English style on the move: Variation and change in stylistic norms in the twentieth century

Leech, G; Smith, NI; Rayson, P

Abstract

This paper has two related purposes. First,
our goal is to explain the results of
recent research on twentieth century British (as well as American) English,
using equivalent corpora of general written (published) English known as the
‘Brown Family’ of corpora. Limiting
our attention to British corpora, the
‘Brown Family’ contains three matching
corpora of a million words each, the B-
LOB, LOB and F-LOB corpora, sampled at roughly thirty-year intervals
(1931±31 years, 1961 and 1991).
(A fourth corpus
from 1901±3 is under
development, and one-third of it will be used in the latter part of this paper.)
These enable us to trace the changing
history of written (published) British
English over a sixty-year period. Through changes in frequency in grammatical
categories and constructions across a variety of genres, we observe largely
consistent patterns of change which lend
themselves to explanations in terms of
what may be called general stylistic trends. To these trends we give such names
as colloquialization
(movement towards spoken norms of usage),densification
(movement towards denser or more compact expression of meaning) and
democratization
(the trend towards avoidance of
discrimination or inequality in
the linguistic treatment of individuals). Only the first two of these trends will be
explored in this paper.
In the second part of the paper, we
show how general stylistic norms,
such as are provided by the ‘Brown Family’ corpora, can be used as a
reference
norm
against which statistical deviations identify some of the characteristic
features of style of an individual author or an individual text. For this we make
use of Rayson’s Wmatrix software (http
://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/) for
comparing (groups of) texts in terms
of lexical, gramma
tical and semantic
characteristics. Although the comparison
is in some respects lacking in
accuracy, it identifies typical
style markers of an individual text, ordering them
in terms of their differentness from the refer
ence norm. It remains to be seen how
far this computational technique can place the elusive notion of authorial style
on an objective footing, but results so far are promising.

Citation

Leech, G., Smith, N., & Rayson, P. (2012). English style on the move: Variation and change in stylistic norms in the twentieth century. In M. Kytö (Ed.), English Corpus Linguistics: Crossing Paths (69-98). Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi

• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2012
• Deposit Date: Apr 2, 2013
• Publisher: Rodopi
• Pages: 69-98
• Series Title: Language and Computers - Studies in Practical Linguistics
• Series Number: 76
• Book Title: English Corpus Linguistics: Crossing Paths
• ISBN: 9789042035188
• Publisher URL: http://www.rodopi.nl/default.asp
• Related Public URLs: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=LC+76