scholarly journals CONVENTIONAL INDIRECTNESS STRATEGIES ON REQUEST USED BY MALE AND FEMALE SPEAKERS IN SPOKEN BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS

PARADIGM ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Tantri Refa Indriarti ◽  
Yulia R. Mawarni
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
British English ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Request Strategies ◽  
National Corpus

<p>This study aims at analysing conventional indirectness strategies on request used by British English speakers as shown in spoken British National Corpus (BNC). Conventional indirect strategy is often rated as the most polite expression of politeness. In this case, male and female obviously have different strategies for making the request, which may be influenced by some factors. A qualitative approach was employed to conduct this study since the data are the utterances produced by male and female speakers in spoken BNC. The study revealed that there were 187 utterances that contain Conventional Indirectness Strategies on request used by male and female speakers in spoken BNC. Ability conditions was the strategy of conventional indirect request that mostly used by the male and female speakers. Then, the three factors (i.e. gender, age, and social class) have an effect and significant role on the speaker’s choice of strategies employed by British English speakers. As this study is focused on the indirect request strategies, thus it is suggested to the next researchers who are interested in the same study could be expected to conduct the indirect request strategies by adding more factors.</p><p> </p>

“That’s well good”: A Re-emergent Intensifier in Current British English

2020 ◽  
pp. 007542422097914
Author(s):  
Karin Aijmer
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
British English ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Time Gap ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Semantic Types ◽  
Over Time ◽  
National Corpus

Well has a long history and is found as an intensifier already in older English. It is argued that diachronically well has developed from its etymological meaning (‘in a good way’) on a cline of adverbialization to an intensifier and to a discourse marker. Well is replaced by other intensifiers in the fourteenth century but emerges in new uses in Present-Day English. The changes in frequency and use of the new intensifier are explored on the basis of a twenty-year time gap between the old British National Corpus (1994) and the new Spoken British National Corpus (2014). The results show that well increases in frequency over time and that it spreads to new semantic types of adjectives and participles, and is found above all in predicative structures with a copula. The emergence of a new well and its increase in frequency are also related to social factors such as the age, gender, and social class of the speakers, and the informal character of the conversation.

scholarly journals A Corpus-based Study of the Use of Pause Fillers Among British English Speakers

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (12) ◽  
pp. 09-16
Author(s):  
Dr. Hamad Abdullah H Aldawsari
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
British English ◽  
Gender Influence ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
And Gender ◽  
National Corpus

Many people use pause fillers such as um, erm, and er in order to signal to the other person that they have not finished speaking yet. This paper aims to investigate pause fillers and their relationship with the two sociolinguistic variables of age and gender. The data-driven analysis is based on the British National Corpus (BNC). The results show that the sociolinguistic variables of age and gender influence the use of pause fillers among British English speakers, which is proposed to be linked to the advancement of age and an improved fluency among female speakers.

‘How many taxis there needs to be?’ The sociolinguistic variation of need to in spoken British English

Corpora ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soili Nokkonen
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Life Stages ◽  
Sociolinguistic Variation ◽  
British English ◽  
Semantic Variation ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Upper Middle Class ◽  
National Corpus

This paper explores need to, a semi-modal of obligation and necessity, and its semantic variation in connection with the sociolinguistic variables of gender, age and social class in the spoken demographic part of the British National Corpus. The semantic/pragmatic uses of need to include internal, deontic, dynamic and epistemic domains based both on traditional concepts and cross-linguistic studies. The sociolinguistic analysis applies the generalisations by Labov, but pays attention to the interactional styles and the communicative needs of the various social groups as well. The results reveal that need to is undergoing change. It shows monotonic distribution among adults, but it is slightly more common among men than women, and, in terms of social class, the upper middle class takes the lead. The semantic variation corroborates these findings – older speakers stick to the more traditional domains – but also reflects the gendered life stages and discourse styles of the speaker groups.

