English Corpus Linguistics – serie

An all-important question for humans, death is unsurprisingly used as a source of intensification in language, perhaps even cross-linguistically. This book explores the use of death for intensification purposes in English and aims to shed light on how certain forms from this semantic field came to be used with an intensifying function over time, specifically dead(ly), mortal(ly) and to death. The author provides a full account of the evolution of these intensifiers from their origins up to present-day English from the perspective of grammaticalisation and other concomitant phenomena. To this end, this corpus-based research resorts to evidence from historical dictionaries, diachronic corpora and electronic collections. The study conducted, unprecedented in the number of examples analysed, combines both a qualitative and a quantitative approach to provide the most comprehensive picture of the long diachrony of these intensifiers.

Based on a large sample of press data extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC), the book undertakes a detailed investigation of present-day English proper names, an important but under-researched area in English linguistics. Employing the statistical technique of binary logistic regression, this book presents a new method of analysing non-discrete categories in linguistics with reference to the grammatical notion of gradience and the principle of parsimony. The focus is particularly on the grammatical factors influencing the choice between use and non-use of the definite article - a well-known issue of uncertainty in modern English. The study also concentrates on multi-word organisation names, which have been little studied, although they occur frequently in newspaper language and have special characteristics of their own. By making precise predictive statements about the conditions under which the definite article is preferred or dispreferred, the book is also able to shed light on the theory of linguistic performance.

This book presents a richly illustrated, hands-on discussion of one of the fastest growing fields in linguistics today. The authors address key methodological issues in corpus linguistics, such as collocations, keywords and the categorization of concordance lines. They show how these topics can be explored step-by-step with BNCweb, a user-friendly web-based tool that supports sophisticated analyses of the 100-million-word British National Corpus. Indeed, the BNC and BNCweb have been described by Geoffrey Leech as «an unparalleled combination of facilities for finding out about the English language of the present day» (Foreword). The book contains tasks and exercises, and is suitable for undergraduates, postgraduates and experienced corpus users alike.

This study investigates three different postmodifying adjective constructions in the English language. While English adjectives generally precede the entities they modify, they may also occur in postmodifying position. This study assumes that the different postmodifying constructions are a positional variation of attributive premodification. The support for this claim is derived from a detailed analysis of the general syntax and semantics of adjectives as well as a cross-check of previous theories with a wide range of actual language examples taken from computerized corpora. An approach from the Prague School ‘Functional Sentence Perspective’ enables this study to accomplish an integrated view of adjectival postmodification.

Halliday has claimed that neither spoken nor written language is more complex than the other per se, but that the two mediums show different degrees of complexity on different levels. He argues that written language uses more lexical items within the clause whereas spoken language uses more clauses within the clause complex. Thus, written language should use more complex noun phrases and spoken language should use more complex clause complexes. The aim of the study was to conduct a corpus-based study to analyse spoken and written language samples with regard to differences in complexity on the level of noun phrases and clause complexes. With the help of this study it was possible to refute Halliday’s thesis as the data show that both noun phrases and clause complexes are more complex in the language samples under scrutiny.

In the last three decades, metadiscourse has caught the attention of numerous scholars from various research disciplines. This book adds to the discussion by looking at the phenomenon from a historical angle. Text analyses with a corpus of sermons and religious treatises from the 13th to the 18th century provide new insights into the way authors guide their audience through their texts and persuade them of their points of view. The focus on the Middle and Early Modern English periods, which witnessed the disintegration of the Catholic Church in England, the Reformation, the decline of Scholasticism and the advent of Renaissance Humanism, makes evident the influence of socio-cultural factors, text-type conventions, and a changing author-addressee relationship on the development of metadiscourse.

Based on an innovative corpus-based approach, this book offers a comprehensive survey of the phonological and phonetic properties of L2 speech in English and German. The first part of the book critically examines current theoretical models and research methodologies in the field of second language acquisition of phonology and describes the advances that have been made in corpus linguistics over the past few years – in particular, the development of phonological learner corpora. It furthermore presents the first learner corpus of L2 English and L2 German that is fully aligned and has extensive phonological annotations: the LeaP corpus. The second part of the book describes the results of the quantitative and qualitative corpus analyses in the following areas of non-native speech: fluency, final consonant cluster realisation, vowel reduction and speech rhythm, intonation and general foreign accent. In addition, the influence of many non-linguistic factors, including instruction and a stay abroad, on the phonological properties of non-native speech is explored.

A famous English hymn does not start with He who would be valiant, but He who would valiant be with valiant in dislocated position in the clause. The aim of this study is to analyse syntactic dislocation in English congregational song between 1500 and 1900 and to examine its motivations and developments. Poetic factors, like metre and rhyme, can be assumed as primary causes. Moreover, two contrasting dislocation patterns emerge, which show the interplay of poetic requirements and syntactic criteria. The first pattern occurs mainly in metrical psalms, while the second pattern is typical of hymns. With these patterns as a basis of comparison, syntactic dislocation is a decisive factor that makes congregational song conservative both compared to secular poetry and to religious prose.

The author analyses computer chat as a form of communication. While some forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) deviate only marginally from traditional writing, computer chat is popularly considered to be written conversation and the most «oral» form of written CMC. This book systematically explores the varying degrees of conversationality («orality») in CMC, focusing in particular on a corpus of computer chat (synchronous and supersynchronous CMC) compiled by the author. The author employs Douglas Biber’s multidimensional methodology and situates the chats relative to a range of spoken and written genres on his dimensions of linguistic variation. The study fills a gap both in CMC linguistics as regards a systematic variationist approach to computer chat genres and in variationist linguistics as regards a description of conversational writing.

The author critically discusses the concept of ‹general nouns›, which Halliday/Hasan introduced in their approach to lexical cohesion (1976), and she provides a comprehensive overview of these nouns from a micro- and a macro-linguistic perspective. For the empirical analysis, the author compiled a corpus, which allows statements about a medium- and genre-specific use of ‹general nouns›. For this purpose, she developed an analytical tool, which takes into account formal and semantic features. The major outcome of the corpus analysis is that ‹general nouns› are much more flexible in form and function than Halliday/Hasan assumed and, most importantly, that they fulfil genre-specific functions some of which have not systematically been associated with lexical cohesion.

This book highlights the potential and the challenges of corpora in language education with a particular focus on the teacher’s perspective. For this purpose, the study explores the relevance of the corpus approach to central paradigms underlying contemporary language education. Furthermore, a critical analysis investigates the persisting gap between research findings and their implementation in teaching practices. As a result, key factors in advancing the popularisation of corpora in language education are identified. A survey and a case study verify this gap and, importantly, underline the pivotal role of adequate teacher education if corpus-based language teaching is to make any significant impact on current teaching practices.