Based on diachronic and synchronic corpus data, this paper empirically explores two symptoms of linguistic democratisation in English: (i) a general frequency increase of a linguistic feature traditionally associated with spoken language, which may be interpreted as colloqualisation, and (ii) a development towards similar rates of occurrence of the phenomenon in different genres, i.e. its more general availability irrespective of stylistic context. For the latter process, the term ‘stylistic levelling’ is suggested. The focus is on developments of the (typically spoken) conjunct though, as in the sentence It was not cheap, though, from the early 17th to the late 20th century. The paper makes suggestions for the quantitative analysis of aspects of linguistic democratisation, demonstrates the approach based on a corpus study, discusses L2 varieties of English as one possible source of such processes, and discusses the theoretical and methodological implications of the study.

基于历时和共时语料数据，本文从经验上探讨了英语语言民主化的两个症状：（i）传统上与口语相关联的语言特征的普遍频率增加，这可能被解释为口语化；（ii）发展朝向不同类型现象的相似发生率，即不管样式背景如何，其普遍可用性。对于后面的过程，建议使用术语“风格均衡”。重点是（通常说的）连词的发展，尽管这句话并不便宜，从17世纪初到20世纪末。本文为语言民主化各个方面的定量分析提供了建议，展示了基于语料库研究的方法，讨论了英语作为这种过程的一种可能来源的英语变体，并讨论了该研究的理论和方法论意义。