Swearing in Modern British English: The Case of Fuck in the BNC

2004 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 235-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony McEnery ◽  
Zhonghua Xiao
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
American English ◽  
Systematic Account ◽  
British English ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Australian English ◽  
Morphological Variants ◽  
National Corpus

Swearing is a part of everyday language use. To date it has been infrequently studied, though some recent work on swearing in American English, Australian English and British English has addressed the topic. Nonetheless, there is still no systematic account of swear-words in English. In terms of approaches, swearing has been approached from the points of view of history, lexicography, psycholinguistics and semantics. There have been few studies of swearing based on sociolinguistic variables such as gender, age and social class. Such a study has been difficult in the absence of corpus resources. With the production of the British National Corpus (BNC), a 100,000,000-word balanced corpus of modern British English, such a study became possible. In addition to parts of speech, the corpus is richly annotated with metadata pertaining to demographic features such as age, gender and social class, and textual features such as register, publication medium and domain. While bad language may be related to religion (e.g. Jesus, heaven, hell and damn), sex (e.g. fuck), racism (e.g. nigger), defecation (e.g. shit), homophobia (e.g. queer) and other matters, we will, in this article, examine only the pattern of uses of fuck and its morphological variants, because this is a typical swear-word that occurs frequently in the BNC. This article will build and expand upon the examination of fuck by McEnery et al. (2000) by examining the distribution pattern of fuck within and across spoken and written registers.

scholarly journals British ‘Bollocks’ versus American ‘Jerk’: Do native British English speakers swear more – or differently – compared to American English speakers?

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Marc Dewaele
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
British English ◽  
Conceptual Representations ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Frequency Of Use ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
American English Speakers ◽  
National Corpus

AbstractThe present study investigates the differences between 414 L1 speakers of British and 556 L1 speakers of American English in self-reported frequency of swearing and in the understanding of the meaning, the perceived offensiveness and the frequency of use of 30 negative words extracted from the British National Corpus. Words ranged from mild to highly offensive, insulting and taboo. Statistical analysies revealed no significant differences between the groups in self reported frequency of swearing. The British English L1 participants reported a significantly better understanding of nearly half the chosen words from the corpus. They gave significantly higher offensiveness scores to four words (including “bollocks”) while the American English L1 participants rated a third of words as significantly more offensive (including “jerk”). British English L1 participants reported significantly more frequent use of a third of words (including “bollocks”) while the American English L1 participants reported more frequent use of half of the words (including “jerk”). This is interpreted as evidence of differences in semantic and conceptual representations of these words in both variants of English.

Male and female shame: a corpus-based study of emotion

Corpora ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathrine Norberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
British English ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
National Corpus

In this study, I investigate the representation of the emotion terms shame, ashamed and shameless in relation to women and men in late twentieth-century British English. The study is based on analyses of examples of shame retrieved from the British National Corpus with the specific aim to study in what contexts men and women express shame or are associated with it, and evaluate whether the emotion is represented as negative or positive. I present two general models of shame, where the first model concentrates on a negative connection between shame and pain, exposure and embodiment, and the second model describes shame as a necessary ingredient of social life that makes people recommit to socially sanctioned behaviour and values. Most examples of women's shame in the material correspond to the description given in the first model, whereas the majority of the examples of men's shame correspond with the second. The two models illustrate how shame functions to preserve hierarchical gender structures.

scholarly journals What may words say, or what may words not say. A corpus-based approach to linguistic action

2005 ◽  
pp. 189
Author(s):  
Monserrat Martínez Vázquez
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Approach ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Reliable Information ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Communicative Process ◽  
Linguistic Action ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
National Corpus ◽  
The Way

In this paper I present an empirical approach to the analysis of the way English speakers conceptualize the communicative process in English. Most linguistic expressions about language in English are surface manifestations of what Reddy termed the "conduit metaphor". Reddy's model implies several interrelated cognitive associations: words are conceived as containers in which speakers introduce their ideas and send them to listeners, who will take these ideas out of these containers. Central to this model is the metaphor words are containers. It has also been claimed that there are other ways of perspectivizing the language process apart from the notion of containment (Vanparys 1995). In fact, Reddy himself notes that there is approximately a 30% of metalanguage not based on the conduit metaphor. The pervasiveness of the container metaphor would reasonably be most directly tested in expressions with the lexeme word. In order to measure what falls inside and outside these containers I carry out a corpus analysis of the lexeme word excerpted from the British National Corpus (BNC). The systematic evidence obtained from a large but delimited corpus gives us more reliable information about the frequency and use of this metaphor than an intuition based analysis or an arbitrary search in multi-source corpora.

