This thesis documents the acquisition, ordering and deployment of lexical material collected for the BBC Voices project, which was conducted during 2004 - 2005. It seeks to present a record of the way in which extensive raw data, generated through an interactive website, were first organised in order to create a coherent and usable database and then applied to initial lexical studies. The work is constructed in two parts. The first part describes the way in which the BBC Voices lexical data were liberated from the encoded format in which they had been collected from respondents, subsequently systematised and finally transferred to a viable database for analysis. Theoretical issues pertaining to the use of the lexical items are identified and discussed in Part 1 and applied in Part 2. The second part of this thesis takes as its focus two studies, using samples of the data in different contexts in order to illustrate their value, accessibility and relevance to linguistic research. The first study is an application to metaphor use in the UK, and the other is geographically based, assessing issues of language stability. The two parts together constitute a synthesis of the formulation and application of a large lexical database. The creation of an accessible lexical resource of this magnitude is of immense value to lexicologists and dialectologists worldwide.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:590153 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Thompson, Ann Georgina |
| Publisher | University of Leeds |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
Page generated in 0.0021 seconds