Significant or random?: A critical review of sociolinguistic generalisations based on large corpora

International Journal of Corpus Linguistics

Volumn 19, Issue 1, 2014, Pages 1-28

  Brezina, Vaclav ^a   Meyerhoff, Miriam ^b  

^a LANCASTER UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

^b VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OF WELLINGTON   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

Aggregation; Log likelihood; Methodology; Sociolinguistics; Statistics

Indexed keywords

EID: 84900311060     PISSN: 13846655     EISSN: 15699811     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1075/ijcl.19.1.01bre     Document Type: Review

References (49)

1. Anderwald, L. 2002. Negation in Non-standard British English. London: Routledge.
2. Anderwald, L. 2005. "Negative concord in British English dialects". In Y. Yieiri (Ed.), Aspects of English Negation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 113-138.
3. Baker, P. 2010. Sociolinguistics and Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
4. Barbieri, F. 2008. "Patterns of age-based linguistic variation in American English." Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12 (1), 58-88. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2008.00353.x
5. Barlow, M. 2002. MonoConc Pro 2.0. Houston: Athelstan Publications.
6. Biber, D. 1991 [1988]. Variation Across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
7. Biber, D. 2009. "A corpus-driven approach to formulaic language in English: Multi-word patterns in speech and writing". International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 14 (3), 275-311. DOI: 10.1075/ijcl.14.3.08bib
8. Biber, D., S. Conrad & R. Reppen. 1998. Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511804489
9. Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad, E. Finegan & R. Quirk. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman.
10. Brezina, V. 2013. "Certainty and uncertainty in spoken language: In search of epistemic sociolect and idiolect." In M. Reif, J. Robinson & M. Pütz (Eds.) Variation in Language and Language Use, Frankfurt am Mein: Peter Lang, 97-107.
11. Bucholtz, M. 1999. " 'Why be normal?' Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls". Language in Society, 28 (2): 203-223.
12. Chambers, J. K. 2003. Sociolinguistic Theory: Linguistic Variation and its Social Implications. Oxford: Blackwell.
13. Cheshire, J. 1992. Variation in an English Dialect: A Sociolinguistic Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
14. Deutschmann, M. 2003. Apologising in British English. Umeå: Umeå Universitet.
15. Eckert, P. 1989. "The whole woman: Sex and gender differences in variation". Language Variation and Change, 1 (3): 245-267. DOI: 10.1017/S095439450000017X
16. Eckert, P. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford: Blackwell.
17. Field, A. 2009. Discovering Statistics Using SPSS. London: SAGE.
18. Gibbons, J. D. & Chakraborti, S. 2003. Nonparametric Statistical Inference. New York: Marcel Dekker.
19. Gries, S. T. 2005. "Null-hypothesis significance testing of word frequencies: A follow-up on Kilgarriff." Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 1 (2), 277-294. DOI: 10.1515/cllt.2005. 1.2.277
20. Gries, S. T. 2006. "Some proposals towards more rigorous corpus linguistics." Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 54 (2), 191-202.
21. Holmes, J. 1995a. "Time for /t/: Initial /t/ in New Zealand English." Australian Journal of Linguistics, 15 (2), 127-156. DOI: 10.1080/07268609508599522
22. Holmes, J. 1995b. Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.
23. Hunston, S. & G. Francis. 2000. Pattern Grammar: A Corpus-driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/scl.4
24. Ito, R. & Tagliamonte, S. 2003. "Well weird, right dodgy, very strange, really cool: Layering and recycling in English intensifiers". Language in Society, 32, 257-279. DOI: 10.1017/S0047404503322055
25. Johnson, D. E. 2009. "Getting off the GoldVarb standard: Introducing Rbrul for mixed-effects variable rule analysis". Language and Linguistics Compass, 3 (1), 359-383. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00108.x
