Bouso, TamaraRuano, Pablo2024-04-032024-04-032021Bouso, T., and Ruano, P. (2021). The British Sentimental Novel Corpus (BSNC) and the ROC-DDC alternation at the level of the individual. Nordic Journal of English Studies, Vol. 20, n. 1, pp. 215–2571502-7694http://hdl.handle.net/10347/33414This article provides a description of the British Sentimental Novel Corpus (BSNC) and a case study that explores, at the level of the individual, the relation between the Reaction Object Construction (ROC) and the Direct Discourse Construction (DDC). The BSNC is a large-scale specialised corpus that comprises full novels of eleven canonical authors across three generations from 19th century British fiction. It aims at studying language as both a social and a cognitive phenomenon and, in line with a recent trend in historical sociolinguistics, at exploring the interaction between individual and aggregate levels (see Fonteyn 2017; Hilpert 2020; Petré et al. 2019). The first part describes the methodological principles that underlie the design and compilation of the BSNC. In the second part, we present a new case study that aims to determine whether our previous aggregate findings also hold at the individual level. The results serve to confirm our hypothesis: first, individual changes in the ROC and the DDC run in parallel across almost the entire 19th century, correlating most significantly between 1851 and 1860. Second, the aggregate-level division of labour between these two functionally similar constructions turned out to be a feature of all authors in the BSNC. Last, the ROC-DDC alternation has been attested in an important proportion of the BSNC novels, with only a relatively small group of texts using solely the older and less extravagant variant (i.e. the DDC). This suggests that the alternation as such represents a cognitive reality for these individual writers across their lifespan.eng© Tamara Bouso, Pablo Ruano Atribución-NoComercial-CompartirIgual 4.0 Internacionalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/British Sentimental Novel CorpusReaction Object ConstructionDirect Discourse ConstructionROC-DDC alternationIndividual and aggregate levels19th century fictionjournal articleopen access