Sociolinguistics and Corpus Linguistics

This textbook introduces students to the ways that corpus linguistics approaches can be used in order to aid sociolinguistic research. Corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics have a great deal in common in terms of their basic approaches to language enquiry, particularly in terms of providing representative samples from a population and analysing quantitative information in order to study variation or differences between populations.This text covers a range of different topics within sociolinguistics:*Analysing demographic variation*Comparing language use across different cultures*Examining language change over time*Studying transcripts of spoken interactions*Identifying attitudes or discourses.Written for undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociolinguistics, or corpus linguists who wish to use corpora to study social phenomena, this textbook examines how corpora can be used to investigate synchronic variation and diachronic change by referring to a number of classic corpus-based studies as well as the author's original research. Original analyses of a number of corpora including the British National Corpus, the corpus of Spoken English Dialects and the Brown family of corpora are complemented by a new corpus of written British English collected around 2006 for the purposes of writing the book.Techniques of analysis like concordancing, keywords and collocations are discussed, along with corpus annotation and statistical procedures such as chi-squared tests and clustering. Paul Baker takes a critical approach to using corpora in sociolinguistics, outlining the limitations of the approach as well as its advantages.

Paul Baker is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. He is co-author of A Glossary of Corpus Linguistics (2006) and commissioning editor for the journal Corpora.