This project aims at increasing our understanding of the social motivations of language change by making use of large corpora. In a major contribution to the corpus linguistic research community, the project members will annotate texts included in the corpora with new information about the about the age and gender of the authors of the corpus texts. This will allow them to revisit and possibly refine earlier findings in sociolinguistic research according to which women tend to be the leaders of language change, for example. The project will focus on the development of expressive, creative and innovative constructions, and it will provide new perspectives on how to work with linguistic data and with low-frequency constructions in particular. The project will also support sustainable research by making the annotated datasets that will be collected during the project available to the entire research community.

2024

2028