none 10.1075/scl.105.10keh John Benjamins Publishing Company John Benjamins Publishing Company 1757 141554073 4156999 1420924 202507030822000045 10.1075 2025-07-03T02:23:41Z 2022-10-17T09:13:04Z 3 1388-0373 10.1075/scl https://benjamins.com/ catalog/scl Susanne Flach University of Zurich https://ror.org/02crff812 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7469-2703 Martin Hilpert University of Neuchatel https://ror.org/00vasag41 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6347-5076 New approaches to variability and change This volume presents a snapshot of the current state of the art of research in English corpus linguistics. It contains selected papers from the 40th ICAME conference in 2019 and features contributions from experts in synchronic, diachronic, and contrastive linguistics, as well as in sociolinguistics, phonetics, discourse analysis, and learner language. The volume showcases the particular strengths of research in the ICAME tradition. The papers in this volume offer new insights from the reanalysis of new data types, methodological refinements and advancements of quantitative analysis, and from taking new perspectives on ongoing debates in their respective fields. 105 11 10 2022 10 17 2022 9789027212665 9789027256980 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam 10.1075/scl.105 http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027256980 https://www.jbe-platform.com/deliver/fulltext/9789027256980.pdf https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/scl.105/html Andrew Kehoe Birmingham City University https://ror.org/00t67pt25 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7263-3160 Matt Gee Birmingham City University https://ror.org/00t67pt25 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4499-5196 Antoinette Renouf Birmingham City University https://ror.org/00t67pt25 Abstract This paper conducts a diachronic study of language change in a corpus covering almost 30 years of mainstream UK news text. In our previous studies, several databases were compiled from the corpus, including diachronic records of word frequency, collocation and morphological analysis. Upon user enquiry, our WebCorp Linguist’s Search Engine produced tailored output from these resources. The system was therefore passive, requiring a word or phrase to be specified before querying the databases. The aim now is to extend the data-driven functionality to track the frequency of words in the corpus across time automatically and alert users to statistically significant change patterns. Three tests are employed to find upward and downward trends, sudden jumps in frequency, and seasonal variation. 11 10 2022 10 17 2022 285 318 10.1075/scl.105.10keh https://benjamins.com/catalog/scl.105.10keh https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/scl.105.10keh/html Journal of Official Statistics Cleveland 6 1 3 1990 STL: A seasonal-trend decomposition procedure based on loess 10.2307/2683591 Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics, Series A (1961–2002) Cox 25 5 1963 Large sample sequential tests for composite hypotheses Corpus of News on the Web (NOW): 3+ billion words from 20 countries, updated every day Davies 2013 10.1371/journal.pone.0113114 10.1098/rsif.2011.0846 10.1017/S1360674316000113 Corpus Linguistics: Refinements and Reassessments Kehoe 255 2009 10.1163/9789042025981_015 Weaving web data into a diachronic corpus patchwork 10.1075/pbns.306.05keh 10.1126/science.1199644 10.1075/scl.57.14ren From Data to Evidence in English Language Research Renouf 27 2018 10.1163/9789004390652_003 Big Data: Opportunities and challenges for English corpus linguistics 10.1093/biomet/64.1.152 Sequential Methods in Statistics Wetherill 1966