Corpus Linguistics and Variation in Australian English

Dear Colleagues,

We are delighted to announce an invitation to contribute to a Special Issue of the journal Languages. The aim of this Special Issue is to build on and extend the existing tradition of synchronic and diachronic corpus-based research on Australian English (AusE). We welcome both papers of a discursive nature that address such topics as the current state of play and future directions and/or present information on corpus-related projects, as well as papers that use data derived from established and/or newly created corpora to examine linguistic aspects of AusE (syntactic, morphological, lexical, phonological, or pragmatic) or sociolinguistic aspects of AusE (as influenced by differences of gender, age, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, or region). Contributions may explore aspects of variation and change either within AusE or between AusE and other English varieties.

Corpus-based research on AusE has been facilitated, over the past half century or so, by the compilation of purpose-built, readily accessible, Australian corpora. The first significant corpus of AusE to appear was the one-million-word Australian Corpus of English (ACE) consisting of 500 written text samples. Designed as a parallel to the British and American “Brown family” corpora, the ACE has proved its worth in comparative studies of linguistic variation (e.g. Peters 1994; Collins 1995, 2004). The next corpus to be compiled was the Australian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-AUS), which includes both written texts (40%) and spoken texts (40%), thereby expanding the possibilities for exploring register and inter-varietal variation, as in the various chapters of Peters et al. (2009), and Collins’s (2009) study of modality. A more specialised Australian corpus is the Australian Radio Talkback (ART) corpus, as used by Peters & Collins (2012). 

In addition to these synchronic corpora, diachronic corpora have been compiled and used, including the Corpus of Oz Early English (COOEE), comprising texts of various kinds from the period 1788–1900, a source of data for research by Fritz (2007), Collins (2014), and others. The diachronic corpus, ‘AusBrown’ (Collins & Yao 2019) has facilitated research on the progression of AusE towards linguistic independence—or ‘endonormativisation’ (Schneider 2007)—over the course of the twentieth century (e.g. Collins & Yao 2018). A more specialised corpus focusing on parliamentary language is the Australian Diachronic Hansard Corpus (ADHC), consisting of 2.3 million words and sampled across five equally spaced periods corresponding to major social changes in Australia from 2001 to 2015, which has been used inter alia to investigate the role of colloquialisation/densification in the development of AusE over this period (Kruger & Smith (2018). 

A number of the aforementioned corpora were brought together to form the Australian National Corpus collection (Musgrave & Haugh 2020), and this suite of resources is now curated by the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDcCA); see https://www.ldaca.edu.au/about/sample-collections/. Its holdings include a number of more specialised corpora (e.g., the La Trobe Corpus of Spoken AusE, and corpora of Australian sign language (Auslan) and Australian Twitter data). This Special Issue will showcase the insights that such corpora can provide into diversification in AusE across variables such as gender, age, and socioeconomic status, as well as different modes of communication. We hope that the research presented here will make readers aware of the range and potential of the existing AusE corpora, as well as inspire further research and corpus-building projects. 

The Editorial Office requests that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editors (p.collins@unsw.edu.au; adam.smith@mq.edu.au) or to the Languages Editorial Office (languages@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring their proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

References

1. Collins, Peter. 1995. The indirect object construction in English: An informational approach. Linguistics 33: 35–49.
2. Collins, Peter. 2004. Let-imperatives in English. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9: 299–320.
3. Collins, Peter. 2009. Modals and quasi-modals in English. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
4. Collins, Peter. 2014. Quasi-modals and modals in Australian English fiction 1800–1999, with comparisons across British and American English. Journal of English Language and Linguistics 42: 7–30.
5. Collins, Peter and Xinyue Yao. 2018. Colloquialisation and the evolution of Australian English: A cross-varietal and cross-generic study of Australian, British and American English from 1931 to 2006. English World-Wide 39: 253–277.
6. Collins Peter and Xinyue Yao. 2019. AusBrown: A new diachronic corpus of Australian English. ICAME Journal 43: 5–21.
7. Fritz, Clemens. 2007. From English in Australia to Australian English: 1788– 1900. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
8. Kruger, Haidee and Adam Smith. 2018. Colloquialisation versus densification in Australian English: A multidimensional analysis of the Australian Diachronic Hansard Corpus (ADHC). Australian Journal of Linguistics 38(3): 293–328.
9. Musgrave, Simon and Michael Haugh. 2020. The Australian national Corpus (and beyond). In L. Willoughby and H. Manns (eds.). Australian English reimagined: Structure, features and developments, 238–256. London and New York: Routledge.
10. Peters, Pam. 1994. American and British influence in Australian verb morphology. In U. Fries, G. Tottie and P. Schneider (eds.). Creating and using English language corpora, 149–158. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
11. Peters, Pam and Peter Collins. 2012. Colloquial Australian English. In B. Kortmann and K. Lunkenheimer (eds.). The Mouton world atlas of variation in English, 585– 595. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
12. Peters, Pam, Peter Collins, and Adam Smith. 2009. Comparative studies in Australian and New Zealand English: Grammar and beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Prof. Dr. Peter Collins
Dr. Adam Smith
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Languages is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.