International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2005

This paper investigates the communicative use ofit-extraposition (e.g.It is surprising that John went to London) in texts, based on a corpus analysis of 1,701 instances in the British component of theInternational Corpus of English. Contrary to the wayit-extraposition is often treated in the literature, it does not represent a uniform functional category whose communicative purpose arises mainly from its status as the stylistically unmarked counterpart of non-extraposition. An analysis of the information status of the extraposed subject shows that it is possible to distinguish two basic types (Given Complement Extraposition and New Complement Extraposition) which differ fundamentally in their communicative potential and distribution in different (spoken and written) text types. For each of the two informational types a number of specific uses in texts are identified taking into account thematic structure (topic-comment) and the semantic nature of the matrix predicate.

This paper presents a corpus-based approach to investigating the function of metaphor, specifically to the question whether the use of metaphorical language is motivated primarily by stylistic considerations or by cognitive principles. The paper focuses on concepts that can be expressed alternatively by a literal or a metaphorical linguistic expression with the same structural properties. Such expressions can be individual words (such asgraspandunderstand, which can both encode the concept UNDERSTAND), or fixed phrases (such asin the heart ofandin the center of, which can both encode the concept IN THE CENTER OF). It turns out that a comparison of the distinctive collocates of the literal and the metaphorical variant in each case provides clear evidence for the hypothesis that metaphorical language has a cognitive function.

This article uses bilingual corpora to explore fixedness in a specific genre of human languages. It compares Chinese and English fire news reports and attempts to find features of fixedness in phraseology and textuality across the two languages from this particular perspective. First, collocations regarding fire incident processing are dealt with in both languages. Then the lexical units larger than collocations are explored, followed by a discussion on textual cohesion created by collocation and variable lexical units. A script model for the Chinese fire news texts is then proposed, to illustrate the concept of “text contour” in certain types of discourse. Finally, the implication of this fixedness and its variability across languages is discussed in terms of the problems it poses for language learners and translators.

Recently, corpus comparison has been used by a number of researchers for extracting single-word terms (SWTs) from specialized corpora. It is viewed as a means to supplement multi-word term (MWT) extraction, the focus of which is on noun phrases. However, little is known about the value of this technique in a terminological setting. This paper examines two different methods for finding French SWTs in the field of computing. The first one (M1) compares the specialized corpus to a corpus considered to be a reflection of language as a whole. The second one (M2) breaks down the specialized corpus into six topical subcorpora that are compared in turn to the entire specialized corpus. The calculation relies on standard normal distribution and is carried out by a program calledTermoStat. The specific units produced by both methods are then evaluated by comparing them to the contents of two specialized dictionaries. We also compare the results yielded by the two methods. Results show that precision is fair (approximately 50%of units extracted by both methods can be found in specialized dictionaries). However, recall is lower in both methods. Results also reveal that, even though M1 yields better results that M2, both methods are useful for identifying SWTs and should be considered in terminological work.