Featuring contributions from an international team of leading and up-and-coming scholars, this volume provides a comprehensive sociolinguistic picture of current spoken British English based on the Spoken BNC2014, a brand new corpus of British speech.

Part I. Short Introductions to Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics and the BNC2014

1. Corpus Linguistics and Sociolinguistics: Introducing the Spoken BNC2014

Vaclav Brezina, Robbie Love and Karin Aijmer

2. The Spoken BNC 2014: Corpus Linguistic Perspective

Tony McEnery

3. Current British English: Sociolinguistic Perspective

Beatrix Busse

4. Analysing the Spoken BNC2014 with CQPweb

Andrew Hardie

Part II. Discourse, Pragmatics and Interaction

5. Politeness Variation in England: A North-South Divide?

Jonathan Culpeper and Mathew Gillings

6. 'That's Well Bad'. Some New Intensifiers in Spoken British English

Karin Aijmer

7. Canonical Tag Questions in Contemporary British English

Karin Axelsson

8. Yeah, yeah yeah, or yeah no that's right: A Multifactorial Analysis of the Selection of Backchannel Structures in British English

Deanna Wong and Haidee Kruger

Part III. Morphosyntax

9. Variation in the Productivity of Adjective Comparison in Present-Day English

Tanja Säily, Victorina González-Díaz and Jukka Suomela

10. The Dative Alternation Revisited: Fresh Insights from Contemporary Spoken Data

Gard Jenset, Barbara McGillivray and Michael Rundell

11. 'You still talking to me?' The Zero Auxiliary Progressive in Spoken British English, Twenty Years On.

Andrew Caines, Michael McCarthy and Paula Buttery

12. 'You can just give those documents to myself': Untriggered reflexive pronouns in 21st century spoken British English

Laura L. Paterson

Vaclav Brezina is Senior Research Associate at the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University. He also designed a number of different tools for corpus analysis such as BNC64, Lancaster vocabulary tool and Lancaster statistical tool. He is involved in the development of the Trinity Lancaster Corpus of spoken learner production and the Spoken BNC2014.

Robbie Love is a PhD Research Student at the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University. He is heavily involved in the compilation of the Spoken BNC2014 and is responsible for a series of critical methodological investigations into the application of spoken corpora for sociolinguistic research.

Karin Aijmer is Professor Emerita in English linguistics at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her most recent publications include A Variational Pragmatic Analysis (2013), A Handbook of Corpus Pragmatics, with Christoph Rühlemann (2014) and Pragmatics: An Advanced Resource Book for Students, with Dawn Archer and Anne Wichmann (2012).