Grammatical Trends in Modern English

GramTime started on 1 July, 1996 and received funding from The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation through 1999. From the year 2000 the project goes on with local funding.

The situation for corpus linguistics is particularly advantageous at present. Theoretical and methodological developments have been substantial with an increasing number of scholars all over the world compiling and using corpora for various research purposes. Several very large corpora and many small and medium-sized ones have been made available for researchers over the last few years, at the same time as storing facilities and processing power have gone down considerably in price.

The aim of GramTime is to use existing corpora to investigate on-going and recent changes in English, particularly in the areas of grammar. Comparisons are made between the major varieties British, American, Australian and New Zealand English; between genres like belles-lettres, non-fiction and journalistic prose; and between the spoken and written channels.

  · The British National Corpus (BNC): 100 million words, written and spoken British English (1980s and 1990s)

  · The Bank of English. We use a subset called the CobuildDirect Corpus: 50 million words, written and spoken British, American and Australian English (1980s and 1990s)

  · The London-Lund corpus: 500 000 words, spoken British English (1960s and 1970s)

  · The Brown corpus: 1 million words, written American English (1960s)

  · The Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen corpus (LOB): 1 million words, written British English (1960s)

  · The Freiburg updated version of LOB (FLOB): 1 million words, written British English (1990s)

  · The Freiburg updated version of Brown (Frown): 1 million words, written American English (1990s)

  · The Longman Spoken American Corpus (LSAC): 5 million words, spoken American English (1990s)

  · The Wellington Corpus of Spoken English (WCSE): 1 million words, spoken New Zealand English (1990s)

  · The Wellington Corpus of Written English (WCWE): 1 million words, written New Zealand English (1990s)

  · The Independent on CD-ROM 1990, 1995 and 2000

  · The Times on CD-ROM 1990 & 1995

  · The New York Times on CD-ROM 1990, 1995 and 2000

  · The Sydney Morning Herald on CD-ROM 1992–1995

Click on the following link to see what has been published by the members of the GramTime project:

http://www.vxu.se/hum/forskn/projekt/gramtime/publications.xml

The project publishes an electronic newsletter, GramTime News, aimed at teachers of English. Apart from reports from ongoing research, informative articles about present-day English usage and occasional book notes, it contains a section where usage questions from readers are answered on the basis of information drawn from the project's large computer corpora.

For a chronological overview of the contents of previous issues, an alphabetical index and back issues of GramTime News, go to:

http://www.vxu.se/hum/publ/gtn/

To subscribe to future issues of GramTime News, send an e-mail to gramtime-request@listserv.vxu.se with the following message: subscribe