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Seminar I A year to remember? The BE21 corpus and recent part-of-speech change in British English

Seminars / Lectures / Workshops

2Apr2025Seminar
  • Date

    02 Apr 2025

  • Organiser

    Department of English and Communication

  • Time

    17:00 - 18:00

  • Venue

    AG312, PolyU campus / Online via Zoom  

Speaker

Professor Paul Baker

Summary

This talk describes the collection and analysis of the most recent edition of the Brown family, the BE21 corpus, consisting of 1 million words of written British English texts, published in 2021. Using the Coefficient of Variance, the frequencies of part-of-speech tags in BE21 were compared against the other four British members of the Brown family (from 1931, 1961, 1991 and 2006). Part-of-speech tags that were steadily increasing or decreasing in all five or the latest three corpora were examined via concordance lines and their distributions in order to identify new and emerging trends in British English. The analysis points to the continuation of some trends (such as declines in modal verbs and titles of address), along with newer trends like the rise of first-person pronouns. The analysis indicates that more general trends of densification, democratisation and colloquialisation are continuing in British English.

Keynote Speaker

Professor Paul Baker

Professor Paul Baker

Lancaster University, United Kingdom

Paul Baker is Professor of English Language at the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University where he is a member of the Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences ESRC Research Centre. He specialises in corpus linguistics, particularly using and developing corpus methods to carry out discourse analysis. He has written 26 books which have covered a range of topics including newspaper discourse, health, identity, terrorism and language change over time. He is commissioning editor of the journal Corpora (EUP) and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. 

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