Parts of speech in English texts: Synchronic and diachronic variability in the 20th century

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christian Mair
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2003 to 2007
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 5415546

Building on successful work on ongoing language change based on four matching reference corpora of 20th century English (LOB, Brown, F-LOB, Frown) in their plain-text versions, the English departments of the Universities of Freiburg (Germany) and Lancaster (UK) are involved in producing versions of the corpora which are annotated ("tagged") for part-of-speech. Tagging is done automatically, with extensive manual post-editing to ensure that the material has the quality required to obtain empirically valid linguistic results.Practically all corpus-bases research on language change in progress traces changing frequencies of individual words or construction types. The focus of the present project, by contrast, is on shifting frequencies of part-of-speech classes or tag-sequences. As part-of-speech frequencies are important indicators of genre and style, we expect the work to lead to important new insights on how the deep currents of grammatical/ structural change are embedded in more volatile diachronic developments on the textual level.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants