Corpus-based Approaches to Register Variation

This chapter explores sub-register variation in newspaper writing in the 19th century using two corpora extracted from the British Library Newspapers database, the most comprehensive collection of national and regional newspapers from the Victorian period. As an ‘agile’ (Hundt & Mair 1999) register, newspaper writing is well suited for tracing language change and investigating the interrelationship between language and culture. Frequency analysis of select linguistic features identifies syst