Functional variation in the Spoken BNC2014 and the potential for register analysis
Open Access
- 6 July 2022
- journal article
- Published by John Benjamins Publishing Company in Register in L1 and L2 Language Development
- Vol. 1 (2), 296-317
- https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.18013.lov
Abstract
This article focuses on how register considerations informed and guided the design of the spoken component of the British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014). It discusses why the compilers of the corpus sought to gather recordings from just one broad spoken register – ‘informal conversation’ – and how this and other design decisions afforded contributors to the corpus much freedom with regards to the selection of situational contexts for the recordings. This freedom resulted in a high level of diversity in the corpus for situational parameters such as recording location and activity type, each of which was captured in the corpus metadata. Focussing on these parameters, this article provides evidence for functional variation among the texts in the corpus and suggests that differences such as those observed presently could be analysable within the existing frameworks for analysis of register variation in spoken and written language, such as multidimensional analysis.Keywords
This publication has 7 references indexed in Scilit:
- The Spoken BNC2014Corpus Studies of Language Through Time, 2022
- Overcoming Challenges in Corpus ConstructionPublished by Taylor & Francis Ltd ,2020
- CQPweb — combining power, flexibility and usability in a corpus analysis toolCorpus Studies of Language Through Time, 2012
- Register, Genre, and StylePublished by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,2009
- Applying corpus linguistics in a health care contextJournal of Applied Linguistics, 2004
- A typology of English textsLinguistics, 1989
- Variation across Speech and WritingPublished by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,1988