Books

This book describes an approach to lexis and grammar based on the concept of phraseology and of language patterning arising from work on large corpora. The notion of 'pattern' as a systematic way of dealing with the interface between lexis and grammar was used in Collins Cobuild English Dictionary (1995) and in the two books in the Collins Cobuild Grammar Patterns series (1996; 1998). This volume describes the research that led to these publications, and explores the theoretical and practical implications of the research. The first chapter sets the work in the context of work on phraseology. The next two chapters give several examples of patterns and how they are identified. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss and exemplify the association of pattern and meaning. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 relate the concept of pattern to traditional approaches to grammar and to discourse. Chapter 9 summarizes the book and adds to the theoretical discussion, as well as indicating the applications of this approach to language teaching. The volume is intended to contribute to the current debate concerning how corpora challenge existing linguistic theories, and as such will be of interest to researchers in the fields of grammar, lexis, discourse and corpus linguistics. It is written in an accessible style, however, and will be equally suitable for students taking courses in those areas.

This work is designed, firstly, to both provoke theoretical discussion and serve as a practical guide for researchers and students in the field of corpus linguistics and, secondly, to offer a wide-ranging introduction to corpus techniques for practitioners of discourse studies. It delves into a wide variety of language topics and areas including metaphor, irony, evaluation, (im)politeness, stylistics, language change and sociopolitical issues. Each chapter begins with an outline of an area, followed by case studies which attempt both to shed light on particular themes in this area and to demonstrate the methodologies which might be fruitfully employed to investigate them. The chapters conclude with suggestions on activities which the readers may wish to undertake themselves. An Appendix contains a list of currently available resources for corpus research which were used or mentioned in the book.

Eighteenth-century English is often associated with normative grammar. But to what extent did prescriptivism impact ongoing processes of linguistic change? The authors of this volume examine a variety of linguistic changes in a corpus of personal correspondence, including the auxiliary do, verbal  -sand the progressive aspect, and they conclude that direct normative influence on them must have been minimal.
The studies are contextualized by discussions of the normative tradition and the correspondence corpus, and of eighteenth-century English society and culture. Basing their work on a variationist sociolinguistic approach, the authors introduce the models and methods they have used to trace the progress of linguistic changes in the “long” eighteenth century, 1680–1800. Aggregate findings are balanced by analysing individuals and their varying participation in these processes. The final chapter places these results in a wider context and considers them in relation to past sociolinguistic work.
One of the major findings of the studies is that in most cases the overall pace of change was slow. Factors retarding change include speaker evaluation and repurposing outgoing features, in particular, for certain styles and registers.

This collection of papers explores some facets in the areas of Corpus Linguistics and Phraseology which have gone unnoticed so far. With the aid of a range of different corpora and new-generation software tools, the authors tackle specialized domains and discourse in specialized settings, utilizing some innovative approaches to the study of recurrent features and patterns in the languages of economics, history, linguistics, politics, and other fields. The papers critically examine contemporary discourses in which experts and laypersons are equally involved, showing that the spoken and written texts, selected from various specialized corpora, can be seen as collective memory banks. The series of reflections and specialized meanings uncovered in these texts are closely tied to particular sequences of patterned chunks in language and offer exciting insights into the inseparability of lexis and grammar.
The contributions to this volume were previously published in International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13:3 (2008).

The concept of Pedagogical Norm is grounded in both sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic principles. Pedagogical norms guide the selection and sequencing of target language features for language teaching and learning. This book both situates and expands on this concept highlighting the interaction of research and pedagogy. The papers collectively illustrate how the concept of pedagogical norm applies to all components of language, including phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse. The book begins with a discussion of definitions including papers that trace the history of the concept and define what is meant by norms. Also included are papers that apply the concept of pedagogical norms in specific contexts (e.g., intonation, morphology) and to specific languages. Finally, pedagogical norms are extended beyond the more traditional areas of grammatical competence to such disparate areas as listening, discourse, and circumlocution.

This volume represents the first collection of empirical studies focusing on peer interaction for L2 learning. These studies aim to unveil the impact of mediating variables such as task type, mode of interaction, and social relationships on learners’ interactional behaviors and language development in this unique and pedagogically powerful learning context. To examine these issues, contributors employed quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods designs as well as cognitive, social, and sociocognitive theoretical frameworks. The majority of the studies are classroom based and were conducted in a rich array of settings covering five continents and encompassing a wide range of learner L1s and target languages. These settings include second and foreign language classrooms from primary to university level, content-based programs, online contexts, and after-school programs. To span the divide between research and practice, each study includes a section suggesting pedagogical implications.

Though “pejoration” is an important notion for linguistic analysis and theory, there is still a lack of theoretical understanding and sound descriptive analysis. In this timely collection, the phenomenon of pejoration is studied from a number of angles. It contains studies from phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and deals with diverse languages and their variants. The collection will appeal to all those linguists with a genuine interest in locating pejoration at the grammar-pragmatics interface.

It seems to be a truism that today’s news media present the news in a more personal and direct way than print newspapers some twenty-five years ago. However, it is far from obvious, how this can be described linguistically. This study develops a model that integrates and differentiates between the various facets of personalisation from a linguistic point of view. It includes 1) contexts that involve the audience by inviting direct interaction and through the use of visual elements; 2) the focus on private individuals who are personally affected by news events; and 3) the use of communicative immediacy, for instance in the form of direct speech and first and second person pronouns. This model is applied to data from five British online news sites, demonstrating how individual features contribute to personalisation, how different features interact, and what personalisation strategies are used by news sites of different market orientations.

Over the past few years interest and research in experimental linguistics has shifted more toward centre stage, perhaps because of the growing recognition that purely theoretical formulations and speculations about language must necessarily be tested against the empirical facts of language knowledge, use, and acquisition. To highlight some aspects of empirical linguistics, a conference was organized in 1978 at University of Alberta, at which six prominent scholars were invited to present substantial contributions. These papers are included in this volume, together with an epilogue summing up and discussing the recurrent themes of the conference, and a general bibliography.