International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2005

In recent decades there has been a trend towards greater use of empirical data, for instance corpus data, within linguistics. I analyse a sample of linguistics articles from the past half-century in order to establish a detailed profile for this trend. Based on consistent criteria for classifying papers as evidence-based, intuition-based, or neutral, the resulting profile shows that the trend (i) is real, but (ii) is strikingly weaker in general linguistics than in the special subfield of computational linguistics, and (iii) appears to have begun to go into reverse.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has often proved fruitful in providing insights into the relationship between language and ideology. However, CDA is not without its critics. Constructive criticism has been offered by Stubbs, who suggests bolstering CDA by using a large corpus as the basis on which to make reliable generalisations about language use. Taking up that suggestion, this paper reports on a study of a group of words semantically related to corruption. In the study, corpus methodology is used to manipulate the data: concordances and collocational tools are used to provide semantic profiles of the words and highlight connotational differences, and to identify the geographical locations that the words refer to. It is argued that words with a noticeably negative connotation tend to be used when referring to activities that take place outside of Britain, while less negative words are used when referring to similar activities in British contexts. CDA theory is drawn on to interpret the ideological significance of the findings.

The issue of processing and understanding spontaneous speech interests speech engineers and linguists, because spontaneous speech is the most natural and the most frequent form of language used for communication. However, the lack of well-defined databases of spontaneous speech prohibits the scale and the depth of spontaneous speech research to a great extent. By using the methodology of corpus linguistics, this paper shows that linguistic theories can be examined, approved or disproved by quantitative empirical analyses. The studies introduced in this paper contain a pioneering work on corpus-based analyses of syllable contractions in spontaneous Mandarin by construing spontaneous Mandarin database incorporated with linguistic considerations into the spontaneous speech phenomena. Corpus-based results presented in this paper not only confirm characteristics of syllable contraction with respect to Chinese phonology, but also provide new insights into lexical factors that influence the production of syllable contractions.

This paper examines the use of two tones by speakers across a variety of discourse types in the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE). Specifically, it focuses on the use of the rise and rise-fall tones by speakers to assert dominance and control in different discourse types. Brazil (1997) argues that the use of the rise and the rise-fall tones is a means of exerting dominance and control at certain points in the discourse and that while conversational participants have the option to freely exchange this role throughout the discourse, in other kinds of discourse such behaviour would be seen to be usurping the role of the designated dominant speaker. The findings suggest that the choice of certain tones is determined by both the discourse type and the designated roles of the speakers, but is not confined to the native speakers or determined by gender.