English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Grammatical change, as opposed to (for example) phonetic or lexical change, is generally felt to be a slow process, imperceptible to the native speaker. There is some truth in this judgement, and yet changes in English grammatical usage during the recent past have been considerable. The evidence for this comes from comparable corpora or subcorpora systematically sampled from the language at regular intervals of time. It has now become possible to • observe changes in progress in written English • compare rates of change from one genre to another • compare rates of change across the two regional varieties: American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) 1. The Brown Family of Corpora The corpora I shall refer to, in demonstrating this, are known collectively as the Brown family of corpora. The name derives from the Brown Corpus, the earliest electronic corpus of the English language, collected at Brown University 1962-4, and since then widely distributed among researchers, teachers and students. The Brown Corpus consists of just over a million words, and is subdivided into 500 written (printed) text samples of approximately 2000 words each. Alongside the Brown Corpus, the Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen corpus was created as a British counterpart, to be as precisely comparable to the Brown Corpus as possible. It consists, like Brown, of 500 samples of written English, constructed according to the same corpus design, with subdivision into 15 genres, within which individual texts and groups of texts are matched. Like those of the American corpus, the text samples of the British corpus were selected by stratified randomized sampling from texts first published in 1961. It will be noticed that these corpora, like others subsequently created, were named after the universities at which they were compiled. Also, for convenience, Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 4:25 AM Major Trends in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics 4 8 Invited Papers corpora created at more than one university have been informally identified by acronyms, such as “LOB corpus” for the “Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen corpus”. Considering the immense growth in computing power and text storage capacity since the 1960s and 1970s, the Brown and LOB corpora are nowadays regarded as somewhat small and as well as being limited to written English. Nevertheless, they are still valuable for research because of their precise comparability, and also because of their wide availability: researchers all around the world can obtain copies of these corpora, and can annotate them and analyse them for their own research purposes. Table 1. The genres of the Brown family of corpora, and the number of text samples each contains. Identifying letter Genres Subcorpora Number of text samples A Press: reportage Press 44 B Press: editorial 27 C Press: reviews 17 D Religion General Prose 17 E Skills and hobbies 36 F Popular lore 48 G Belles letters, biography, memoirs etc. 75 H Miscellaneous [mostly government documents] 30 J Learned [academic writing] Learned 80 K General fiction Fiction 29 L Mystery and detective fiction 24 M Science fiction 6 N Adventure and western fiction 29 P Romance and love story 29 R Humour 9 Total 500 Because the genre sections are relatively small, it has been found that more reliable comparisons can be made by grouping the genres into four subcorpora (Press, General Prose, Learned and Fiction), containing a set of similar genres, as shown in the third column of Table 1. Table 2 summarizes the contents of each corpus of the Brown family, referring to the subcorpora which are used in subsequent data analyses in this paper. Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 4:25 AM

Growth and Decline: How Grammar has Been Changing in Recent English