NOT-contraction in 19th century British English

NOT-contraction in present-day English is considered to be an informal and colloquial feature, similar to the 19th century view of the contracted form. The fact that the contracted form is scarcely found in written language and usually in informal texts along with it being considered a shorter way to write the uncontracted variant could explain the neglect in research. 19th century BrE has been and still remains a rather unexplored area. This study investigates the frequency of NOT-contractions in the 19th century by comparing the frequency of contraction across time, genre, gender, and sentence type in A Corpus of Nineteenth-Century English (for details see Kytö, Rudanko and Smitterberg 2000). This investigation describes and analyzes the frequency of NOT-contraction i.e. non-contracted vs. contracted forms in 19th century BrE, in terms of independent variables and dependent variables and the variation amid these. The variation across time will show if any changes occur diachronically. Co-variation with gender is examined to uncover differences between male and female writers. Sentence types are investigated to see whether a specific sentence type favors contraction.