Social Differentiation in the Use of English Vocabulary

• DOI: 10.1075/ijcl.2.1.07ray
• Publication Date: 2010-11-25T09:05:45Z
• Authors: Paul Rayson; Geoffrey N. Leech; Mary Hodges
• Keywords: British National Corpus; Corpus Linguistics; Transcription

In this article, we undertake selective quantitative analyses of the demographi-cally-sampled spoken English component British National Corpus (for brevity, referred to here as ''Conversational Corpus"). This is a subcorpus c. 4.5 million words, in which speakers and respondents (see I below) are identified by such factors gender, age, social group, geographical region. Using corpus analysis tool developed at Lancaster, comparison vocabulary speakers, highlighting those differences marked very high X2 value difference between different sectors according group. A fourth variable, that region United Kingdom, not investigated although it remains promising subject for future research. (As background also briefly examine written material [BNC].) study illustrative potentiality Conversational corpus-based research on differentiation use language. There evident limitations, including (a) reliance frequency lists (b) simplicity transcription system employed part BNC The conclusion article considers advances paradigm illustrated here.