International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 13, Issue 2, 2008

This article addresses the relatively neglected question of identifying and characterizing the various uses of sort, kind and type in the English NP. It does so on the basis of close analysis of a set of data extracted from the Times subcorpus of the COBUILD corpus. The proposed description refers to the general functions fulfilled by elements of the NP, which, from right to left, form an objective — subjective continuum. At the same time, we characterize the specific grammatical, collocational and discoursal patterns that can be observed to shape each use in the empirical data. In this way, we distinguish, besides the generally recognized head and qualifier uses, also modifier, postdeterminer and quantifier uses. We then consider these intra-NP type noun uses as a possible case of Adamson’s (2000) hypothesis, which correlates subjectification with leftward movement in the NP.

This paper presents a hybrid model for part-of-speech (POS) guessing of Chinese unknown words. Most previous studies on this task have developed a unified statistical model for all Chinese unknown words and have rejected rule-based models without testing. We argue that models that use different sources of information about unknown words, both structural and contextual, can be effective for handling different types of unknown words. We propose a rule-based model that uses information about the type, length, and internal structure of unknown words and combine it with two existing statistical models that use information about the POS context and component characters of unknown words respectively for this task. By combining the complementary strengths of the three models that use different sources of information, the hybrid model achieves an accuracy of 89%, a significant improvement over the best result reported in previous studies.

This paper reports on a quantitative corpus-based study of the impact of a postverbal constituent (PVC) on the choice of word order in Dutch written clause final verb clusters consisting of a participle and an auxiliary verb. The study verifies the results of previous research by analyzing the effect of the presence vs. the absence of a PVC, while at the same time extending previous research by scrutinizing this effect more in depth. More specifically, it is investigated whether there is an effect of the grammatical relationship between the PVC and its head, the syntactic weight of the PVC and the accent distribution within the PVC. Based on several statistical measures for bivariate and stratified analysis, we are able to show that these factors simultaneously affect the choice of word order in written clause final verb clusters. These results lead us to explore the relationship between the prosodic and syntactic-pragmatic determinants of word order variation.

Linguists and other social scientists have employed many transcription conventions to exhibit the temporal interleaving of multi-speaker talk. The existence of many different systems, which are mutually incompatible, is evidence that representing spoken discourse remains problematic. This study proposes a novel orthographic transcription layout based on word timings. To test this method, the Maptask corpus (Anderson et al. 1991) is used because it contains unusually precise information on the timings of vocal events. This makes it possible to evaluate a non-standard talk-division format (TST1) in which the alternation of speakers is not imposed by a transcriber's intuition but emerges from the empirical data. It highlights the prevalence of ‘echoing’ in the joint production of dialogue. Moreover, lengths of speech segments and inter-speaker intervals as defined by this procedure show significant associations with a number of contextual and interactional variables, indicating that this approach has analytic as well as representational benefits.