This chapter takes advantage of the fact that our corpus contains posts made over an eight-year period, along with the demographic information we have about patient age. We consider diachronic aspects of the forum in a range of ways. First, we look at how language has changed over the time, focusing on changes in anxiety discourses. We consider the corpus in terms of trends over the eight-year period. We also consider how the age of posters impacts on the ways they write about language, dividing the corpus into age-graded sections. We compare linguistic differences across these age groups, seeking to identify how language use reflects different understandings or representations of anxiety in relationship to age. Finally, we trace how posting behaviour ‘evolves’ over time; for example, early posts involve narrative histories, question seeking and expressions of emotional state whereas later ones involve advice-giving and expressions of affiliation as posters take on the role of ‘expert’. We also consider how participants leave the forum by looking at ‘final posts’. In what ways, if at all, do posters provide a sense of narrative ‘closure’ when they leave the group?

Chapter 8 presents a summary of the findings. The limitations of the study are also discussed, including the subtle nature of function, more cross-linguistic verification, comparisons in greater detail, the need for both diachronic and synchronic investigations, and so on. More significantly, spoken language should also be taken into consideration for further improvement.

This chapter explores trends in obesity coverage over time, both in terms of areas of stability and change. Two perspectives on time are adopted. First, changes to keywords are studied on a year-by-year basis, spanning the duration of the corpus (i.e. 2008 to 2017). Second, change is studied in terms of the annual press cycle, with keywords obtained by comparing articles in terms of the particular month in which they are published (e.g. comparing articles published in January against those published in all other months combined, and so on). The first part of the analysis shows how certain discourses, namely those which represent obesity as a matter of personal responsibility, are increasing in relative frequency over time, while those which represent obesity as something resulting from social and political factors are in decline. The second part of the analysis shows how obesity representations can be driven by the news values associated with particular events in the annual (press) cycle, such as Christmas, Easter, summer holidays and the timing of children’s school terms.

Pragmatic variability may be conceptualised on a vertical and horizontal axis, the former signifying diachronic pragmatic variation across time, the latter synchronic pragmatic variation at a particular point in time due to micro-social factors (e.g. social distance, social dominance, degree of imposition) and macro-social factors (e.g. region, gender, age, social class, ethnic identity). Both synchronic and diachronic variability share many theoretical concepts and methodological concerns. The present chapter sketches the concept of pragmatic variability and highlights the role played by situational context, stylistic constraints and macro-social parameters in pragmatic analyses. Following this, the research landscape on pragmatic variability is examined and research approaches to intralingual synchronic and diachronic pragmatic variation discussed, with particular reference made to variational pragmatics and historical pragmatics. The need for comparable data and the challenges this poses in pragmatic analyses, irrespective of research framework, is then taken up in the context of a case study on present day synchronic variation in offer realisations situated in variational pragmatics. There, data types and the possible applicability of the concept of the pragmatic variable for pragmatic work is discussed, as are the opportunities to be gained from combining synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The paper concludes with a critical summary identifying current trends and suggestions for future research on pragmatic variability.

In modern lexicography, a core distinction has been made between diachronic and synchronic dictionaries, and English dictionaries are no exception. In fact, English dictionaries are at the centre of this debate, since the Oxford English Dictionary, a landmark scholarly undertaking of the nineteenth century, is arguably the most successful exposition of the diachronic approach to dictionary making. While many other historical language dictionaries have modelled themselves on the OED, the development of a more theoretical basis for synchronic dictionaries was largely led by English language learner dictionaries in the late twentieth century. This chapter seeks to explain the distinctions between diachronic, or historical, dictionaries and their synchronic counterparts; how the distinction arose in English lexicography; what it means for those using or writing dictionaries; and, perhaps, why it’s important. While there is some underlying theoretical basis, the story of dictionaries is overwhelmingly one of practice, the findings are based on illustrative examples from English dictionaries throughout. In conclusion, there is an assessment of how meaningful the distinction continues to be today, and what changes we might expect to see in the future.

The Classic Maya represent a newly important topic for political anthropology and the study of pre-Modern societies. The decipherment of their script offers a trove of primary sources that allow us, uniquely in the ancient Americas, to compare and contrast a rich material record with a significant historical one. Whether our goal is to comprehend social power in its broadest sense, or to understand the nature of specific institutions such as monarchy, complex societies isolated from the cross-fertilisations of the Old World have clear comparative value. As such, what we can learn about the Maya casts useful light on universal themes and will be of wider relevance to the field.