Grammatical word class variation within the British National Corpus Sampler

This paper examines the relationship between part-of-speech frequencies and text typology in the British National Corpus Sampler. Four pairwise comparisons of part-of-speech frequencies were made: written language vs. spoken language; informative writing vs. imaginative writing; conversational speech vs. ‘task-oriented’ speech; and imaginative writing vs. ‘task-oriented’ speech. The following variation gradient was hypothesized: conversation – task-oriented speech – imaginative writing – informative writing; however, the actual progression was: conversation – imaginative writing – task-oriented speech – informative writing. It thus seems that genre and medium interact in a more complex way than originally hypothesized. However, this conclusion has been made on the basis of broad, pre-existing text types within the BNC, and, in future, the internal structure of these text types may need to be addressed.