Abstract/Summary

The aim of this paper is to ascertain the degree to which lexical diversity, density and creativity in everyday spoken British English have changed over a 20-year period, as a function of age and gender. Usage patterns of the four verb-forming suffixes, -ate, -en, -ify and -ize, were compared in contemporary speech from the BNC2014 with its 20-year old counterpart, the Demographically-Sampled (DS) component of the British National Corpus. Frequency comparisons revealed that verb suffixation is denser in the BNC2014 than in its earlier equivalent (DS), with the exception of the -en suffix, the use of which has decreased, particularly among females and younger speakers in general. Males and speakers in the 35-59 age range showed the greatest type diversity; there is evidence that this peak is occurring earlier in the more recent corpus. Contrary to expectations, females rather than males produced the largest number of neologisms and rare forms.