Integrity Score 4442
No Records Found
No Records Found
No Records Found
Tea, weather and being on time: analysis of 100 million words reveals what Brits talk about most
By Vaclav Brezina, Lancaster University
Lovely weather today, isn’t it? Time for a cuppa? The way someone talks, and the words they use, tell us quite a bit about where someone is from, their social background and even their age. Language both reflects and shapes society – as a linguist, it’s my job to find out how.
One way to do this is by analysing large collections of language, which linguists call corpora (or “bodies”). By measuring the frequency of words, we can determine what a particular society or group prioritises and values.
In research for a new frequency dictionary of British English, my colleague Dana Gablasova and I, both at Lancaster University, analysed every word in the British National Corpus 2014.
The corpus is a 100 million-word sample of current language. It covers language used in informal speech, fiction, newspapers, magazines, academic writing and online sources between 2010 and 2020. It is free and publicly accessible at #LancsBox and LancsLex. Here are five frequently discussed topics and some of the words that define them, including how many times they appeared per million words.
1. Time and punctuality
According to our analysis, “year” and “time” are the two most frequent nouns in British English, occurring 1,963 and 1,898 per million words, respectively. People talk and write about them all year round, time (and time) again. The idea of time is closely connected with punctuality – something highly valued in Britain.
The expressions “on time” and “in time” occur with the combined frequency of 47 per million words. When we look at preferences of individual time-related words, summer (144 per million) is preferred over winter (63 per million). Sunday (114 per million) and Saturday (104 per million) are spoken and written about more than any of the other days. Morning (206 per million) is twice as frequent as evening (103 per million) and almost three times as frequent as afternoon (70 per million).
Read Full Story https://theconversation.com/tea-weather-and-being-on-time-analysis-of-100-million-words-reveals-what-brits-talk-about-most-222088