Class distinctions a corpus study; a fringe pursuit for Guardian-reading classes?

As part of an ongoing project I offer a preliminary study looking at some of the terms which refer to class to see how the representation has changed if at all over the last 20 years; the preliminary study concentrates on the profiles of evaluation resulting from an examination of collocational profiles and textual preferences of a few chosen phraseologies using the SiBol corpus. Stubbs’ (1996, 2002) approach is to start with a pre-existing or an intuitively compiled list of words, and then use corpus tools to understand more about their meaning(s). Collocates are used as a tool to sort the data into homogeneous groups and make any recurrent patterns visible. Corpora allow researchers to objectively identify widespread patterns of naturally occurring language but also rare but telling examples, both of which may be over-looked in a small-scale analysis.