You are what you Tweet!

In the time that it takes you to read this article, millions of users will have sent a Snapchat, uploaded an Insta Story and updated their Twitter profile. The age of digital culture is very much upon us. For Linguists, the contemporary networked society offers a way to explore language use beyond the traditional method of recording and interviewing speakers. This includes those studies which examine the dialectal distribution of words and features across different parts of the country. One such paper is Grieve and colleagues’ recent Twitter-based analysis of lexical variation in British English.

Traditionally, linguists interested in researching dialectal variation (i.e., linguistic features specific to a particular geographic region or group) have set about researching this topic by conducting surveys and interviews with speakers of a particular variety. For instance, a linguist might ask someone to name the “a narrow passageway between or behind buildings”. If you’re from the south, you might say ‘alleyway’ but northern speakers might call it a ‘snicket’ or a ‘ginnel’.

With the advent of social media, however, linguists no longer have to elicit these words directly. Rather, they can extract massive datasets of social media data to examine where in the country these words are used most.

In their 2019 paper, Grieve and colleagues used a corpus (i.e., dataset) of 180 million Tweets to examine lexical variation in British English. Helpfully, since tweets include what is known as ‘metadata’ that relates to the location in which the tweet was sent, Grieve and colleagues were able to plot these tweets on maps to identify where these words were most frequent. They compared their analysis with the more traditional approach taken in the BBC Voices project.

Their analysis very convincingly shows that the lexical variation observed in the Twitter data mirrors that identified in more traditional analyses! This finding is shown in the graphic below, where for all of the 8 words, the Twitter maps look comparable to those created for the BBC Voices project. For instance, consider the maps for the word ‘bairn’ – a word that means ‘child’ is typically heard in northern UK dialects (second row, right). The BBC Voices project map and the Twitter map are virtually indistinguishable. Across both maps, this word appears largely confined to the north/north-east of the UK – as expected.

Whilst, for the most part, the traditional dialect maps and the Twitter dialect maps look very similar, Grieve and colleagues note some differences. For instance, in the Twitter dataset, ‘bairn’ is observed to account for a maximum of 7.2% instances of the word ‘child’, even in the areas where it is stereotypically associated with that dialect. This is in comparison to the BBC Voices dataset, which reports a maximum of 100% of instances of ‘bairn’ for ‘child’ in some areas. Discussing the reasons for this difference, Grieve and colleagues explore several possibilities. First, they suggest that the differences may be related to a decline in usage of this word. It is possible that 'bairn' has simply become less popular over time. However, the decline in the use of this word also might have something to do with the type of data we get from Twitter and the way it's analysed in large-scale studies such as this. In particular, the authors note that it is impossible to examine the conversational context of the tweet. A such, it’s possible that’s there’s some contexts where users would use ‘child’ for ‘bairn’ even if they use the dialectal term ‘bairn’ in speech. For instance, if a user is reporting someone else’s speech.

Nevertheless, with these issues aside, Grieve and colleagues’ analysis suggests that the findings observed in large-scale dialectal surveys are largely mirrored in the Twitter data. As such, we can expect more and more sociolinguistic research to examine data from social media sites, such as Twitter in the future! So, it seems, you really are what you tweet!

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Grieve, Jack; Chris Montgomery; Andrea Nini; Akira Murakami & Diansheng Guo (2019) Mapping Lexical Dialect Variation in British English Using Twitter. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. 

This summary was written by Christian Ilbury

https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2019.00011.

Don't thank us for this post, it's really "no problem"

It’s probably not something you even think about. Someone asks you to pass salt or pepper at dinner, they say “thanks!” Someone is raising money for charity, and when you give a larger than expected donation, they say “thank you ever so much!” Or, maybe it’s Ariana Grande getting over Pete Davidson, and she says “thank you, next”. But what exactly would you say in response?

Aaron Dinkin of  San Diego State University decided to investigate exactly that. Aware that there is a perceived difference between older people using “you’re welcome” and younger people using “no problem”, and that prescriptivists are wringing their hands at the prospect of the latter replacing the former, he decided to take some results from an undergraduate sociolinguistic survey to see if this was really the case.

The methodology was quite simple. Students had to ask directions from people in the street or in shops, in and around Toronto. On receiving the directions they wanted, they had three levels of gratitude to give: “thanks”, “thank you”, and “thank you very much”. They were asked to note the response from a selection of categories, including a lack of response, “you’re welcome”, “no problem”, and other possible replies. They were also asked to note down demographic information about the person they asked, such as their ethnicity, rough estimates of their age, whether they were a native speaker, and whether they were someone in the street or a shop employee.

