International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 11, Issue 4, 2006

“situationally defined varieties” (Biber et al. 1999:5) have advanced the study of conversational grammar considerably. This paper questions the use of writing-based conceptual frameworks and terminologies in the description of conversational grammar. It is argued that conversation as the major situationally defined variety of the spoken language requires for its adequate description concepts and terminologies that are based on the situational factors that determine the conversational situation. The paper attempts to demonstrate that, conversely, a descriptive apparatus derived from the written code, which by necessity fails to reflect the situational factors governing conversation and implicitly compares features of conversation to the norms of the written language, inevitably conveys negative evaluation of the conversational features observed. This claim will be illustrated by functional and terminological analyses of two conversational key features commonly labelled ‘dislocation’ and ‘dysfluency’. The analyses will be carried out using data from the BNC. Potential alternative concepts and terminologies will be discussed.

Uncovering the extent of word associations and how they are manifested has been an important area of study in corpus linguistics since the 1960s (Sinclair et al. 1970). This paper defines and describes a new way of categorising word association, the concgram, which constitutes all of the permutations of constituency and positional variation generated by the association of two or more words. Concgrams are identified without prior input from the user (other than to set the size of the span) employing a fully automated search that reveals all of the word association patterns that exist in a corpus. This study argues that concgrams represent more fully word associations in a corpus. Most concgrams seem to be non-contiguous, and show both constituency (AB, ACB) and positional (AB, BA) variations. Further studies of concgrams will help in the task of uncovering the full extent of the idiom principle (Sinclair 1987).

The paper proposes a methodology for collecting “open-source” corpora, i.e. corpora that are automatically collected from the Internet and distributed in the form of a list of links with open-source software for recreating their full text. The result is a random snapshot of Internet pages which contain stretches of connected text in a given language. The paper discusses a methodology for acquiring such corpora, two ways of documenting them (using a set of metatextual categories and by comparison to frequency lists from existing corpora) and their function as benchmarks for comparing results of linguistic inquiry. Experiments with a variety of languages show that Internet-derived corpora can be successfully used in the absence of large representative corpora that are rare and expensive to build.

This paper is an English-Spanish corpus-based contrastive study of multiple modification within the boundaries of the noun phrase. This issue is particularly problematic when comparing English and Spanish, and causes difficulties in foreign language learning as well as in translation processes between the two languages. The aim of this study is to unveil the interaction between meaning and grammar in this linguistic area in English and Spanish, revealing the different grammatical structures used in the two languages to actualise a particular meaning. The approach followed in this paper is a functional one (Bondarko 1991; Chesterman 1998). The empirical data on which the study is based are instances of authentic language in use extracted from two large monolingual reference corpora, Cobuild/Bank of English and CREA (Reference Corpus of Contemporary Spanish). The contrastive analysis consists of three stages: description, juxtaposition and a contrastive stage in which functional-semantic correspondences are suggested on the basis of meaning.