Language varieties

Whole texts are tagged according to variety and other specifications. Corpora designed for research into stylistics or pragmatics, for example, are likely to be tagged in great detail and include the age, gender and nationality of the speakers, the date of publication, etc.

In the CCS, you have three choices, namely:

q British books, ephemera, radio, newspapers, magazines (26m words)

q American books, ephemera and radio (9m words)

q British transcribed speech (10m words)

If restricting the text type according to these criteria could be helpful, select the appropriate check boxes before hitting Show Concs.

Spoken and Written Language

You might like to read Exploring English: Speaking and Writing from English Online.

Ø Are moreover and whereas used in speech, or do they belong to the written language?

Ø would have thought – is this lexical bundle used in written English?

Ø You can find examples of question tags, can’t you?

Ø Are goodness me, for+all+i+care and for+heaven+s+sake actually used?

Ø This spoken search may surprise: like+VBD

UK and US English

Ø Who says: different from and different than.

Ø Dived or dove? Also, incidentally, Dove/VERB vs dove/NOUN

Ø Some say have, others take a bath or shower. Try this: have|take+DT+bath|shower

How are these words used differently on opposite sides of the Atlantic?

Ø momentarily

Ø smart

Ø fancy

Ø football

In which language variety does lanai appears as a common noun? And Hoosier? This link will take you a discussion of the word – where you will also see “unhandy” in its definition.

For more on these varieties, try "Or whose language is it anyway?" and

Potentially Confusing And Embarrassing Differences between American and British English.

Exploiting the varieties function

Do we write the 1970s with or without an apostrophe? Remember to use the backslash before numbers. Perform these two searches and note how many concordances there are of each: \1970s and \1970+s. If there are less than forty, we can assume that there are no more in the whole corpus, and that that number out of 56 million words is not very significant. Search \1970+s as US and again as UK. Does it seem that these are all the examples in the whole corpus? Search for \1970+s as transcribed speech only. What do transcribers know about writing decades with apostrophes?