International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 17, Issue 3, 2012

This paper explores the viability of automated semantic tagging as a tool of cultural analysis comparing American and British English using the Brown family of corpora. Pairs of corpora representing written language production from circa 1961, 1991 and 2006 were contrasted by comparing key semantic tags. This method was then evaluated in relation to three earlier studies which attempted to uncover cultural differences via assigning keywords to ad hoc categories. After outlining the differences found, we conclude that computerised semantic tagging can offer a wider reaching and more scientific comparison of language patterns. However, we suggest that this method is most appropriate as a starting point for a more in-depth cultural analysis, rather than as a final or certain indication of cultural change.

Schneider & Barron (2008) discuss the effect of macro-social factors such as region, ethnic background, age, social status and gender on intra-lingual pragmatic conventions, and state that, to date, they have received comparatively little attention in the study of pragmatics. This paper chooses two macro-social factors, age and gender, and focuses on how they impact on the use of response tokens in Irish English. Not only does the paper shed light on the use of variational pragmatics as a framework for corpus-based studies but it also brings together research on sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics, which has, to-date, been scarce (Baker 2010). The paper reveals the importance of avoiding the exploration of sociolinguistic variables in isolation and concludes by highlighting the importance of interdisciplinary research and the merits of fine-grained sociolinguistic investigations using small corpora.

This study details the use of corpus linguistics techniques to interrogate a corpus of adolescent health emails. The analysis focuses on the theme of depression, qualitatively examining how adolescents communicate psychological distress to health professionals. The study’s findings relate how the adolescents situate their accounts around two recurring constructs: “I am depressed” and “I have depression”. These formulations encode different perspectives and meaning making with regard to the conceptualisation of depression, the former describing depressive experiences as a reaction to negative life events, the latter portraying depression as a pathology originating within the individual. Thus the language choices employed by adolescents can be seen to reflect not only the personal and social contexts in which their depression is situated, but also reflect broader contemporary attitudes to mental health, specifically the sociocultural trend of psychiatrization, whereby sadness is constructed as a clinical problem rather than an unavoidable facet of everyday life.

CQPweb is a new web-based corpus analysis system, intended to address the conflicting requirements for usability and power in corpus analysis software. To do this, its user interface emulates the BNCweb system. Like BNCweb, CQPweb is built on two separate query technologies: the IMS Open Corpus Workbench and the MySQL relational database. CQPweb’s main innovative feature is its flexibility; its more generalised data model makes it compatible with any corpus. The analysis options available in CQPweb include: concordancing; collocations; distribution tables and charts; frequency lists; and keywords or key tags.An evaluation of CQPweb against criteria earlier laid down for a future web-based corpus analysis tool suggests that it fulfils many, but not all, of the requirements foreseen for such a piece of software. Despite some limitations, in making a sophisticated query system accessible to untrained users, CQPweb combines ease of use, power and flexibility to a very high degree.

This paper introduces InterCorp, a parallel corpus including texts in Czech and 27 other languages, available for online searches via a web interface. After discussing some issues and merits of a multilingual resource we argue that it has an important role especially for languages with fewer native speakers, supporting both comparative research and studies of the language from the perspective of other languages. We proceed with an overview of the corpus — the strategy and criteria for including new texts, the representation of available languages and text types, linguistic annotation, and a sketch of pre-processing issues. Finally, we present the search interface and suggest some research opportunities.

This paper outlines the compilation of a corpus of Catalan written production. The CesCa corpus presents a picture of the Catalan written language throughout compulsory schooling. It contains two kinds of data: Vocabularies of five semantic fields comprising 242,404 lexical forms and Textual data of four different discourse genres consisting of 207,028 tokens. Both vocabularies and the textual data have been morphologically analyzed and lemmatized. The corpus is freely available. This paper will outline the main features of the corpus and make some suggestions as to the uses to which the corpus can be put.