Seminar | Changes in the Register of Conversation over Time a Discourse Unit Approach

How does conversation vary over time? Until recently, we have only really been able to address this question through small scale, qualitative, studies at best. However, for British English we now have two broadly comparable corpora (the demographic spoken BNC 1994 and the BNC 2014) which allow researchers to take a quantitative approach to this question. While they only provide us with access to two points in time, separated by 20 years, this does at least allow researchers to begin to explore, provisionally, how, if at all, the register of conversation evolves through time. To help me to do that in a way which is sensitive to the functions of discourse, I have annotated subsections of both corpora with discourse units (Egbert et al 2021). This allows me to look at nine discourse macro-structures above the level of the turn using a quantitative approach as the basis for our comparison.

In exploring the discourse units I will use a keywords approach to looking at the different discourse unit functions in the data over time, exploring what keyword functions are shared, and which vary, across the two corpora. In this talk I will present the results of this exploration showing, for each discourse unit function, how they have evolved over time. The results will be illustrated with relevant examples.