British National Corpus (BNC) as a sociolinguistic dataset: Exploring individual and social variation

该项目利用现有的数据集——英国国家语料库（BNC）来研究英国不同年龄和社会群体使用的非正式英语口语。此外，英国英语的新发展将通过比较BNC和BNC2014来调查，BNC2014是兰开斯特大学与剑桥大学出版社合作开发的一个新数据集。这使我们第一次能够大规模地观察20多年来英式英语口语的语言变化。通过结合语料库语言学和社会语言学领域的方法，以及使用新颖的分析方法对数据进行深入探索，该项目将为英国英语的社会变化提供新的见解，这在以前是不可能的。社会语言学分析的重点将放在年龄上，这是日常社会生活的一个重要方面，迄今为止，研究语言的研究人员对年龄的关注有限。这个项目的主要贡献不仅是增加了我们对英式英语的了解，而且也为将来在这一领域进行系统的研究提供了可能。该项目的成果将应用于中学的英语教学（AS和A-level），以及母语不是英语的学生的ESL/EFL课程。在国际上，对EFL/ESL教学的需求不断增长，这也是英国经济的重要组成部分。该项目的结果也将通过兰开斯特大学ESRC社会科学语料库方法中心运营的免费在线课程（语料库语言学MOOC）以及项目合作伙伴（项目大使）的不同渠道传播。该项目得到了剑桥大学出版社的支持，剑桥大学出版社是全球领先的学术出版商，也是剑桥大学的一部分，英语和媒体中心是一个重要的教育慈善机构，与英国和国外的英语语言和媒体研究的中学教师合作，伦敦三一学院是一个在全球40多个国家开展业务的主要国际考试委员会。

The project exploits an existing dataset, The British National Corpus (BNC), for the study of informal spoken British English as used by different age and social groups across the UK. In addition, new developments in British English will be investigated by comparing the BNC with BNC2014, a new dataset that is being developed at Lancaster University in collaboration with Cambridge University Press. This allows us, for the first time, to look at language change in spoken British English, on a large scale, over twenty years. By combing methodologies from the fields of corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics as well as using novel analytical methods for in-depth exploration of the data, the project will offer new insights into social variation in British English that have previously not been possible. The focus of the sociolinguistic analyses will be on age, an important aspect of everyday social life, that has so far received only limited attention from researchers studying language.The main contribution of the project is not only to our knowledge of British English but also to enabling future systematic research in this area. The results of the project will be applied in teaching of the English language at secondary schools (AS and A-level) and in ESL/EFL classes to students whose mother tongue is not English. Internationally, there is a growing demand for EFL/ESL teaching, which also represents an important part of British economy. The results of the project will also be disseminated via a free online course (our Corpus Linguistics MOOC) run by the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science, Lancaster University as well as via different channels of the project partners (project ambassadors). The project has been endorsed by Cambridge University Press, a leading global academic publisher and part of the University of Cambridge, the English and Media Centre, an important educational charity working with secondary teachers of English Language and Media Studies in the UK and abroad and Trinity College London, a major international testing board operating in over 40 countries worldwide.