Geoffrey Leech, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair, Nicholas Smith: Change in Contemporary English. A Grammatical Study

• Ilka Mindt

“Change in Contemporary English” presents research in the area of corpus linguistics. The four authors provide an excellent in-depth analysis of various aspects of English grammar based on four one-million-word corpora known as the “Brown family” (p. 9), which comprises two corpora representing American and British English from the 1960s (the Brown corpus and the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen corpus (LOB)) and two corpora representing the same two varieties from the 1990s (Frown and F-LOB). Their aim of study is not so much to investigate differences between British and American English as to compare the two varieties, each on the basis of a 30-year period. They label their approach “short-term diachronic comparable corpus linguistics” (p. 24). To substantiate their findings, other corpora have also been chosen to supplement the results from the Brown family. Among them is not only a one-million-word corpus of British English of the 1930s (B-LOB) but also corpora representing spoken British English, such as the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE). Unfortunately no comparable corpora of American English writing or speech exist that could have been used to complement the picture.