Language and Computers – serie

Honoured with the 2017 AESLA Research Award of the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics.Corpus linguistics on the move: Exploring and understanding English through corpora comprises fourteen contributions by leading scholars in the field of English corpus linguistics, covering areas of central concern in corpus research and corpus methodology. The topics examined in the different chapters include issues related to corpus compilation and annotation, perspectives from specialized corpora, and studies on grammatical and pragmatic aspects of English, all these examined through a broad range of corpora, both synchronic and diachronic, representing both EFL and different native varieties of English worldwide. The volume will be of primary interest to students and researchers working on English corpus linguistics, but is also likely to have a wider general appeal.Contributors are: Bas Aarts, Siân Alsop, Anita Auer, Jill Bowie, Eduardo Coto-Villalibre, Pieter de Haan, Johan Elsness, Moragh Gordon, Hilde Hasselgård, Turo Hiltunen, Magnus Huber, Marianne Hundt, Mikko Laitinen, Martti Mäkinen, Beatriz Mato-Míguez, Mike Olson, Antoinette Renouf, and Bianca Widlitzki.

The contributions in this volume provide a kaleidoscope of state-of-the-art research in corpus linguistics on lexis and lexicogrammar. Central issues are the presentation of major corpus resources (both corpora and software tools), the findings (especially about frequency) which are simply not accessible without such resources, their theoretical implications relating to both lexical units and word meanings, and the practical – especially pedagogical – applications of corpus findings. This is complemented by a lexicographer’s view on the data structures implicit in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The volume, which has sprung from the 36th ICAME conference, held in at Trier University in May 2015, will be of relevance for theoretical and applied linguists interested in corpora, word usage, and the mental lexicon.

From Data to Evidence in English Language Research offers new insights into the ways in which developments in linguistic corpora and other digital data sources can be used to extend and re-evaluate research questions in English linguistics.

In Language and Chronology, Toner and Han apply innovative Machine Learning techniques to the problem of the dating of literary texts. Many ancient and medieval literatures lack reliable chronologies which could aid scholars in locating texts in their historical context. The new machine-learning method presented here uses chronological information gleaned from annalistic records to date a wide range of texts. The method is also applied to multi-layered texts to aid the identification of different chronological strata within single copies.While the algorithm is here applied to medieval Irish material of the period c.700-c.1700, it can be extended to written texts in any language or alphabet. The authors’ approach presents a step change in Digital Humanities, moving us beyond simple querying of electronic texts towards the production of a sophisticated tool for literary and historical studies.

In order to guarantee open access and full searchability, research in historical lexicography and lexicology must follow the same directions as the evolution of the Internet, which has moved from hypertext-based resources to more significative services and products stored and disseminated through databases and, more recently, through knowledge bases. Against this background, this book addresses specific questions like What is involved in the digitisation of linguistic data? What annotation systems can give rise to datasets compatible with knowledge bases? What standards are needed to reach full searchability? What sources and methods can be used to gather the lemmas of a historical dictionary? What determines the obsolescence of lexicographical resources?

If there is one speculation about English and German that has pervaded scholarly work within contrastive linguistics as well as language teaching and translation handbooks for decades, it is probably the assumption of a more “verbal style” in English compared to German. Settling this question once and for all, the present book provides a comprehensive comparison of verbal style in English and German that pays due attention to language-internal variation by mode and register at the same time.

Digitalization has profoundly transformed our communicative and linguistic environment, and the language used most in digital media around the globe is English. The articles in this book present new research focusing on the ways in which the English language and its speakers are influenced by digital modes of communication. Traditional notions of language contact and change are being redefined, and data obtained from digital platforms offer new answers to old questions. In addition to descriptions of linguistic development, the book illuminates sociolinguistically motivated perceptions and performativity regarding English language use in diverse digital media environments.

