This article explores the interrelatedness of societal changes and changes in language practices. By using a combination of corpus linguistic and socio-pragmatic methods, we track diachronic changes in word patterns and interpret findings in the framework of democratization. The data comes from a small and representative corpus of British English (ARCHER-3.1) and from three “big data” sets (Google Books, British Library Newspapers and The Economist). We suggest that data triangulation, including sociohistorical contextualization, allows us to conclude that especially from the mid-nineteenth century onwards words signaling social status and referring to individuals have decreased and from the first decades of the twentieth century onwards words referring to collectivities of people have increased.

本文探讨了社会变化与语言习惯变化之间的相互关系。通过结合语料库语言学和社会语用学方法，我们跟踪单词模式的历时变化，并在民主化的框架内解释发现。数据来自英式英语的一个小而有代表性的语料库（ARCHER-3.1）和三个“大数据”集（Google图书，大英图书馆报纸和《经济学人》）。我们建议，数据三角剖分，包括社会历史环境，可以使我们得出这样的结论：特别是从19世纪中叶开始，表示社会地位和指称个人的词语减少了，而从20世纪初开始，指代人的集体存在的词语有了减少。增加。