Towards a Better Exploitation of the Brown 'Family' Corpora in Diachronic Studies of British and American English Language Varieties

What it is about

The Brown family corpora (Brown, Frown, LOB, FLOB) hold about 500 texts each from 1961 and 1991/2, sorted into 15 genres. Earlier diachronic studies pooled the genres into four broad categories. The paper measures change in the Coleman-Liau Index, a character-based readability score, with a t-test, under two designs: one with all 15 genres and one with the four categories. The two designs disagree. In British English the four-category design shows a significant rise in the Press category, which the genre-level design does not confirm. In American English the genre-level design finds a rise in one Press genre (Editorial) that the category design misses. Within Fiction, genres move in opposite directions. The paper also notes that uneven genre sizes (80 texts in Science, 30 in Miscellaneous) can make a category trend reflect one genre only.

Ideas

• I1. Report results per fine-grained group, not only per broad category, in any Mova evaluation. Use school subjects or lesson types as the groups, keep the table in BTreeMap order, and claim a trend only when the subgroups agree.
• I2. Use the Coleman-Liau formula (characters per word, sentences per text) as a deterministic readability grade for the lesson texts in world/src/knowledge.rs. It needs no syllable counter. Measure its agreement with the school year assigned to each lesson, and run it twice.
• I3. Before any comparison, report the number of texts in each group next to each test, as the paper's Table 1 does, so that small groups cannot quietly decide a result.

For Mova

The relevant chapters are 08. National varieties (British and American differences) and 37. Register and variation (register). The code is world/src/knowledge.rs for the lessons. The measures: per-group results with group sizes, and the agreement of the readability grade with the school year.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{stajner2011better,
  title = {{Towards a Better Exploitation of the Brown 'Family' Corpora in Diachronic Studies of British and American English Language Varieties}},
  author = {Štajner, Sanja},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Second Student Research Workshop associated with RANLP 2011},
  year = {2011},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/R11-2003/}
}

References

22 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Laurie Bauer. 1994. Watching English change: and introduction to the study of linguistic change in standard English in the twentieth century. London: Longman. find
2. Meri Coleman and T. L. Liau. 1975. A computer readability formula designed for machine scoring. Journal of Applied Psychology, 60 (2): 283–284. find
3. David Denison. 1994. A Corpus of Late Modern English Prose. In: M. Kytö et al. eds. Corpora Across the Centuries: 7–16 Amsterdam: Rodopi. find
4. Nelson W. Francis. 1965. A standard corpus of edited present-day American English. College English, 26: 267–273. find
5. George R. Klare. 1968. The Role of Word Frequency in Readability. Elementary English, 45: 12–22. find
6. George R. Klare. 1974. Assessing Readability. Reading Research Quarterly, 1: 62–102. find
7. Geoffrey Leech. 2003. Modality on the move: the English modal auxiliaries 1961-1992. In: R. Facchinetti, M. Krug and F. Palmer, eds. Modality in contemporary English. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 223–240. find
8. Geoffrey Leech. 2004. Recent grammatical change in English: data, description, theory. In: K. Aijmer and B. Altenberg, eds. Advances in Corpus Linguistics: Papers from the 23rd International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 23) Göteborg 22-26 May 2002. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 61–81. find
9. Geoffrey Leech and Nicholas Smith. 2005. Extending the possibilities of corpus-based research on English in the twentieth century: a prequel to LOB and FLOB. ICAME Journal, 29: 83–98. find
10. Geoffrey Leech and Nicholas Smith. 2006. Recent grammatical change in written English 1961–1992: some preliminary findings of a comparison of American with British English. In: A. Renouf and A. Kehoe, eds. The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 186–204. find
11. Geoffrey Leech and Nicholas Smith. 2009. Change and constancy in linguistic change: How grammatical usage in written English evolved in the period 1931-1991. In: A. Renouf and A. Kehoe, eds. Corpus Linguistics: Refinements and Reassessments. Amsterdam/New York, 173–200. find
12. Geoffrey Leech, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair and Nicholas Smith. 2009. Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
13. Christian Mair and Marianne Hundt. 1995. Why is the progressive becoming more frequent in English? A corpus-based investigation of language change in progress. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 43: 111–122. find
14. Christian Mair. 1997. The spread of the going-tofuture in written English: a corpus-based investigation into language change in progress. In: R. Hickey and St. Puppel, eds. Language history and linguistic modelling: a festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on his 60th birthday. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1536–1543. find
15. Christian Mair. 2002. Three changing patterns of verb complementation in Late Modern English: a real-time study based on matching text corpora. English Language and Linguistics, 6: 105–131. find
16. Christian Mair, Marianne Hundt, Geoffrey Leech and Nicholas Smith. 2002. Short term diachronic shifts in part-of-speech frequencies: a comparison of the tagged LOB and F-LOB corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 7: 245–264. find
17. Christian Mair and Geoffrey Leech. 2006. Current change in English syntax. In: B. Aarts and A. MacMahon, eds. The Handbook of English Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell, Ch.14. find
18. Douglas R. McCallum and James L. Peterson. 1982. Computer-based readability indexes. In Proceedings of the ACM ’82 Conference: 44–48. New York, NY. find
19. Edgar A. Smith and Peter J. Kincaid. 1970. Derivation and Validation of the Automated Readability Index for Use with Technical Materials. Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 12(5): 457–464. find
20. Nicholas Smith. 2002. Ever moving on? The progressive in recent British English. In: P. Peters, P. Collins and A. Smith, eds. New frontiers of corpus research: papers from the twenty first International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora, Sydney 2000. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 317–330. find
21. Nicholas Smith. 2003a. A quirky progressive? A corpus-based exploration of the will + be + -ing construction in recent and present day British English. In: D. Archer, P. Rayson, A. Wilson and T. McEnery, eds. Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2003 Conference: 714–723. Lancaster University: UCREL Technical Papers. find
22. Nicholas Smith. 2003b. Changes in the modals and semi-modals of strong obligation and epistemic necessity in recent British English. In: R. Facchinetti, M. Krug and F. Palmer, eds. Modality in contemporary English. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 241–266. find

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/stajner-2011-better-exploitation-brown-family-corpora/