International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 12, Issue 3, 2007

Based on a large set of data from one of the biggest available corpora of spoken British English (the 10-million word spoken component of the BNC), this article explores central lexical-grammatical aspects of progressive forms with future time reference. Among the phenomena investigated are verb preferences, adverbial co-selection, subject types, and negation. It is demonstrated that future time progressives in spoken British English are patterned to a considerable extent (for example that it is individual verbs, rather than semantic groups of verbs, that preferably occur in such constructions) and that actual language use often runs counter to claims that can be found in traditional grammatical descriptions of the construction. A number of general and often neglected issues in the analysis of lexical-grammatical patterns are also addressed, in particular the notion of pattern frequency.

COMPARA is a bidirectional parallel corpus of English and Portuguese, currently with 3 million words. The corpus was launched in 2000 and at present it is possibly the largest edited parallel corpus publicly available on the Web, with roughly 6,000 corpus queries per month. This paper summarizes an analysis of six years of corpus use. We begin by looking at user studies for language resources, especially corpora, and then we provide a snapshot of COMPARA’s users and their behaviour based on log analysis. Particular emphasis is given to the language interface preferred by users (Portuguese and English are possible), the choice between the Simple and Complex Search modes, the reasons underlying null-results and behaviour after restricted output. The data has pointed us to cases where COMPARA’s Web interface can be improved, and provided insights about our users and the problems they face, although further studies that distinguish between different kinds of users remain necessary.

The primary objective of this paper is to propose a corpus-based research methodology for comparing quantitative aspects of collocational patterning in translated and non-translated texts of the same language. The main issue under investigation is whether collocational patterns tend to be less diverse (i.e. reduced in range) in translated than non-translated texts. A pilot study is carried out with a view to examining the overall number of collocates and the distribution of collocations in relation to a given node in the translated and non-translated subcorpora. The data is drawn from a comparable corpus of Brazilian Portuguese which consists of two separate subcorpora: one made up of translated Brazilian Portuguese and the other consisting of non-translated Brazilian Portuguese. Both subcorpora are designed according to the same criteria and specifications and are of similar size.

This paper builds on the groundwork and setting up of methods for an innovative approach to analysing text. We have proposed that there is a hitherto unexplored textual feature, which we call ‘repulsion’, which operates on the construction of meaning in an opposing way to that of word collocation. To illustrate, we do not say cheerfully happy even though we say blissfully happy. We focus on ‘lexical repulsion’, by which we mean the intuitively-observed tendency in conventional language use for certain pairs of words not to occur together, for no apparent reason other than convention. Our goal is to establish how repulsion as a whole operates and whether it can be assigned the status of an objectively measurable ‘force’. It is anticipated that this approach will have wide implications for corpus linguistics and NLP. In this paper, we take the particular case of repulsion between sense-related word pairs.