144 Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
external factors as a cognitive and cultural phenomenon that comes within
the remit of cognitive sociolinguistics.
- Method and Data
The present study will re-examine the database and the coded dataset drawn
upon in Szmrecsanyi and Hinrichs (2008). This section will loosely paraph-
rase their methods section.
2.1. Data
The database taps the following corpora sampling naturalistic language
data:
- The Corpus of Spoken American English (CSAE). The release that will
be used here is composed of the installments 1 and 2 (Du Bois et al.
2000; Du Bois et al. 2003), spanning in all 41 conversations, each ap-
proximately 20–30 minutes in length. Designed primarily for conversa-
tion analytic purposes and thus sampling very conversational, un-
scripted and hence very informal American English, this corpus is a
comparatively small one (roughly 166,000 words of running text),
though it is large enough for some of the purposes of the present study. - The Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects (FRED). This corpus (see
Hernández 2006; Szmrecsanyi and Hernández 2007) contains samples
of dialectal speech (mainly transcribed so-called ‘oral history’ material)
from a variety of sources. The bulk of these samples was recorded be-
tween 1970 and 1990; in most cases, a fieldworker interviews an in-
formant about life, work etc. in former days. The informants are typi-
cally elderly people with a working-class background. Speech styles
are relatively formal due to the interview situation. The subsample of
FRED to be analyzed here spans ca. 1.3 million words; dialect areas in-
cluded in the sample are the Hebrides, the Midlands, the North of Eng-
land, Wales, the Southwest, and the Southeast (the exact composition is
not of interest here, as this is not a study in dialectology).