International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2006

On the basis of a transcribed French television corpus made of two news bulletins, two chat shows and one literary programme recorded in February 2003, this paper explores the claim that passé simple (PS) may still be used in prepared oral discourse (Pfister 1974). The corpus does not provide support for that use on television, but it seems to suggest a shift from temporal to aspectual features in French television talk: a perfective presentation prevails on a past presentation. This trend would need to be confirmed by a larger television corpus, tested in other types of oral discourse and tested on written corpora.

This paper explores the various meanings/uses of NEED TO, a semi-modal of obligation and necessity, in two spoken and two written corpora of British English from the 1950s to the 1990s. Previous corpus-based studies indicate that its overall usage has increased, but there is clearly a gap in research on its semantics. This corpus-driven inductive investigation applies the traditional semantic concepts of root and epistemic meaning to the corpus data. The results suggest that NEED TO covers all the possible meanings/uses, both root and epistemic, of a modal of obligation and necessity. Consequently, it is a possible rival of MUST and HAVE TO in affirmative contexts. However, the traditional analysis leaves out the instances where NEED TO expresses internally motivated compulsion. This is accounted for in recent cross-linguistic studies which rearrange the non-epistemic field. Their insights are taken into consideration, and a synthesis concerning the semantic profile of NEED TO is suggested.

This paper investigates indirect anaphora (IA) from a corpus-based linguistics (CBL) perspective. Indirect anaphora involves backward-pointing links between surface lexical items, such as demonstrative pronouns and objects, situations or concepts which are mentioned or hinted at in previous discourse, but which are not linguistically encoded as surface grammatical elements such as nouns or noun phrases. This paper reports an empirical study of three types of IA, namely labelling (Francis 1986, 1989, 1994), situation reference (Fraurud 1992, 1992a) and text/discourse deixis (Lyons 1977, Levinson 1983). Although the paper reveals some discernable patterns in the use of IA across different genres, the study ultimately points to the challenges of identifying hard and fast categories of IA in a corpus of real-life examples.

The current study explores the use of conjunctive adverbials (CAs) in two corpora compiled by the author. The learner corpus consists of 23 final papers contributed by 10 MA TESOL students from Taiwan while the control corpus contains 10 journal articles from two prestige international TESOL journals. On the quantitative dimension, student writers were found to slightly overuse connectors when the analysis was based on word-level. Additionally, the qualitative analysis revealed that certain CAs (e.g. besides, therefore) were used inappropriately by some of the learners. The paper ends with several teaching suggestions on how to help student writers master the complex system of conjunctive adverbials in English.