A6) RICHTER, WALZER;"Want to" vs. "wanna": frequency change in apparent time (BNC + BNCweb)

Corpus: British National Corpus (BNC)

Programs: BNCweb

Tasks:

• Want to can undergo contraction to wanna. Restricting your search to the different age groups of speakers in the spoken part of the BNC, try to find out
  • if the absolute frequency of the construction want to + infinitive (i.e. want to plus wanna) has changed in apparent time: Do younger speakers use it more or less often than older speakers per one million words of text?
  • if the relative frequency of wanna, expressed as a percentage of want to plus wanna, has changed in apparent time: Has the share of contractions increased or decreased across generations of speakers?
• Can you think of a logical connection between the absolute frequency of the construction and the relative frequency of contracted variants?
• Why does such an analysis of contracted forms in spoken and transcribed language have to be taken with a pinch of salt?

Notes:

• The corpus and the BNCweb interface can be accessed via the departmental server: https://eng-ling.uni-bamberg.de/
• You need to sign up for a free user account to get access to the corpora (also here https://eng-ling.uni-bamberg.de/).
• The quick reference guide (https://eng-ling.uni-bamberg.de/bncweb/Simple_query_language.pdf) can also be accessed via the BNCweb interface.
• While want to can be typed in in normal orthography, wanna has to be separated into wan na.

Solution: Mini-project A6.pdf