This work is a corpus-based study of the language of English up-market (“quality”) newspaper editorials, covering the period 1900–1993. CENE, the Corpus of English Newspaper Editorials, was compiled for the purposes of this study and comprises editorials from the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, and The Times chosen to represent periods at ten-year intervals. The language of the editorials was investigated with regard to features that previous research had proved to be markers of such types of discourse as might be of interest to an investigation of the development of the language of newspaper editorials. To begin with, sets of features associated with the empirically defined dimensions of linguistic variation presented in Biber (1988) were compared across decades and newspapers; these dimensions included personal involvement and information density, narrative discourse, argumentative discourse, abstract discourse, and explicit reference. However, since the study showed that the features within each set often developed in diverging directions, the old sets were broken up and new ones formed on the basis of change and continuity as well as of shared linguistic/stylistic functions, specific for newspaper editorials, among the features involved. It then became apparent that, during the 20th century, the language of the editorials developed towards greater information density and lexical specificity and diversity but at the same time towards greater informality, in so far as the use of conversational features increased. The narrative quality of the editorials at the beginning of the century gradually decreased whereas their reporting and argumentative functions remained the same over the years. When the features were compared across the newspapers analyzed, a clear distinction was noticed between The Times and the Guardian. The language of the Guardian was the most informal and the most narrative while that of The Times was the least so. The information density was the highest inThe Times and the lowest in the Guardian. In these respects, the Daily Telegraph took an intermediate position. The editorials of the Guardian were more argumentative than those of both the Daily Telegraph and The Times. As regards lexical specificity and diversity as well as sentence complexity, the Daily Telegraph scored the highest and The Times the lowest while the results obtained for the Guardian were in between the two.

English Corpora under Japanese Eyes is a fine collection of papers written in commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the Japan Association of English Corpus Studies (JAECS). Beginning with the overview of the field by Stig Johansson, an honorary member of the JAECS, the present volume shows the state-of-art in English corpus studies in Japan and demonstrates the creative uses of corpora in a wide range of research topics from studies drawing on large-scale general corpora, such as British National Corpus and the Bank of English, to studies based on more specific, historical, literary, learner and parallel corpora. The papers incorporated in this anthology are grouped into five sections: 1) Overview of corpus-based studies, 2) Corpus-based studies of contemporary English, 3) Historical and diachronic studies of English, 4) Corpus-based studies in English literature, 5) Corpus and English language teaching. This volume will inspire still further corpus exploitation in the broader field of the humanities.

This book provides the first empirical study of the history and spread of mediopassive constructions. It investigates the productivity of the pattern, the spread of the construction in Modern English, and looks into text type-specific preferences for the construction. On a more abstract level, it combines the corpus-based description of mediopassive constructions with cognitive linguistic models, drawing largely on notions such as ‘prototype’, ‘family resemblances’, ‘patch’ and ‘construction’. The theoretical modelling is largely based on data from real texts. These come from publicly available machine-readable corpora, text-databases and a single-register ‘corpus’ (American mail-order catalogues). The study combines the corpus-based approach with cognitive theories and is therefore of interest to both empirical and theoretical linguists.

Using the Web as Corpus is one of the recent challenges for corpus linguistics. This volume presents a current state-of-the-arts discussion of the topic. The articles address practical problems such as suitable linguistic search tools for accessing the www, the question of register variation, or they probe into methods for culling data from the web. The book also offers a wide range of case studies, covering morphology, syntax, lexis, as well as synchronic and diachronic variation in English. These case studies make use of the two approaches to the www in corpus linguistics – web-as-corpus and web-for-corpus-building. The case studies demonstrate that web data can provide useful additional evidence for a broad range of research questions.

This volume will be of particular interest to readers interested in expanding the applications of corpus linguistics techniques through new tools and approaches. The text includes selected papers from the Fifth North American Symposium, hosted by the Linguistics Department at Montclair State University in Montclair New Jersey in May 2004. The symposium papers represented several areas of corpus studies including language development, syntactic analysis, pragmatics and discourse, language change, register variation, corpus creation and annotation, and practical applications of corpus work, primarily in language teaching, but also in medical training and machine translation. A common thread through most of the papers was the use of corpora to study domains longer than the word. Not surprisingly, fully half of the papers deal with the computational tools and linguistic strategies needed to search for and analyze these longer spans of language while most of the remaining papers examine particular syntactic and rhetorical properties of one or more corpora.

The papers published in this volume were originally presented at the Sixth International Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora (4-7 July 2004 Granada, Spain) and reflect the latest developments that have taken place in the field of the teaching applications of text corpora, with a special emphasis on their use in the foreign language classroom.The book is divided into three main sections. The first section sets the scene for what this collection of essays aims to be. It deals with the issue of what corpus linguistics can do not only for the understanding of the nature of language itself but also for so fundamental and miraculous a matter such as language learning and language acquisition. The second section tackles the issues of corpus design and corpus exploitation and provides the reader with a great variety of evidence in favour of corpora exploitation for the building of a successful teaching environment. The final section deals with practical applications of corpora in the foreign language classroom. Although each of the papers here reports particular experiences in very different teaching and learning contexts, as a whole they show that corpora can be used on the spot in a language teaching context by teachers and learners without extensive training in computational tools, and studies of linguistics features can be tailored to specific pedagogic context and learning requirements.The book represents a solid contribution to linguistic studies and language teaching and it is a good example of the diversity of the scientific lines in which corpus linguistics is involved at the present moment.

