Speaking in Many Voices

This chapter will analyze the concordance lines extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA); it is a large genre-balanced monitor corpus containing one billion words from 1990 to 2019 (25+ million words each year), which is nowadays probably the most widely used corpus of English (Davies 2010). The corpus features both spoken and written data extracted from academic texts, newspapers, magazines, fiction, TV and movies, blogs and other web pages (Davies 2010: 453). Its variety and balance of genres, as well as its considerable number of tokens, allow investigating recent changes in US English, including morphology, semantics and syntax. The major aim of the analysis featured here is to trace how key phrases constituting the national narrative are employed in contemporary discourses. In addition, we will compare the trends identified in Chap. 6 , which analyzed how the six phrases appear in the COHA (Davies 2012), with the way the same phrases have been used in recent decades (2000–2019).