-body vs. -one

[Mark Davies]

> Aren't there a lot of speakers and writers who use both forms freely?
> I'm not saying interchangeably, since I'm sure there are subtle
> differences, possibly in register (-one being more more formal?) but
> I'm hard pressed to say what the difference is for me, and I'm sure I
> use both in relatively free distribution.
>
> It would be interesting to see if there's any quantitative work on
> this, with regional or other parameters of variation.

http://www.americancorpus.org/charts/somebody.xls

(for: someone [vv*] vs somebody [vv*])

Based on corpus data, it looks like 'someone' is more formal -- about twice as much in academic (vs. somebody) than in spoken. In addition, its use increases in each genre (informal > formal): spoken, fiction, popular magazine, newspaper, academic.

And although the numbers aren't overly-compelling, there has been an increase in 'someone' (vs somebody) since the 1940s, at least in whatever dialect is used by the writers at TIME.

Mark D.

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Mark Davies
Professor of (Corpus) Linguistics
Brigham Young University
(phone) 801-422-9168 / (fax) 801-422-0906
Web: davies-linguistics.byu.edu

** Corpus design and use // Linguistic databases **
** Historical linguistics // Language variation **
** English, Spanish, and Portuguese **
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