Lexico-grammatical variation in spoken British English corpora

This chapter combines, for the first time, the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 and the London-Lund Corpus 2 – two corpora of contemporary spoken British English – to explore lexico-grammatical variation according to register and speaker gender. Multi-dimensional analysis (MDA) is used to compare registers according to features associated with involved vs. informational discourse. MDA identifies clear differences between each of the LLC-2 registers, which range from most informal (face-to-face conversation) to most formal (parliamentary proceedings). The Spoken BNC2014 is found to represent an even more informal spoken register than LLC-2’s face-to-face conversation. Twelve features, including nouns, present tense verbs, and private verbs, have large effects on the variability between the registers. Gender is found to have a significant effect on formality, with female speakers more likely to use linguistic features associated with informality, including private verbs. A case study on the use of private verb THINK in face-to-face conversation suggests that the higher rate of use among female speakers may be associated with functions related to tentativeness and collaborative style. The chapter evaluates the complementarity of the two corpora, suggesting that they can fill gaps in each other’s register coverage for the purpose of research on sociolinguistic variation in contemporary spoken British English.