Examining Syntactic Variation in English: The Importance of Corpus Design and Corpus Size

This paper examines a number of cases of syntactic variation in English - change over time, variation between genres, and variation between dialects. All of the data comes from large, structured corpora of English, including COCA, COHA, GloWbE, the BNC, and Google Books (Advanced). For many different types of syntactic constructions, only very large corpora, with the right type of architecture and interface, can provide the needed data to accurately describe these types of syntactic variation.

Abstract

1. Introduction

2 Researching genre-based variation with COCA

3. Researching recent and ongoing syntactic changes with COCA

4. Researching longer range syntactic changes with COHA

5. Researching long-range syntactic changes with Google Books-Advanced

6. Researching dialectal variation in syntax with COCA and the BNC

7. Researching dialectal variation in syntax in other World Englishes

8. Conclusion

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