LING 306

 Last week – informalisation  Ongoing change in spoken English  This week – written English  Is written English being “informalised” as well?  What other changes are ongoing in current written English?  How can corpus linguistics help us investigate this?  Next week – language regulation  Conscious attempts to change the way English is used

 Researchers in this area: we will mainly be talking about Geoffrey Leech, Christian Mair, Nick Smith  … but others too inc. Biber  Observations they have made about current changes in (written British) English  Proposed explanations for these observed changes

 Most of the research discussed in this lecture is based on the Brown family of corpora  Contrast long-term historical corpus studies: corpora like Helsinki Corpus or ARCHER are used  (more on ARCHER in a bit)

 Who versus whom: case distinction  Decades ago it was noticed that the distinction was no longer always made for this word  Who did you see?  Who am I speaking to?  The building was destroyed ten years ago. But by who?  General opinion: whom is on its way out  What does the corpus say?

/2 Difference (%age of 1961) British English (LOB/ FLOB) % American English (Brown/ Frown) %  What is happening?  No evidence of a consistent ongoing reduction in whom  Looking at text-types registers tells us what is actually going on:  Whom as indicator of formality / non-colloquiality  found more in the less colloquial registers  found least of all in informal, spontaneous speech

 Smith and Rayson (2007)  (discuss past progressive passive as well, but we will only cover what they say on the present progressive passive here)  What is the present progressive passive?  Geraldine is riding the horse >>>  The horse is being ridden by Geraldine  A relatively new structure – only about 200 years old  {present tense absolutely ancient, passive pretty old, progressive a bit newer}  Prescriptivists were against its use in the C19  Meaning: predictable combination of [present] + [progressive]

 Frequency of present progressive passive in LOB and FLOB   (Smith & Rayson 2007: 136)  This is spreading in the latter half of the C20

A major and complicated change:

 Modal verbs:  Obligation/necessity: SHOULD, MUST  Volition/prediction: WILL, WOULD ▪ Etc.  Semi-modals:  Obligation/necessity: HAVE to, NEED to, HAVE got to, BE supposed to  Volition/prediction: WANT to, BE going to ▪ Etc.

 Biber et al. (1998: )  Using the BNC and ARCHER ▪ ARCHER: A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers ▪ 1650 to present, 10 registers ▪ 1.7 million words  Modal verbs decreasing in frequency of use, but semi-modals increasing  Biber (2004), again using ARCHER, found that there are big differences between registers

 Aim: to find out what has been happening with the modals very recently i.e. 1960s to 1990s  Using the comparable sampling frame of the Brown family of corpora  Leech looked at the frequency of a range of modals and semi-modals to see if there was a change over time

Note: * or ** indicates that a result is statistically significant

 The modals are declining  The semi-modals are increasing  BUT the modals are still vastly more frequent overall  So the semi-modals aren’t taking over entirely  The decline of the modals is more advanced in American English  BrE in 1991 is about the same as AmE in 1961  Leech calls this a “follow-my-leader” pattern

 Repeated Leech’s investigation of modal verbs using a different dataset  TIME magazine – all of it  Complete archive online as tagged corpus (Mark Davies, BYU):   100 million words  1923 to present, categorised by year  Results compared to Leech’s for Brown & Frown

 Key issues:  Lots and lots of big year-to-year variation  Can we get a good picture by just looking at 1961 and 1991?  The modals do not all show the same pattern as Leech identified  For instance, Millar found MAY, CAN & COULD increasing, whereas Leech found them slightly decreasing

 No!  Leech’s results are consistent and cohere with the picture from other studies (e.g. Biber), suggesting that they are identifying a real phenomenon  Millar’s data is not exactly the same (much more limited) so there is no direct contradiction  But it does make us aware of…  the need for rechecking, reconfirmation, and reproduction of results  the limitations of sample corpora  the importance of genre, balance, representativeness

 Three different forms of relative clause in English  With wh-pronoun ▪ The pencil which I borrowed  With that ▪ The pencil that I borrowed  With zero ▪ The pencil I borrowed  There is a quantitative shift ongoing between these different forms

