Diachronic study and language change

Corpus LinguisticsRichard Xiao

lancsxiaoz@googlemail.com

Aims of this session• Lecture

– Corpora vs. diachronic study– The state of the art of corpus-based diachronic studies– Case study: recent change in English grammar

• Lab session– Using the Time corpus to explore full and bare infinitives in

American English between the 1920s and the 2000s

Corpora vs. diachronic study• The nature of diachronic study determines its

reliance on empirical historical data• Diachronic study is perhaps one of the few

areas which can only be investigated using corpus data (cf. Bauer 2002: 109)– The intuitions of modern speakers have little to

offer regarding the language used hundreds or even tens of years ago

Helsinki corpus and related books• Three books based on the Helsinki corpus on

the project “English in transition: Change through variation”– Early English in the Computer Age: Exploration

through the Helsinki Corpus (Rissanen, Kytö and Palander-Collin 1993)

– English in Transition: Corpus-based Studies in Linguistic Variation and Genre Styles (Rissanen, Kytö and Heikkonen 1997)

– Grammaticalization at Work: Studies of Long-term Developments in English (Rissanen, Kytö and Heikkonen 1997)

Recent grammatical changes• Work undertaken by teams led Geoff Leech (Lancaster)

and Christian Mair (Freiburg) on the basis of the corpora of the Brown family (LOB vs. FLOB, and Brown vs. Frown)– Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study

(Leech, Hundt and Mair 2009)– Recent grammatical change in English: data, description,

theory (Leech 2004)– Current changes in English syntax (Leech and Mair 2006)– Recent grammatical change in written English 1961-1992

(Leech and Smith 2006)– Grammatical change in 20th century English (Mair 2006)

Historical pragmatics• Arnovick (2000) examines the speech event of parting, focusing on

the development of Goodbye, which was originally an explicit blessing God be with you– The end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century

marked a crucial period during which the blessing declined and the closing form Goodbye increased in frequency

• Jacobsson (2002) studies Thank you and Thanks in Early Modern English– They were probably the same in the Early Modern period as they are

today as gratitude expressions, but they ‘had not developed the discourse-marking features (e.g. as a closing sequence of conversation) of today’s British English; nor is it possible to see the complex patterns of thanking in different turn-positions

• Biber (2004) explores, on the basis of the ARCHER corpus, the patterns of historical change in the preferred devices used to mark stance across the past three centuries

Recent change in English grammar

• Case study based on Leech (2004)– “Recent grammatical change in English: data,

description, theory”, in K. Aijmer and B. Altenberg (eds) Advances in Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam: Rodopi

• What are the major trends in grammatical change over the three intervening decades between 1961-1991?

Data collection and tagging

Spoke: 80,000 words from a comparable and balanced range of spoken genres

Modal auxiliaries

LL score greater than 3.84 for p<0.05

A generation gap?

BrE is following rather "reluctantly" in the wake of AmE?

“Encroachment” hypothesis• The apparent decline in canonical modal

usage (e.g. will, would, shall, should, may, might, ought, need) is due to the rise, in recent centuries, of the so-called semi-modals, such as be going to and have to, which are presumed to be still increasingly used– Are semi-modals gradually encroaching the

territory of canonical modals?

“Encroachment” hypothesis

• No strong connection between the patterns shown by the modals and the semi-modals

• Semi-modals are much less frequent (in written English) than the modals, but changes in frequency show a mixed picture– Some of them seem to have increased their usage massively

in the period 1961-1991 (e.g. need to), but others have declined (e.g. be to)

– Unexpectedly, however, the overall frequency of semi-modals is found to be greater in the BrE than in the AmE corpora in both periods

Frequencies of some semi-modals

Semi-modals in spoken BrE

• Trends in spoken English are similar to those in written English, but somewhat more exaggerated

• The general increase of semi-modals is even greater in spoken than in written English (+32.3% vs. 10% for BrE / 18.6% for AmE)– But only two of them have increased significantly

Modal auxiliaries: a summary• In general terms, a clear decline of frequency in the use of

canonical modal auxiliaries between 1961 and 1991• During this period, individual modals have been declining at

different rates, but there is a tendency for very common modals to hold their own (e.g. will, can), and for infrequent modals (e.g. shall, ought to, need) to decline sharply– Some middle-ranking modals (e.g. may and must) have also declined

sharply

• Alongside the decline of modals, there is no clear overall picture regarding semi-modals: although in general, semi-modal usage is increasing, some semi-modals are declining, and semi-modals as a whole are much less frequent than ‘true’ modals

A bigger question…

• Do the decline in canonical modals (especially formal modals) and the general increase in semi-modals suggest that English is becoming more colloquial over the three intervening decades between 1961 and 1991?

Changes indicative of colloquialization

Frequency per M words

Colloquialization hypothesis A decline in canonical modals, especially formal usages like shall,

ought to and need An increasing frequency of phenomena associated with spoken

language (e.g. progressive, contractions, zero-relative clauses) A decreasing frequency of phenomena associated with the

written language (e.g. passive, pied-piping relative clauses)• A tendency for the written British English gradually to acquire

norms and characteristics associated with the spoken conversational English over the three decades in 1961-1991

• Leech, G. (2012) How grammar has been changing in recent English: Using comparable corpora to track linguistic change. 外语教学理论与实践 2012, Vol. 4 Issue (4): 13-20 。

Practical

• Using the Time corpus to explore full and bare infinitives in American English between the 1920s and the 2000s– http://corpus.byu.edu/time/

The Time Corpus• The Time corpus

(Davies 2007)– 100+ million words– span (1923-2006)– Wide range of topics

(news, sports, business, culture, health, entertainment, etc)

– internal consistency– chronological gap http://corpus.byu.edu/time/

HELP V

[help].[vv*] [v*i]

Tip: select "Chart“

HELP + PRON + V

[help].[vv*] [p*] [v*i]

HELP + NOUN + V

[help].[vv*] [n*] [v*i]

HELP + WORD + NOUN + V

[help].[vv*] * [n*] [v*i](* - any word, e.g. Det)

HELP + bare infinitives

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1920s 19930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s

Year

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Combined frequency per million words(1960s - 1990s: stead rise)

HELP + to V

[help].[vv*] to [v*i]

HELP + PRON + to V

[help].[vv*] [p*] to [v*i]

HELP + NOUN + to V

[help].[vv*] [n*] to [v*i]

HELP + WORD + NOUN + to V

[help].[vv*] * [n*] to [v*i]

HELP + full infinitives

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1920s 19930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s

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Combined frequency per million words(1960s-1990s: a decline)

Full vs. bare infinitives in Time corpus

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Frequency per million words

1920s 1940s 1960s 1980s 2000s

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bare_inf

full_inf