Screening colloquialisation strategies in recent diachrony

Conference paper

Laura Abalo-Dieste
Luis Javier Conejero Magro, Cristina Blanco García, Laura Méndez Márquez, Jennifer Ruiz-Morgan, Bridging Cultures: English and American Studies in Spain, Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Extremadura, Cáceres, Spain, 2023, pp. 113–121

DOI: https://hdl.handle.net/10662/18604

Link to the proceedings online file

Cite

APA Click to copy
Abalo-Dieste, L. (2023). Screening colloquialisation strategies in recent diachrony. In L. J. Conejero Magro, C. Blanco García, L. Méndez Márquez, & J. Ruiz-Morgan (Eds.), Bridging Cultures: English and American Studies in Spain (pp. 113–121). Cáceres, Spain: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Extremadura. https://doi.org/https://hdl.handle.net/10662/18604

Chicago/Turabian Click to copy
Abalo-Dieste, Laura. “Screening Colloquialisation Strategies in Recent Diachrony.” In Bridging Cultures: English and American Studies in Spain, edited by Luis Javier Conejero Magro, Cristina Blanco García, Laura Méndez Márquez, and Jennifer Ruiz-Morgan, 113–121. Cáceres, Spain: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Extremadura, 2023.

MLA Click to copy
Abalo-Dieste, Laura. “Screening Colloquialisation Strategies in Recent Diachrony.” Bridging Cultures: English and American Studies in Spain, edited by Luis Javier Conejero Magro et al., Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Extremadura, 2023, pp. 113–21, doi:https://hdl.handle.net/10662/18604.

BibTeX Click to copy

@inproceedings{abalo-dieste2023a,
  title = {Screening colloquialisation strategies in recent diachrony},
  year = {2023},
  address = {Cáceres, Spain},
  pages = {113–121},
  publisher = {Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Extremadura},
  doi = {https://hdl.handle.net/10662/18604},
  author = {Abalo-Dieste, Laura},
  editor = {Conejero Magro, Luis Javier and Blanco García, Cristina and Méndez Márquez, Laura and Ruiz-Morgan, Jennifer},
  booktitle = {Bridging Cultures: English and American Studies in Spain}
}

Abstract

Recent sociolinguistic research focuses on the spread of terms typical of spoken discourse into written registers where they were once considered inappropriate, a process investigated as ‘colloquialisation’ and ‘popularisation’, among other labels. However, the avoidance of typically spoken devices, such as phrasal verbs, in speech-like registers have also been accounted for as ‘decolloquialisation’ and ‘monologisation’. This study investigates whether the variation attested in the literature maps a single process of stylistic change which describes a growing proximity between the style of speech and that of writing. To that end, a set of twenty linguistic features have been analysed in samples of spoken and written discourse with data from the two editions of the British National Corpus, BNC1994 and BNC2014. The results suggest that the frequency difference of stylistically marked linguistic items between speech and writing has become more balanced over time, a process termed here ‘register levelling’.

Keywords: British National Corpus, colloquialisation, diachrony, stylistic change, register levelling