The results, not surprisingly, did not exactly match the stereotypes of “you’re welcome” versus “no problem”. While it was true that younger people were more likely to use “no problem” than their older counterparts, regardless of how they were thanked, there were more pertinent differences in the data. For one, 18% of the of the elicitations got no response at all, and this was found to correlate with using shorter forms – more people said nothing in response to “thank you”, and even more did not respond at all to “thanks”. However, if people did reply to “thanks”, they were more likely to use “no problem”. Meanwhile, when the students used “thank you” or “thank you very much”, all participants were more likely to say “you’re welcome” in response, irrespective of age.

There was also the response “no worries” – only younger participants used this, and they almost exclusively used it in response to “thanks” on its own. Dinkin concluded that in younger populations, “no problem” was beginning to lose its status as an informal response, and evolve as a broader reply while “no worries” was beginning to fill the informal gap left behind. However, “you’re welcome” still held its status as being pragmatically more polite to use with more elaborate forms of thanking.

He also wrote that more could be done to analyse the changes in response to thanks – for example, comparing the data here to responses in other communities, or even doing similar studies in the US to see how it compares to Canada. However, even the results as they stand leave a lot to consider. So how should we respond to “thank you, next”?

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Dinkin, Aaron. J. (2018). It's no problem to be polite: Apparent‐time change in responses to thanks. Journal of Sociolinguistics 22(2): 190-215. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12278

This summary was written by Marina Merryweather

A be’er way to analyse t-glottaling?

Most people are familiar with the concept of t-glottaling, that is to say the replacement of /t/ with a glottal stop in a word. Using the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet, a word such as better may be represented as either [betə] if pronounced with an audible [t], or [beʔə] if pronounced with a glottal stop. Frequently, the glottal stop pronunciation is also represented as be’er. T-glottaling, once (and still by some) considered a stigmatized feature of speech, is now widespread in Britain and is generally perceived as being stereotypical of British urban speech (although it is by no means confined to urban areas).

The replacement of /t/ with a glottal stop has been the subject of investigation by many sociolinguists in different parts of Britain and these studies have generally agreed that t-glottaling is most likely to occur in certain contexts. Within different social settings, speakers use t-glottaling more in informal styles of speech than when using a more formal style of speech and, generally speaking, you might expect to hear more t-glottaling from speakers lower down the social scale. T-glottaling is also associated more with younger speakers than with older speakers, an indication that this is a feature of language change which is still in progress. In addition to these social constraints on the use of t-glottaling, there are also linguistic contexts which are more likely to trigger its use.  For example, t-glottaling is more likely to occur word-finally, in a word such as bit, than in word-medial position, in a word such as bitter. In word-final position, t-glottaling also follows a pattern in that it occurs most frequently when it is followed by a consonant (put down), less so when it occurs before a pause (stay put) and least of all when it is followed by a vowel (put off).

Researcher Erik Schleef goes a step further in his analysis of t-glottaling. He focuses on t-glottaling among adolescents in London and Edinburgh and finds that although t-glottaling follows the patterns discussed above in both locations, his results show that the Edinburgh teenagers use more t-glottaling overall than the London teenagers. This may come as somewhat of a surprise as t-glottaling is often associated with London speech but, as Schleef points out, the phenomenon actually seems to have had a longer history in Scotland. Schleef also finds differences between the two locations in the teenagers’ use of word-medial /t/ when the /t/ occurs before a vowel (as in the word bitter), which is the context where t-glottaling is least likely to occur according to most studies. In London t-glottaling was most likely to occur before a consonant word-medially but in Edinburgh t-glottaling was just as likely to occur before either vowels or consonants.

Schleef also examines whether the use of t-glottaling is influenced by the grammatical category of words and finds that adjectives and nouns disfavour t-glottaling whereas function words (e.g. prepositions and pronouns), and both progressive and past participle forms of verbs (e.g. waiting, waited) tend to favour glottal replacement. On closer examination, Schleef suggests that progressives and past participles are likely to show high rates of t-glottaling because /t/ appears in word-final position of the root word (in this example, wait) which is a context that attracts high rates of glottal replacement.

