5.1 Introduction

In this case study, which is largely inspired by Biber and Finegan (1989), we will have a look at the diachronic change of English fictional texts from the 16th to the 20th centuries in regards to comprehension difficulty. The texts investigated, which represent both British and American English fiction of the 16th to 19th centuries, have been taken from a number of different historical literature databases. The 20th century texts have been retrieved from the BNC's written part containing popular fiction. For more detailed information on the historical literature databases please see Schlüter, Chapter 6, Research Methods in Language Variation and Change.

Table 1: Number of text files included in the study for British and American English fiction

As can be seen in the table above, we have included a fairly large number of texts in our case study, thus ensuring for a greater representativity of authors for each century.

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