Book contents
- Data-Intensive Investigations of English
- Studies in English Language
- Data-Intensive Investigations of English
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Data-Intensive Approaches to English Linguistics
- Chapter 2 What Big Data Tells Us about American English Phonetics
- Chapter 3 Do You Reckon?
- Chapter 4 ‘Scots for the Masses’?
- Chapter 5 Combining Collocation Measures and Distributional Semantics to Detect Idioms
- Chapter 6 Using Data-Intensive Methods for Unlocking Expressiveness in Word Formation
- Chapter 7 Modals of Future Time Reference across Native and Non-native Englishes
- Chapter 8 Bayesian Multivariate Analysis of Complement Selection
- Chapter 9 Statistical Modelling of Syntactic Complexity of English Academic Texts Using Ensemble Machine Learning
- Chapter 10 Implications of the Replication Crisis
- Index
- References
Chapter 4 - ‘Scots for the Masses’?
Utilising a Novel Data-Analysis Facility to Statistically Explore Late Modern Scots in the Digitised Chapbooks Collection
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2025
Book contents
- Data-Intensive Investigations of English
- Studies in English Language
- Data-Intensive Investigations of English
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Data-Intensive Approaches to English Linguistics
- Chapter 2 What Big Data Tells Us about American English Phonetics
- Chapter 3 Do You Reckon?
- Chapter 4 ‘Scots for the Masses’?
- Chapter 5 Combining Collocation Measures and Distributional Semantics to Detect Idioms
- Chapter 6 Using Data-Intensive Methods for Unlocking Expressiveness in Word Formation
- Chapter 7 Modals of Future Time Reference across Native and Non-native Englishes
- Chapter 8 Bayesian Multivariate Analysis of Complement Selection
- Chapter 9 Statistical Modelling of Syntactic Complexity of English Academic Texts Using Ensemble Machine Learning
- Chapter 10 Implications of the Replication Crisis
- Index
- References
Summary
By 1700, written Scots had largely disappeared from most printed text types. However, chapbooks – cheap booklets sold on the street from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries (Fox 2020: 386) – may have promoted Scots usage given their wide appeal, audience, and topic range. Thanks to the National Library of Scotland, a recently digitised collection of Scottish chapbooks has been made available to the public, representing a novel and invaluable resource that has not yet seen quantitative, linguistic analysis. To explore this under-researched time period and medium, we utilise the defoe tool (Filgueira Vicente et al. 2020b) to extract a large number of variable Scots tokens for statistical analysis. Our results indicate the persistence and prevalence of Scots features in imaginative prose, but also local news, which aligns with both historical and contemporary findings (Donaldson 1989a,b; Cruickshank 2017; Shoemark et al. 2017b) and suggests the continuity of Scots in print.
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- Data-Intensive Investigations of English , pp. 75 - 103Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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