Lexical frequency was also investigated and may also trigger the use of t-glottaling. Schleef found that in both locations more frequent words favoured glottal replacement when the /t/ occurred in word-medial position and in London this was also the case for word-final position. In Edinburgh, Schleef also found that words of four or five syllables favoured glottal replacement.

What this research indicates is that the use of glottal replacement may be affected by more than just phonological factors, as has been assumed in many previous studies. It provides a framework for the way forward for future studies of this phenomenon.

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Schleef, E. (2013). Glottal replacement of /t/ in two British capitals: Effects of word frequency and morphological compositionality. Language Variation and Change 25: 201-223.

Doi: 10.1017/S095439451000094

This summary was written by Sue Fox

Gay Talk

According to the online British and World English Oxford Dictionaries, the word gay has four different meanings assigned to it. Two of those meanings, the use of gay to mean ‘light-hearted and carefree’ and the use of gay to mean ‘brightly coloured, showy’, are both said to be ‘dated’.  The primary meaning of gay in current usage appears to be its reference to a ‘homosexual, especially a man’. Interestingly, though, a fourth meaning of ‘foolish, stupid or unimpressive’ has been documented. In this latter case, the use of gay is said to be ‘informal, often offensive’.

Using sociolinguistic methods, researcher Justyna Robinson investigated the semantic changes-in-progress of the word gay to see whether such an analysis can provide further insights into the variation and change of this word. She traced the word across selected data from the British National Corpus and the Oxford English Corpus and found that the corpora data supports the perception that gay is undergoing semantic change. She found that the older sense of gay ‘happy’ is diminishing, balanced by an increase in the use of gay ‘homosexual’. She also found that the data provides evidence that gay can mean ‘lame’ (meanings similar to the dictionary definitions of ‘foolish, stupid’ or even ‘boring’) but also that it can mean ‘unmanly’ to refer to activities considered to be ‘effeminate’ or ‘not masculine enough’.

Robinson also analysed the speech of 72 speakers born and bred in South Yorkshire that she had interviewed as part of a larger project on semantic change. The speakers represented different age groups (age range: 11-94), genders and socio-economic groups. From these speakers, Robinson elicited all the different senses of gay that each participant knew and, once more, she found that the most salient senses of the word gay matched the meanings of ‘happy / bright’, ‘homosexual’, ‘lame’ and ‘unmanly’.   

Perhaps unsurprisingly, she found that it was the older speakers who retained the most use of gay in the sense of ‘happy, bright’ and that the younger generations, most notably young males still in education, were the main users of the most recent sense of gay to mean ‘lame’. For the older speakers, their views about the shift in meaning of gay were often expressed in negative terms and Robinson reports comments such as ‘I really fight against the use of this word [as ‘homosexual’]. I object strongly to hijacking of the word’. In general, as is often the case with language change, a ‘common, nostalgic narrative’ emerges among the older speakers. The majority of younger speakers seem to be aware of the use of gay to mean ‘happy / bright’ but it has not been part of their usage. Their comments were more likely to be along the lines of ‘it used to mean’ or that ‘happy / bright’ was the ‘older meaning’. The younger speakers assigned meanings to gay ‘lame’ ranging from ‘boring’ (school, lessons, friends) to ‘not interesting’, ‘weird’, ‘annoying’, ‘bad’, ‘rubbish’ and ‘stupid’. None of the speakers in the study seemed to suggest that this usage projected homophobic undertones, a concern that has been raised in other academic literature.

While it seems that teenage boys use gay ‘lame’ the most, Robinson’s analysis showed that young adult males employ gay in a slightly different way, in the sense of ‘unmanly’ and that it is used to describe activities such as ‘eating salad’ or ‘carrying an umbrella’. Used in this way, Robinson argues that gay projects masculinity through distancing a speaker from anything considered ‘effeminate’ or ‘not masculine enough’. She suggests that men use gay in this way (note that no women in the study used gay in this sense) to challenge the masculinity of other men. Once more, though, these participants clearly indicated that they did not think this sense was used as a homophobic pejorative but that it applied to behaviour that goes against traditional notions of masculinity, particularly as they might pertain to local ‘northern’ English toughness.

Robinson concludes by tracking the different stages of change for the word gay and shows that older meanings often overlap with newer meanings, with the newest meaning of gay ‘lame’ emerging along with the meaning of gay ‘unmanly’.

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Robinson, J. (2012). A gay paper: why should sociolinguists bother with semantics? English Today 28: 38-54.

