International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 14, Issue 2, 2009

To say that there has been a certain amount of confusion and debate over the nature and function of the notion of semantic prosody would be an understatement. In this paper we attempt to address and assess, in the light of current thinking in the field of lexical grammar, some of the main issues which have been raised.

The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which was released online in early 2008, is the first large and diverse corpus of American English. In this paper, we first discuss the design of the corpus — which contains more than 385 million words from 1990–2008 (20 million words each year), balanced between spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. We also discuss the unique relational databases architecture, which allows for a wide range of queries that are not available (or are quite difficult) with other architectures and interfaces. To conclude, we consider insights from the corpus on a number of cases of genre-based variation and recent linguistic variation, including an extended analysis of phrasal verbs in contemporary American English.

Between the 1960’s and 1990’s the frequency of modal verbs in the Brown family of corpora fell substantially, a decline which Leech (2003: 96) suggests is indicative of a more “general and long lasting trend”. Taking Leech’s study as a starting point, this paper investigates twentieth century changes in modal verbs using the new and relatively unexplored TIME Magazine Corpus. Results show that while certain modal verbs have fallen in frequency, the overall pattern is one of growth. These changes may be accounted for by the increase of semi-modal verbs and shifts in usage. Results appear to lend support to the explanatory hypotheses of colloquialization, democratization and stylistic change. Investigation of discrepancies between results from the TIME Corpus and the Brown corpora yields important methodological implications. In particular, as a result of sampling variation, a diachronic comparison based on two data points may present an inaccurate picture of the overall trend.

Indefinite subjects of so-called pivot verbs in Malay can appear on either side of the verb. This paper discusses the following two tendencies concerning their behaviour: (i) the longer the subject is, the more likely it is to occur after the verb; (ii) in adverbial clauses the preferred word order is VS rather than SV. Both of these points are supported by quantitative evidence from a corpus of front-page articles of the daily newspaper Utusan Malaysia. The paper also proposes an explanation for these tendencies by using the functional notion of ‘topic’ and the mechanism of competition. Specifically, tendencies (i) and (ii) above are claimed to result from the competition between the topicality and heaviness of the subject NP, and from the Constraint on ‘Topic-over-Topic’ Configuration (COTC) respectively. The proposed model with competition and COTC is applicable to other phenomena in Malay (apparent violations of the Definiteness Restriction) and other languages (restricted occurrence of the topic marker in some subordinate clauses in Japanese) as well.