The importance of robust corpora in providing more realistic descriptions of variation in English grammar

Abstract

Abstract This paper provides many concrete examples of how English grammar varies in important ways, as a function of differences between genres, as a function of language change, and as a function of differences between dialects. We also show – in great detail – how several recent corpora – such as COCA (2008), COHA (2011), GloWbE (2013), and the BYU interface to the Google Book n-grams (2012) – allow us to accurately examine this full range of variation, in ways that are not available with smaller corpora. As a result, these new corpora allow us to provide a much more reliable and insightful view into English syntax than was possible even four or five years ago.