Doi: 10.1017/SO266078412000399

This summary was written by Sue Fox

All the lads and lasses!

There are still lots of lads and lasses in the northeast of England

In data collected in the 1950s for the Survey of English Dialects (SED) it was found that there was a ‘north-south’ divide in the use of the terms lad and lass, with lad being the main term used in the north to mean BOY whereas boy itself was the main variant in the south. Lass competed with other terms (such as girl, wench, maiden, missy) but it was still mainly confined to the north. When words for SON or DAUGHTER were elicited, the term lad competed with son in the north and, to a lesser degree, the term lass competed with daughter, but also only in the north. Research in the 1980s predicted that because lass was more variable than lad then it was likely that the term lass would be lost before lad.

Researchers Joan Beal and Lourdes Burbano-Elizondo set out to investigate patterns of variation and change in the use of these terms by comparing the 1950s data to data collected between 1994 and 2005 for two sociolinguistic studies in the northeast of England, the first in Newcastle and the second in Sunderland.

The Newcastle data revealed that both lad and lass is still used by all age groups and among all social classes, although lad is more widespread than lass. The results also showed (with the exception of middle class males) that males use both lad and lass more than females, so there appears to be variation according to gender. Like the SED data, the Newcastle data revealed that lad could be used to mean BOY or SON (though the latter was rare) but, unlike the SED data, it could also be used to mean SEXUAL PARTNER (in this case more often than boyfriend but less often than husband). Overall, though, lad was used in the vast majority of cases to mean YOUNG MAN. In the case of lass, girl was a much stronger rival than boy was for lad and the most frequent meaning for lass was YOUNG WOMAN. The use of lass to mean DAUGHTER was as rare as lad was to mean SON. However, lass could also be used to mean SEXUAL PARTNER, both in the sense of GIRLFRIEND and WIFE (whereas lad to mean HUSBAND was rare). Although there was a tendency for lower social groups to use more lad and lass, there was no firm correlation between social class and variable use of the terms; the researchers suggest that style or stance may be a greater predictor of their use but further research would be needed to shed light on this.

In the Sunderland data the results revealed that, in line with Newcastle, there was variation according to gender, with males using both lad and lass a lot more than females, especially in the sense of CHILD (male/female). Lad and lass could also be used to mean BROTHER/SISTER (although these were rare variants). When the meaning was CHILD or BROTHER/SISTER, lad and lass appeared at equal levels but lass was used much more frequently than lad (both by males and females) when used to mean SEXUAL PARTNER.   

Taking the results from both studies, the researchers state that both words are still used in the northeast of England but that their use may be declining. Generally speaking, both terms are more likely to be used by males than females but lass is used less often than lad. The exception is that lass is used more often than lad in the sense of SEXUAL PARTNER, with lass being the most commonly-used term for FEMALE SEXUAL PARTNER, especially by males. This leads the researchers to conclude that lass may not be dying out (as predicted in the 1980s research) but that it is undergoing semantic shift (a change in meaning) in northeast dialects whereby its primary meaning is SEXUAL PARTNER.

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Beal, J. and Burbano-Elizondo, L. (2012). ‘All the Lads and Lasses’: lexical variation in Tyne and Wear. English Today 28 (4): 10-22.

doi: 10.1017/S0266078412000351

This summary was written by Sue Fox

Just your Donald!

Donald Duck makes a surprising appearance in rhyming slang in Scotland!

       

Does just your Donald make sense to you? It is rhyming slang, where a word is replaced by an expression – usually two words, each stressed – that rhymes with it. To make things more confusing, the rhyming expression is sometimes shortened to just the first word, so that the meaning becomes less predictable. Here, luck is replaced by Donald Duck, which is then shortened to Donald.

Antonio Lillo tells us that this type of wordplay began in the first half of the 19^th century as a secret code among the lower classes and the underworld in London. This is why it’s often associated with Cockney. Later, rhyming slang spread to Australia, South Africa and the USA (though in the USA it is still used only by the criminal classes). Within the UK, it travelled to other large urban areas and in many of them ‘home-grown’ rhymes developed, including in Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Belfast and Dublin. According to Lillo, though, nowhere was rhyming slang cultivated with as much enthusiasm as in Glasgow – partly because of the powerful working class ethos of the population and partly because of strong links between Glasgow gangs and the London underworld.