This volume offers a state-of-the-art picture of work undertaken in the field of computer-aided corpus linguistics. While the focus is on English, central insights can be generalised to other languages, as well. As a work intended to mark the Silver Jubilee of ICAME, the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English, the book combines surveys of the discipline by some of its major pioneers, including founders of ICAME itself, with cutting-edge work by younger scholars. It is divided into three sections: “Overviewing years of corpus linguistic studies”, “Descriptive studies in English syntax and semantics”, and “Second Language Acquisition, parallel corpora and specialist corpora”.The book bears witness to the impressive advances that have characterised the development of corpus linguistics over the past few decades – from terminological issues to practical applications, from theoretical and descriptive research to applied approaches, from monolingual to multilingual and specialist corpora, from corpus design to corpus exploitation tools.

The Contributors to this volume offer a broad range of novel insights about data-based or data-driven approaches to the study of both structure and function of language, reflecting the increasing shift towards corpus-based methods of analysis in a wide range of areas in linguistics. Corpora can be used as models of human linguistic experience, and the contributors demonstrate that there is ample scope for integrating such models into the descriptions of discourse, grammar and meaning.Continually improving technological development facilitates the design of larger and more comprehensive corpora documenting language use in a multitude of genres, styles and modes, even starting to include visual aspects. Software to investigate these data also becomes increasingly powerful and more refined.The sixteen original articles in this volume cover substantial ground on both the theoretical as well as applied levels. Having such data and software resources at their disposal, the contributing researchers rethink the long discussed interplay between language system and use from various angles, considering socio-cultural and cognitive involvement and representation, with synchronic as well as diachronic perspectives in view.These theories and quantitative / qualitative methods are applied to a range of topics from language acquisition and teaching to literature and politics. All of the authors in this volume reveal the profound and leading impact that Mike Stubb’s work has continued to contribute to the field of corpus-based description of language structure, use and function.

The papers brought together in this volume explore, through corpus data, the link between contrastive and interlanguage analysis. Learner corpora are approached from a contrastive perspective, by comparing them with native corpora or corpus data produced by learners from other mother tongue backgrounds, or by combining them with contrastive data from multilingual (translation or comparable) corpora. The integration of these two frameworks, contrastive and learner corpus research, makes it possible to highlight crucial aspects of learner production, such as features of non-nativeness (errors, over- and underuse, unidiomatic expressions), including universal features of interlanguage, or more general issues like the question of transfer. The ten papers of this volume cover topics ranging from methodology to syntax (e.g. adverb placement, postverbal subjects), through lexis (collocations) and discourse (e.g. information packaging, thematic choice). The languages examined include English, Chinese, Dutch, French and Spanish. The book will be of interest to a wide array of readers, especially researchers in second language acquisition and contrastive linguistics, but also professionals working in foreign language teaching, such as language teachers, materials writers and language testers.

This volume presents current state-of-the-art discussions in corpus-based linguistic research of the English language. The papers deal with Present-day English, worldwide varieties of English and the history of the English language. A special focus of the volume are studies in the broad field of corpus pragmatics and corpus-based discourse analysis. It includes corpus-based studies of speech acts, conversational routines, referential expressions and thought styles, as well as studies on the lexis, grammar and semantics of English. And it also includes several studies on technical aspects of corpus compilation, fieldwork and parsing.