scholarly journals A diachronic corpus-based study into the effects of age and gender on the usage patterns of verb-forming suffixation in spoken British English

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Laws ◽  
Chris Ryder ◽  
Sylvia Jaworska
Keyword(s):  
Age And Gender ◽  
Lexical Diversity ◽  
British English ◽  
Usage Patterns ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Age Range ◽  
National Corpus

Abstract The aim of this paper is to ascertain the degree to which lexical diversity, density and creativity in everyday spoken British English have changed over a 20-year period, as a function of age and gender. Usage patterns of four verb-forming suffixes, -ate, -en, -ify and -ize, were compared in contemporary speech from the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 Sample (Spoken BNC2014S) with its 20-year old counterpart, the BNC1994’s demographically-sampled component (the Spoken BNC1994DS). Frequency comparisons revealed that verb suffixation is denser in the Spoken BNC2014S than in the Spoken BNC1994DS, with the exception of the -en suffix, the use of which has decreased, particularly among female and younger speakers in general. Male speakers and speakers in the 35–59 age range showed the greatest type diversity; there is evidence that this peak is occurring earlier in the more recent corpus. Contrary to expectations, female rather than male speakers produced the largest number of neologisms and rare forms.

scholarly journals Swearing in informal spoken English: 1990s–2010s

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robbie Love
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Gender And Age ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Distribution ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
National Corpus

Abstract This paper investigates changes in swearing usage in informal speech using large-scale corpus data, comparing the occurrence and social distribution of swear words in two corpora of informal spoken British English: the demographically-sampled part of the Spoken British National Corpus 1994 (BNC1994) and the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (BNC2014); the compilation of the latter has facilitated large-scale, diachronic analyses of authentic spoken data on a scale which has, until now, not been possible. A form and frequency analysis of a set of 16 ‘pure’ swear word lemma forms is presented. The findings reveal that swearing occurrence is significantly lower in the Spoken BNC2014 but still within a comparable range to previous studies. Furthermore, FUCK is found to overtake BLOODY as the most popular swear word lemma. Finally, the social distribution of swearing across gender and age groups generally supports the findings of previous research: males still swear more than females, and swearing still peaks in the twenties and declines thereafter. However, the distribution of swearing according to socio-economic status is found to be more complex than expected in the 2010s and requires further investigation. This paper also reflects on some of the methodological challenges associated with making comparisons between the two corpora.

scholarly journals Concept "Star" in English Linguaculture: Notional Features

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 1069-1077
Author(s):  
A. A. Bakirova
Keyword(s):  
English Literature ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
White Patch ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Stellar Body ◽  
National Corpus

The article describes the notional features of the concept of star in the English worldview and focuses on those specifics of the representation of the concept that reveal the national consciousness of native English speakers. To describe the structure of the concept, the author analyzed dictionary articles, idioms, and synonyms. The analysis revealed 17 notional signs: a natural luminous body visible in the sky at night; a fixed point of light in the sky; hot balls of burning gas that emits its own light; a planet; fortune / destiny; horoscope; a celebrity; the main person in a film / play; an outstandingly successful person or thing in a group; an object or shape; a figure; a sign of rank / position; a star-shaped ornament or medal worn as a badge of honor or authority; classification of hotels; a white patch on the forehead of a horse or other animal; starfish; a sign of asterisk. The cognitive attributes "stellar body", "fortune / destiny", and "a white patch on the forehead of a horse or other animal" proved to go back to motivating features, which indicates their long-term presence in the language. However, a study of co-occurrence indicated relatively recent cognitive features. Examples were taken from classical English literature and the British National Corpus. A comparative analysis of the actualization of the meanings of the representative word in sentences showed that its conceptual features coincide with the data of explanatory dictionaries.

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