Population movement and the electronic media have produced ‘supra-local’ rhyming slang expressions, such as Britney Spears for ‘beers’ or Fat Boy Slim for ‘gym’. Nevertheless many expressions are still heard only in specific urban or national varieties of English, including the variety that is his focus here – Scottish English.

Rhyming slang in Scottish English falls into two main categories. The first, arguably the largest, contains expressions borrowed from elsewhere, especially Cockney (such as tea leaf, ‘thief’) but also Irish English (Margaret Thatcher, ‘scratcher’ in the sense of ‘bed’) and Australian English (septic or septic tank, ‘Yank’).

The second group consists of home-grown Scottish rhyming slang. Lillo gives a glossary at the end of his article containing about 200 modern expressions of this type. It includes expressions not heard elsewhere, like Barr’s Irn-Bru, ‘clue’, in the title of the article. Irn Bru is the brand name of a fruit-flavoured soft drink which is popular in Scotland, manufactured by A. G. Barr plc. The category also includes Scottish expressions that have made their way into other varieties of English, such as Gardner Spiers, ‘beers’, after the Scottish footballer and manager. This is heard in Yorkshire as well as in Scotland.

One characteristic of Scottish rhyming slang is that expressions with two nouns, like the Cockney trouble and strife, ‘wife’, are rare.  Perhaps this is because the younger generation of Scots find them old-fashioned. A second characteristic is a particular liking for rhymes based on proper nouns. For example, Tony Blair, used generally in the UK and Ireland to mean ‘hair’ (the old Tony Blair needs a cut) is used in the plural in Scotland to mean ‘stairs’ (he’s doon the Tony Blairs). These characteristics, though, are typical of modern rhyming slang in general. What is distinctive about Scottish expressions is the name that the rhyme is often based on. Unlike Cockney rhyming slang, which takes its proper names from all aspects of modern culture around the world, Scottish speakers have a bias towards both people and things that are specifically Scottish (as already seen in the Irn Bru and Gardner Speirs examples).  Lillo draws attention to an abundance of the names of footballers, perhaps due to a particular liking for rhyming slang amongst males in Scotland and to an age-old Scottish connection between football and national identity. However football is not the only national icon enshrined in Scottish rhyming slang: Lillo points out that although Armadillo, ‘pillow’, may seem odd to non-Scottish ears it will be familiar to anyone who recognises the metaphorical nickname of the Clyde Auditorium in Glasgow. Rhyming slang can therefore function as an effective marker of national identity and pride for the Scottish people who use it.

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Lillo, Antonio (2012) Nae Baar’s Irn Bru whit ye’re oan aboot: Musings on modern Scottish rhyming slang. English World-Wide 33: 61-94.

doi 10.1075/eww.33.1.04lil

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Would you like an espresso?

                                  

Is espresso a necessary or a luxury loanword?

We have espresso from Italian and vodka from Russian.  We have aardvark from Afrikaans and alligator from Spanish.  In fact, English is full of words that have been ‘borrowed’ from other languages.  Some are so common, and have been a part of our language for so long, that we may not even guess that they are not historically ‘English’ (for example, the pronoun they from Old Norse which replaced the Old English plurals hi and hie by around 1400).

The examination of borrowings (or ‘loanwords’) can be quite complex as many aspects of meaning and use need to be considered. Investigating the status of English loanwords in German, Alexander Onysko and Esme Winter-Froemel demonstrate that a fundamental factor to consider is whether or not the Recipient Language (RL) has an equivalent word to match the one from the Source Language (SL).  For example, when Italian borrowed the English word computer, it did not have an ‘Italian’ word representing the concept of ‘computer’ and, as a result, the word computer was adopted.  In contrast, French has recently borrowed people from English to specifically mean ‘famous people’ and, due to this specific meaning, it now co-exists and competes with the French form célébrités.

This criterion is what formed the basis for traditional classifications of loanwords – Necessary vs. Luxury Loans.  A Necessary loan is one where the SL provides a term for a concept (e.g. the computer example above) while a Luxury loan is a word from the SL which, when introduced, co-exists with words of similar semantic meaning in the RL (e.g. the people example above).

However, Onysko and Winter-Froemel explain that these classifications have been criticised for what they imply – for example, a Necessary loan is not strictly ‘necessary’ as speakers of the RL could always try to express a new concept using existing components of the language.  Therefore, they propose the alternative classification of Catachrestic vs. Non-Catachrestic loans which re-frame the distinction between the two types of loan in neutral linguistic terms.  A catachrestic loan is one which introduces a new concept to the language (such as computer, e-mail and software from English to German) whereas non-catachrestic loans have some kind of semantic equivalent in the RL (such as English trend adopted alongside German tendenz) and end up developing more specific meanings.

