Book contents
- Data-Intensive Investigations of English
- Studies in English Language
- Data-Intensive Investigations of English
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Data-Intensive Approaches to English Linguistics
- Chapter 2 What Big Data Tells Us about American English Phonetics
- Chapter 3 Do You Reckon?
- Chapter 4 ‘Scots for the Masses’?
- Chapter 5 Combining Collocation Measures and Distributional Semantics to Detect Idioms
- Chapter 6 Using Data-Intensive Methods for Unlocking Expressiveness in Word Formation
- Chapter 7 Modals of Future Time Reference across Native and Non-native Englishes
- Chapter 8 Bayesian Multivariate Analysis of Complement Selection
- Chapter 9 Statistical Modelling of Syntactic Complexity of English Academic Texts Using Ensemble Machine Learning
- Chapter 10 Implications of the Replication Crisis
- Index
- References
Chapter 3 - Do You Reckon?
Creating and Testing a Corpus of Spoken Southern American English from the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (1970–1983)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2025
Book contents
- Data-Intensive Investigations of English
- Studies in English Language
- Data-Intensive Investigations of English
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Data-Intensive Approaches to English Linguistics
- Chapter 2 What Big Data Tells Us about American English Phonetics
- Chapter 3 Do You Reckon?
- Chapter 4 ‘Scots for the Masses’?
- Chapter 5 Combining Collocation Measures and Distributional Semantics to Detect Idioms
- Chapter 6 Using Data-Intensive Methods for Unlocking Expressiveness in Word Formation
- Chapter 7 Modals of Future Time Reference across Native and Non-native Englishes
- Chapter 8 Bayesian Multivariate Analysis of Complement Selection
- Chapter 9 Statistical Modelling of Syntactic Complexity of English Academic Texts Using Ensemble Machine Learning
- Chapter 10 Implications of the Replication Crisis
- Index
- References
Summary
The Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS) is a subset of sixty-four recorded interviews collected as part of the Linguistic Atlas Project from 1970 to 1983. Full transcriptions of all DASS interviews have been produced by the Atlas Project at the University of Georgia; however, these transcriptions have until now existed only as untagged text files, making them unsuitable for detailed corpus analysis. We discuss the process of preparing the DASS transcriptions to be uploaded to a Corpus Workbench (CWB) server, as well as a functionality test of the resulting corpus through analysis of the Southern American English feature reckon. Syntactic analysis indicates that reckon is more grammaticalized than the epistemic verbs think or believe in Southern American English, and sociolinguistic results show that the use of reckon is highly stratified by age, dropping off sharply among speakers born after 1917. Its use also decreases as socioeconomic class and education increase. These findings provide evidence of the growing stigmatization of reckon as a Southern lexeme over time, as well as its association with nonstandard speech. This chapter serves as an example of secondary data analysis of an existing dataset and demonstrates the utility of the DASS corpus for such research.
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- Data-Intensive Investigations of English , pp. 48 - 74Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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