication (ICOCWC), ► pp. 1 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
Poole, Robert & Qudus Ayinde Adebayo
2023. Lexical change and stability in 100 years of English in US newspapers. Applied Corpus Linguistics 3:3 ► pp. 100073 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