26. Kiesling, S. F. 1998. "Men's identities and sociolinguistic variation: The case of fraternity men". Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2 (1), 69-99. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9481.00031
27. Kilgarriff, A. 2001. "Comparing corpora". International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 6 (1), 97-133. DOI: 10.1075/ijcl.6.1.05kil
28. Kilgarriff, A. 2005. "Language is never, ever, ever, random". Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 1 (2), 263-276.
29. Macaulay, R. 2002. "You know, it depends". Journal of Pragmatics, 34 (6), 749-767. DOI: 10.1016/S0378-2166(01)00005-4
30. Mann, H. B. & Whitney, D. R. 1947. "On a test of whether one of two random variables is stochastically larger than the other." The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 18 (1), 50-60. DOI: 10.1214/aoms/1177730491
31. McEnery, A. & Hardie, A. 2012. Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
32. McEnery, A. & Xiao, Z. 2004. "Swearing in modern British English: The case of fuck in the BNC." Language and Literature, 13 (3), 235-268. DOI: 10.1177/0963947004044873
33. Meyerhoff, M. 1999. "Sorry in the Pacific: Defining communities, defining practices". Language in Society, 28 (2), 225-238. DOI: 10.1017/S0047404599002055
34. Murphy, B. 2009. "'She's a fucking ticket': the pragmatics of fuck in Irish English: An age and gender perspective." Corpora, 4 (1), 85-106. DOI: 10.3366/E1749503209000239
35. Murphy, B. 2010. Corpus and Sociolinguistics: Investigating Age and Gender in Female Talk. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/scl.38
36. Nevalainen, T. 1999. "Making the best use of 'bad' data: Evidence for sociolinguistic variation in Early Modern English". Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 100 (4), 499-533.
37. Nevalainen, T. & Raumolin-Brunberg, H. 2003. Historical Sociolinguistics. London: Longman.
38. Nickerson, R. S. 2000. "Null hypothesis significance testing: A review of an old and continuing controversy". Psychological Methods, 5 (2), 241. DOI: 10.1037/1082-989X.5.2.241
39. Rayson, P., Berridge, D. & Francis, B. 2004. "Extending the Cochran rule for the comparison of word frequencies between corpora." In G. Purnelle, C. Fairon & A. Dister (Eds.) Le Poids des Mots: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Statistical analysis of textual data (JADT 2004), Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 926-936.
40. Rayson, P., Leech, G. & Hodges, M. 1997. "Social differentiation in the use of English vocabulary: Some analyses of the conversational component of the British National Corpus". International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 2 (1), 133-152. DOI: 10.1075/ijcl.2.1.07ray
41. Schmid, H.-J. 2003. "Do women and men really live in different cultures? Evidence from the BNC." In A. Wilson, P. Rayson & T. McEnery (Eds.) Corpus Linguistics by the Lune. A Festschrift for Geoffrey Leech. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 185-221.
42. Scott, M. 2001. "Comparing corpora and identifying key words, collocations, and frequency distributions through the WordSmith Tools suite of computer programs". In M. Ghadessy, A. Henry & R. L. Roseberry (Eds.) Small Corpus Studies and ELT: Theory and Practice. John Benjamins: Amsterdam, 47-67.
43. Scott, M. 1997. "PC analysis of key words - and key key words". System, 25 (2), 233-245. DOI: 10.1016/S0346-251X(97)00011-0
44. Sinclair, J. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
45. Smith, J. 2001. "Negative concord in the Old and New World: Evidence from Scotland". Language Variation and Change, 13(2), 109-134. DOI: 10.1017/S0954394501132011
46. Stubbs, M. 2001. "Texts, corpora, and problems of interpretation: A response to Widdowson." Applied Linguistics, 22 (2), 149-172. DOI: 10.1093/applin/22.2.149
47. Torgersen, E. N., Gabrielatos, C., Hoffmann, S. & Fox, S. 2011. "A corpus-based study of pragmatic markers in London English". Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 7 (1), 93-118. DOI: 10.1515/cllt.2011.005
48. Widdowson, H. G. 2000. "On the limitations of linguistics applied." Applied Linguistics, 21 (1), 3-25. DOI: 10.1093/applin/21.1.3
49. Xiao, R., & Tao, H. 2007. "A corpus-based sociolinguistic study of amplifiers in British English." Sociolinguistic Studies, 1 (2), 241-273.