 Interpreting the figures  Which shows a significant decline ▪ {who, whom, whose} no significant change – not enough data  Replace by that and zero ▪ Trend more pronounced in AmE ▪ Note the figures for that and zero are estimates (v. hard to search for)

 Grammaticalisation  Colloquialisation  Americanisation  Densification  (There are other factors, but these are the big ones)

 Grammaticalisation: over time, meaningful words / structures become worn down and fixed into grammatical elements  Grammaticalisation takes a very long time – it explains changes over centuries, rather than over decades  It accounts for things like the creation of BE going to from GO{=“move”} or HAVE to from HAVE{=“possess”}  But doesn’t account for things like the frequency shifts in modals and semi-modals over 30 years in the 20 th century

 Colloquialisation – writing becoming more like speech  Americanisation – UK English becoming more like US English  One or the other or both of these factors seems to be behind the majority of the current grammatical changes in written English

 Change in relative pronouns  wh-pronouns in relative clauses seems to be a feature of written registers  that and zero in relative clauses are associated with speech, ergo colloquial  Colloquialisation as aspect of informalisation

 Modal verbs:  “Follow-my-leader”  BrE and AmE undergoing the same change, but more advanced in AmE  Problem: Is the change spreading from AmE to BrE, or are both undergoing the same change of their own accord (at different speeds)? ▪ It can be difficult to say for certain  (Informalisation, in the form of colloquialisation and democratisation, may also play a role with regard to modal verbs)

 The increase in the present progressive passive  Colloquialisation? – no: the structure is most common in press, least common in fiction and academic prose  “the present progressive passive is rare in speech quotations and contracted forms, but prevalent in factual and comparatively formal types of discourse, particularly those concerned with matters of current interest” ▪ (Smith & Rayson 2007: 137)

 Frequency of present progressive passive

 The increase in the present progressive passive  Americanisation? – no: the P.P.P. is less frequent in AmE (and the trend is downwards)

 Actual explanation suggested by Smith & Rayson: being driven by prominence in media (news) text  Hundt (2004) used ARCHER & found out that the P. P. P. has been common in news text since at least the 19 th Century  (and, it has never been as popular in AmE)

 Densification: increase in information density of the sentences  Information density: ratio of content words to all words  Sentences with lots of function words have low density  Sentences with fewer function words have high density  This also runs contrary to colloquialisation:  Information tends to be less dense in colloquial texts, more dense in formal text types  So densification is making texts less speech-like ▪ (Leech et al. fc.)  Changes attributed to densification: mostly to do with noun phrases

 Phrases with of show a decrease in the Brown family  Noun phrases with an s-genitive show a roughly equal increase  In British English, between LOB and FLOB:  S-genitives increase by 24.1%  Of phrases decrease by 23.6% ▪ (only counting those that could be replaced by s- genitives)

 Why are _N _N sequences a density feature?  Preposition phrase as alternative ▪ E.g. the committee chairman vs. the chairman of the committee  Frequency increase of 17.7% from LOB to FLOB

 Onwards (or backwards) to BLOB  … and Lancaster1901  (… and BE2006 opens up similar possibilities)  Methodological questions  Reproducibility of results  Effect of genre

 Some current changes:  The stasis of “whom”  The present progressive passive  Modals and semi-modals  Relative clauses  Some explanations:  Grammaticalisation  Colloquialisation  Americanisation  Densification  Some methodological issues:  Is analysis based on the Brown family of corpora fine-grained enough?  Plus all the usual issues of searching corpora for grammatical constructions

 Compulsory reading:  Leech, G. and Smith, N. (2006) Recent grammatical change in written English : some preliminary findings of a comparison of American with British English. In Renouf, A. and Kehoe, A. (ed.), The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp  Optional further reading:  Smith and Rayson (2007), Leech (2003), Mair and Leech (2006), Biber (2004), Biber et al. (1998: )