International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 16, Issue 4, 2011

This paper uses diachronic corpus data to visualize language change in a dynamic fashion. Bivariate and multivariate data sets form the input for so-called motion charts, i.e. series of diachronically ordered scatterplots that can be viewed in sequence. Based on data from COHA (Davies 2010), two case studies illustrate recent changes in American English. The first study visualizes change in a diachronic analysis of ambicategorical nouns and verbs such as hope or drink; the second study shows structural change in the behavior of complement-taking predicates such as expect or remember. Whereas motion charts are typically used to represent bivariate data sets, it is argued here that they are also useful for the analysis of multivariate data over time. The present paper submits multivariate diachronic data to a multi-dimensional scaling analysis. Viewing the resulting data points in separate time slices offers a holistic and intuitive representation of complex linguistic change.

Scholars of language have begun to explore the popular academic topic that is “risk” and to establish the viability of corpus linguistics for such analysis. We extend existing scholarship by analyzing the noun lemma RISK over the last two decades of contemporary American discourse with recourse to the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Using the corpus procedures of frequency analysis, concordance contextual analysis, collocational analysis, and a variation on distinctive-collexeme analysis, we revisit the often under-supported assertion that RISK is semantically negative, and then investigate the semantic potential for good risk, a phenomenon associated with economic and adventuring sectors. Data suggest that RISK is genre sensitive, predominantly negative, and heavily medical in shared meaning across genres, and further, that evidence for good risk is minimal. A phrase of interest in recent corpus work — RISK worth taking — is shown to be sensitive perhaps more to constructional constraints than to semantic prosody.

This paper presents a corpus-based study of English denominal adjectives in -like. Starting with semantic aspects, including the relationship between N-like and like an N, it then reports on the productivity of -like adjectives by discussing the kinds of nouns to which -like is added, along with the distributions of individual formations in the Bank of English corpus. It next draws attention to the marked collocational patterns in which -like adjectives occur. These relate both to sets of items collocating with individual -like adjectives, and to subsets of -like adjectives collocating with individual nouns. There are implications in these bidirectional collocational patterns, it is argued, for studies of productivity and lexicalization: in particular that collocational constraints may exist at the level of morpheme, not just at the level of word or phrase.

The goal of this study is to determine if various measures of contraction rate are regionally patterned in written Standard American English. In order to answer this question, this study employs a corpus-based approach to data collection and a statistical approach to data analysis. Based on a spatial autocorrelation analysis of the values of eleven measures of contraction across a 25 million word corpus of letters to the editor representing the language of 200 cities from across the contiguous United States, two primary regional patterns were identified: easterners tend to produce relatively few standard contractions (not contraction, verb contraction) compared to westerners, and northeasterners tend to produce relatively few non-standard contractions (to contraction, non-standard not contraction) compared to southeasterners. These findings demonstrate that regional linguistic variation exists in written Standard American English and that regional linguistic variation is more common than is generally assumed.