Throughout history, linguists and literary scholars have been impelled by curiosity about particular linguistic or literary phenomena to seek to observe them in action in original texts. The fruits of each earlier enquiry in turn nourish the desire to continue to acquire knowledge, through further observation of newer linguistic facts. As time goes by, the corpus linguist operates increasingly in the awareness of what has gone before. Corpus Linguistics, thirty years on, is less an innocent sortie into corpus territory on the basis of a hunch than an informed, critical reassessment of existing analytical orthodoxy, in the light of new data coming on stream. This volume comprises twenty-two articles penned by members of the ICAME (International Computer Archive of Modern and Mediaeval English) association, which together provide a critical and informed reappraisal of the facts, data, methods and tools of Corpus Linguistics which are available today. Authors reconsider the boundaries of the discipline, exploring its areas of commonality with Sociolinguistics, Language Variation, Discourse Linguistics, and Lexical Statistics and showing how that commonality is potentially of immense benefit to practitioners in the fields concerned.The volume culminates in the report of a timely and novel expert panel discussion on the role of Corpus Linguistics in the study of English as a global language. This encompasses issues such as English as an international lingua franca, ‘norms’ for global English, and the question of ‘ownership’, or who qualifies as a native speaker.

This book constitutes the first full-length diachronic treatment of the English progressive from Old English to Present-day English, focusing on the crucial phase of its grammaticalization between the 17th and 20th centuries. It uses data from the British component of ARCHER-2 (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers, version 2) to uncover the details of this long-term grammaticalization process, tracing the development of the construction from a stylistic device to a fully-fledged aspect marker. Illustrated by a wealth of examples, the work offers new results concerning the preferred linguistic environments and the development of the functions of the progressive. In contrast to previous studies, the author shows that there are certain restrictions to context expansion in grammaticalization. She argues convincingly that the persistent reluctance of the progressive to occur in certain contexts does not point to incomplete grammaticalization, but can instead be explained as a product of its particular functions. The author also challenges the tenet that grammaticalization is generally accompanied by subjectification.

This volume consists of selected papers from the 2009 meeting of the American Association for Corpus Linguistics. The chapters cover aspects of language use (usage-based accounts of morphology/syntax of English and Tok Pisin), language learning (corpus-based learning of English, syntactic development observable in a Learner Corpus of English, “core” vocabulary items for learners of English) and language documentation (a new and innovative usage-based frequency dictionary of English, proposals to broaden the traditional understanding of a corpus in various directions, e.g., constructing a corpus of the content of Japanese manga comics). Taken together, the thirteen chapters represent a good cross-section of strands of new work in corpus linguistics, as practised by international scholars working on English and other languages.

This book showcases sixteen papers from the landmark 30th conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME) held at Lancaster University in May 2009. The theme of the book ‘looking back, moving forward’ follows that of the conference where participants reflected on the extraordinary growth of corpus linguistics over three decades as well as looking ahead to yet further developments in the future. A separate volume, appearing as an e-publication in the VARIENG series from the University of Helsinki focuses on the methodological and historical dimensions of corpus linguistics. This volume features papers on present-day English and the recent history of English via the increasing availability of corpora covering the last hundred years or so of the language. Contributors to the volume study numerous topics and datasets including recent diachronic change, regional and new Englishes, learner corpora, Academic written English, parallel and translation corpora, corpora of popular music pop lyrics and computer-mediated communication. Overall the volume represents the state of the art in English corpus linguistics and a peek into the future directions for the field.

The present volume includes a selection of 20 papers from the 31st Annual Conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), held in Giessen (Germany) in May 2010. The conference topic was “Corpus linguistics and variation in English”. All the papers included in the present Conference Proceedings capture aspects of variation in language use on the basis of corpus analyses, providing new descriptive insights, and/or new methods of utilising corpora for the description of language variation. Of particular interest are the five plenary papers that are included in the present volume, focusing on corpus-based approaches to variation in language from different disciplinary perspectives: Stefan Th. Gries (quantitative-statistical descriptions of variation and corpora), Michaela Mahlberg (stylistic variation and corpora), Miriam Meyerhoff (variational sociolinguistics and corpora), Edgar W. Schneider (regional variation and corpora) and Elizabeth C. Traugott (historical variation/grammaticalization and corpora).

As its title suggests, this book is a selection of papers that use English corpora to study language variation along three dimensions – time, place and genre. In broad terms, the book aims to bridge the gap between corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics and to increase our knowledge of the characteristics of English language. It includes eleven papers which address a variety of research questions but with the commonality of a corpus-based methodology. Some of the contributions deal with language variation in time, either by looking into historical corpora of English or by adopting the method known as diachronic comparable corpus linguistics, thus illustrating how corpora can be used to illuminate either historical or recent developments of English. Other studies investigate variation in space by comparing different varieties of English, including some of the “New Englishes” such as the South Asian varieties of English. Finally, some of the papers deal with variation in genre, by looking into the use of language for specific purposes through the inspection of medical articles, social reports and academic writing.