Even so, Onysko and Winter-Froemel show that the classification of loans as catachrestic or non-catachrestic is not an either/or decision.  Of the 101 most common Anglicisms in the data they used from the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, 33 were classified as catachrestic and 70 as non-catachrestic - the new total of 103 resulting from surfen and cockpit being classified as both.  As well as some words showing characteristics of both types of classification, the data also highlights how words can evolve their meaning from non-catachrestic to catachrestic (e.g. okay and clever).  Therefore, they conclude, any investigation of borrowings must reflect a usage-based approach so that it is not just about looking at the words in isolation, it is how, when and where they are being used by the speakers of the language.

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Onysko, A. and Winter-Froemel, E. (2011) Necessary loans – Luxury loans? Exploring the pragmatic dimension of borrowing; Journal of Pragmatics 43:1550-1567

doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2010.12.004

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

Words and the wheel of time

Words fall in and out of favour over time

‘Times may change, but the word times is not changing that much.’ The opening sentence of the researcher Paul Baker’s article invites us to consider how the frequencies of particular words in the English language rise and fall over time. For example, the word change is more than twice as frequent in 2006 as it was in 1931. Some, but certainly not all of this increase can be ascribed to the fact that it occurs in the phrase climate change, which is a recent coinage reflecting a contemporary concern. Baker investigates changes in word frequency in published, written British English sampled from texts in different genres covering the press, general prose, learned articles and fiction. So far, there are four sampling dates: 1931, 1961, 1991 and 2006 – with an earlier date of 1901 in preparation. Baker kicks off his presentation by reporting some intriguing earlier findings, and asks the question ‘Does cultural change lead to linguistic change?’ The clearest examples are in the area of gender and language. For example, the suffixes –ess (e.g. actress) and –ette (e.g. usherette) are used much less now, and there is a marked, but still slow uptake of forms such as spokesperson and chair (for spokesman and chairman). Interestingly, the term Ms is hardly taken up at all, though people do increasingly avoid marking gender in address terms, and this is reflected in a sharp decline in the use of Mr.

What of Baker’s results in this recent study? He finds the greatest increases in the following words: around, health, information, it’s, didn’t, says, social, family, children and need. At first blush, there is no particular pattern here: these words don’t seem to be connected in any way. Baker is able to link this result with previous research, however. For example, need is widely used in sentences such as ‘she needs to finish her essay’, in which need is increasingly used in place of must or has (got) to – a change which has been in progress throughout the 20^th century. The appearance of the two forms with apostrophes – it’s and didn’t – is part and parcel of the widespread colloquialisation of formal styles and registers. Baker goes on to explain that the increases in the frequencies of children, family, social and health reflect a cultural shift, with a greater focus on these areas of life than before – without necessarily implying that British society is more family-friendly or healthier now than in the past.

But the data shows other interesting patterns which are not linked to cultural change. Baker focuses on the words round and around, which of course are semantically and functionally closely related. The basic pattern is that around is rapidly gaining ground, at the expense of round. While around shows a sharp increase in use between 1931 and 2006, round shows a steady decline between the same dates.

We might speculate about the reasons for this shift (an Americanism perhaps), but Baker shows that the process is actually quite complex. The two words do not have exactly the same grammatical functions (that is, they don’t behave linguistically in the same way), as the following examples show:

·        Both around and round:

o       Preposition: around the room vs round the room

o       Prepositional adverb: turn around vs turn round

·        around only:

o       Gradable adverb: around a million

·        round only:

o       Noun: round of drinks

o       Adjective: round table

Around appears to be displacing round in the functions where both can occur, i.e. in prepositional functions, but round remains as a noun and an adjective.

Baker’s study shows that the investigation of vocabulary change by means of carefully matched corpora yields results both for the understanding of cultural change (e.g. the reduction in ‘linguistic sexism’ and the growing interest in relationships and social issues), as well as for linguistic change as such, in a way that is not obviously connected to social issues (exemplified by the intriguing changes in around and round).

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Baker, P. (2011) 'Times may change but we'll always have money: a corpus driven examination of vocabulary change in four diachronic corpora.' Journal of English Linguistics 39: 65-88.

doi:10.1177/0075424210368368

This summary was written by Paul Kerswill