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Against the backdrop of the significant social changes taking place during the Renaissance, this paper interrogates the lexical domain of citizenship, focusing on three words deemed near-synonymous in the historical literature: citizens, burgesses, and freemen. The study takes a quantitative corpus-linguistic approach to the data in the Early English Books Online corpus (1550–1699) and consults lexicographical sources (the Oxford English Dictionary, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Lexicons of Early Modern English 1550–1700) to offer an overview of the organisation of the conceptual domain occupied by citizenship terms referring to "dwellers". The relationships between citizens, burgesses, and freemen over time are addressed through detailed quantitative collocation analysis, considering their overall profile, stability and innovation, and areas of functional overlap and distinctiveness. Overall, the results support historians' intuitions that citizens, burgesses, and freemen are "vernacular synonyms". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the collection and analysis of the most recent edition of the Brown family, the BE21 corpus, consisting of 1 million words of written British English texts, published in 2021. Using the Coefficient of Variance, the frequencies of part of speech tags in BE21 are compared against the other four British members of the Brown family (from 1931, 1961, 1991 and 2006). Part of speech tags that are steadily increasing or decreasing in all five or the latest three corpora are examined via concordance lines and their distributions in order to identify long-standing and emerging trends in British English. The analysis points to the continuation of some trends (such as declines in modal verbs and titles of address), along with newer trends like the rise of first person pronouns. The analysis indicates that more general trends of densification, democratisation and colloquialisation are continuing in British English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the creation and use of the TV Corpus (subtitles from 75,000 episodes, 325 million words, 6 English-speaking countries, 1950s-2010s) and the Movies Corpus (subtitles from 25,000 movies, 200 million words, 6 English-speaking countries, 1930s–2010s), which are available at English-Corpora.org. The corpora compare well to the BNC-Conversation data in terms of informality, lexis, phraseology, and syntax. But at 525 million words in total size, they are more than 30 times as large as BNC-Conversation (both BNC1994 and BNC2014 combined), which means that they can be used to look at a wide range of linguistic phenomena. The TV and Movies corpora also allow useful comparisons of very informal language across time (containing texts from the 1930s and later for the movies, and from the 1950s onwards for TV shows) and between dialects of English (such as British and American English). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which was released online in early 2008, is the first large and diverse corpus of American English. In this paper, we first discuss the design of the corpus — which contains more than 385 million words from 1990–2008 (20 million words each year), balanced between spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. We also discuss the unique relational databases architecture, which allows for a wide range of queries that are not available (or are quite difficult) with other architectures and interfaces. To conclude, we consider insights from the corpus on a number of cases of genre-based variation and recent linguistic variation, including an extended analysis of phrasal verbs in contemporary American English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]