International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 20, Issue 2, 2015

The idea that text in a particular field of discourse is organized into lexical patterns, which can be visualized as networks of words that collocate with each other, was originally proposed by Phillips (1983). This idea has important theoretical implications for our understanding of the relationship between the lexis and the text and (ultimately) between the text and the discourse community/the mind of the speaker. Although the approaches to date have offered different possibilities for constructing collocation networks, we argue that they have not yet successfully operationalized some of the desired features of such networks. In this study, we revisit the concept of collocation networks and introduce GraphColl, a new tool developed by the authors that builds collocation networks from user-defined corpora. In a case study using data from McEnery’s (2006a) study of the Society for the Reformation of Manners Corpus (SRMC), we demonstrate that collocation networks provide important insights into meaning relationships in language.

Since the beginnings of modern popular music, listening to pop songs has been one of the major pastimes in Western countries, raising the question how popular music contributes to the shaping of beliefs and attitudes in general and gender roles and stereotypes in particular. While there is a considerable body of research concerning the depiction of men and women in pop music videos, the lyrics of pop songs, so far, have largely been neglected as a viable source of data. On the basis of two corpora of contemporary pop songs by male and female artists, respectively, the present paper explores discourses of femininity and masculinity as represented in the lyrics of pop songs. It is shown that although the two corpora behave surprisingly similarly in some respects, the way in which male and female artists refer to themselves or to the opposite sex might contribute to the consolidation of unfavourable roles for women.

This study combines quantitative semi-automated corpus methods with manual qualitative analysis to investigate the use of Violence metaphors for cancer and end of life in a 1,500,000-word corpus of data from three stakeholder groups in healthcare: patients, family carers and healthcare professionals. Violence metaphors in general, especially military metaphors, are conventionally used to talk about illness, particularly cancer. However, they have also been criticized for their potentially negative implications. The use of innovative methodology enables us to undertake a more rigorous and systematic investigation of Violence metaphors than has previously been possible. Our findings show that patients, carers and professionals use a much wider set of Violence-related metaphors than noted in previous studies, and that metaphor use varies between interview and online forum genres and amongst different stakeholder groups. Our study has implications for the computer-assisted study of metaphor, metaphor theory and analysis more generally, and communication in healthcare settings.

This article takes a quantitative approach to the grammar of English two-part discourse marker sequences like oh well, you know I mean, etc. We investigate the internal ordering preferences of such sequences in spoken American English corpus data from the perspective of grammaticalization. From this perspective, the development of many discourse markers can be understood as involving a process of increasing syntactic de-categorialization (Hopper 1991) as the grammaticalizing element loses its original grammatical constraints and comes to function as a marker at the level of discourse. We test the hypothesis that discourse marker grammaticalization results in largely unconstrained ordering possibilities. Our analysis shows that, on the contrary, discourse marker sequencing is highly constrained. We interpret these constraints in terms of Auer’s (1996) model of discourse marker grammaticalization. Discourse marker sequencing is characterized by strong persistence of a marker’s original syntactic category and reflects its specific grammaticalization trajectory.