International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2011

This paper examines the relationship between corpus linguistics and theoretical linguistics from a variety of standpoints. We consider the nature of the fit between particular theoretical approaches and the three areas in which corpus linguistics has made a significant contribution to our understanding of language: the provision of frequency information, the highlighting of the importance of collocations, and the description of variation and text types. The complex relationship between data, theory, and representation is described with the aim of situating corpus-based research with respect to different linguistic theories, looking broadly at British and American traditions and paying particular attention to usage-based models of language. We then briefly discuss some current issues surrounding theoretical developments within corpus linguistics, including the divide between cognitive and social perspectives; the representation of corpus-based generalisations; and the relationship between patterns in corpus data and patterns in the mind.

In this paper, we describe a grammatical formalism, called DepPattern, to write dependency grammars using patterns of Part of Speech (PoS) tags augmented with lexical and morphological information. The formalism inherits ideas from Sinclair’s work and Pattern Grammar. To properly analyze semi-fixed idiomatic expressions, DepPattern distinguishes between open-choice and idiomatic rules. A grammar is defined as a set of lexical-syntactic rules at different levels of abstraction. In addition, a compiler was implemented so as to generate deterministic and robust parsers from DepPattern grammars. These parsers identify dependencies which can be used to improve corpus-based applications such as information extraction. At the end of this article, we describe an experiment which evaluates the efficiency of a dependency parser generated from a simple DepPattern grammar. In particular, we evaluated the precision of a semantic extraction method making use of a DepPattern-based parser.

This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of the form, function, and frequency of introductory it plus that-clause and to-clause complementation. These structures are said to be particularly important in academic English. We examined disciplinary variation in 288 research articles across eight disciplines, four science and four non-science — Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Environmental Science, Business, Language and Linguistics, Law, and Public and Social Administration. We examined all 6,008 occurrences of it, recorded 110 different forms of the patterns, and investigated function. Results indicate that Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Science writers used the structures significantly less frequently than non-science writers, while Law used them more often. Numerous other statistically significant disciplinary differences were found. Conclusions are that the structure performs the important functions of evaluating the likelihood or validity of propositions, evaluating or commenting on the difficulty of procedures and evaluating or commenting on the necessity of procedures.

In this article we report on a pilot project investigating the presentation of speech, writing and thought in Early Modern English prose fiction and news writing. The aim of the project is to determine whether discourse presentation changes diachronically and what the function of the various discourse presentation categories were in the Early Modern period. To study this we have built and annotated a small corpus of Early Modern English writing using the model of speech, writing and thought presentation outlined in Semino & Short (2004). We are thus able to compare our findings against those of Semino and Short for Present Day English writing. The quantitative results of our pilot study and our initial qualitative analyses lead to a number of hypotheses which we suggest are suitable for testing on a larger corpus of data.