Towards a Better Exploitation of the Brown 'Family'Corpora in Diachronic Studies of British and American English Language Varieties

Since the 1990s, the Brown ‘family’ corpora have been widely used for various diachronic studies of 20th century English language. However, the existing methodologies failed to exploit its full potential as they only used the four main text categories. In this paper, we present the results of two experiments on diachronic changes of the Coleman-Liau readability Index (CLI) in British and American English in the period 1961–1991/2. The first experiment used all fifteen fine-grained text genres, while the second only used the four main text categories. The comparison of the results of these two experiments demonstrated the importance of using all fifteen fine-grained text genres for obtaining a better understanding of how language changes.