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

基于基于四个匹配的20世纪英语参考语料库（LOB, Brown, F-LOB, Frown）的纯文本版本的语言变化的成功工作，弗莱堡大学（德国）和兰开斯特大学（英国）的英语系参与了对词性进行注释（“标记”）的语料库版本的制作。标注是自动完成的，大量的手工后期编辑，以确保材料具有获得经验有效的语言结果所需的质量。几乎所有基于语料库的语言变化研究都在追踪单个单词或结构类型的频率变化。相比之下，当前项目的重点是词类或标签序列的频率变化。由于词性频率是体裁和风格的重要指标，我们期望这项工作能够对语法/结构变化的深层潮流如何嵌入文本层面上更不稳定的历时发展产生重要的新见解。

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.