International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 17, Issue 2, 2012

This paper focuses upon two issues. Firstly, the question of identifying diachronic trends, and more importantly significant outliers, in corpora which permit an investigation of a feature at many sampling points over time. Secondly, we consider how best to combine more qualitatively oriented approaches to corpus data with the type of trends that can be observed in a corpus using quantitative techniques. The work uses a recently completed ESRC-funded project as a case study, the representation of Islam in the UK press, in order to demonstrate the potential of the approach taken to establishing significant peaks in diachronic frequency development, and the fruitful interface that may be created between qualitative and quantitative techniques.

In this article, a new method to identify groups of spatially similar dialect maps is presented. This is done by comparing statistical properties of the maps: the empirical covariance is measured for every map in a corpus of dialect maps. Then, the Fuzzy C-Means clustering method is applied to these covariance data. Thereby, one is able to detect and measure gradual similarities between maps. By employing the method on lexical data from the dialect atlas Sprachatlas von Bayerisch-Schwaben, it can be shown that clusters of spatially similar maps also share semantic similarities. This method can thus be used for grouping maps based on spatial similarities while at the same time indicating patterns of semantic relationships between spatially related variables.

Using the 400+ million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) as data and a behavioral profile analysis approach, this study examines the semantic and usage differences among actually, genuinely, really, and truly, four near-synonymous adverbs notorious for their complex functional and syntactic usage patterns. In addition to examining the collocates of the adverbs (i.e. the common types of adjectives/verbs they each modify), the study also investigated the positions the adverbs typically occupy in the sentence structure and their functional implications. The data analysis yields an informative delineation of the internal semantic structure of the synonym set, which includes some interesting new findings compared with existing descriptions of the adverbs. The results also show the need for the BP approach to go beyond collocational analysis in the study of synonymous adverbs. Finally, the study also demonstrates the viability of a corpus-based BP approach in the study of synonymous adverbs.

This article presents a case study of a set of constructions containing the related way-nouns road, way, track and route, exemplified by (i) the farm road to the house, (ii) A senior Soviet official is on his way to the Iraqi capital, (iii) spies Burgess and Maclean escaped from Britain en route to Moscow, (iv) Queensland is on track to become the top bowling state in Australia. These distinct constructions are a case of layering (Hopper 1991). Constructions featuring lexical uses of way-nouns, illustrated by (i), coexist with strings containing way-nouns that have been reanalysed into units with new lexical or grammatical meanings, i.e. respectively composite predicates (ii), complex prepositions (iii) and aspectual markers (iv). We argue that these three constructions challenge the view of decategorialization as mere loss of the original categorial features. We also show on the basis of qualitative and quantitative corpus analysis that the structural variants display specialization in relation to the four way-nouns.

Recent studies have sought to understand individuals’ motivations for terrorism through terrorist material content. To date, these studies have not capitalised on automated language analysis techniques, particularly those of corpus linguistics. In this paper, we demonstrate how applying three corpus-linguistic techniques to extremist statements can provide insights into their ideology. Our data consisted of 250 statements (approximately 500,000 words) promoting terrorist violence. Using the online software tool WMatrix, we submitted these data to frequency count, key word and key concept, and concordance analyses. Results showed that authors centre their rhetoric on themes of morality, social proof, inspiration and appeals to religion, and refer to the world via contrasting concepts, suggesting a polarised way of thinking compared to a general population usage. Additionally, we show how collocation can aid the establishment of networks between people and places. We discuss how such analyses might support the formulation of evidence based counter-terrorism strategies.