International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 20, Issue 4, 2015

The classical Chinese text Zhuangzi tells us that the meaning of a word, or a text, is not fixed, but consists of the many perspectives offered in debate. Each new contribution interprets what has been said and thus adds to its meaning. This is akin to the approach of modern hermeneutics. What a text means is determined by its intertextual links to previous texts, and by the traces it leaves in its subsequent interpretations. The practical approach of philology and the methodology of corpus linguistics provide the foundation of the task of interpretation, by establishing the textual evidence on which interpretation has to rest. My paper exemplifies the Zhuangzi’s strategy in moving on from the textual evidence to their manifold interpretations, thus interweaving corpus linguistics, philology and hermeneutics.

In the present paper, we investigate a group of markers in spoken interaction, commonly termed general extenders (GEs). We compare their usage in different discourse settings within the reference speech corpus of the Slovene language GOS. The results show that there is a high variability of GE form, but that most forms are rarely used. GEs are generally less frequent in public and formal settings, such as classes and radio and television informative broadcasts, and more frequent in private settings. Substantial differences are found not only between the two groups of GEs, adjunctive and disjunctive, but also between particular GE expressions. We argue that mere qualitative analysis of pragmatic expressions such as GEs is not sufficient for reliable conclusions, and that quantitative corpus analysis can provide additional insights into GE functions, especially considering the differences between the two groups of GEs, adjunctives and disjunctives, and between particular GE expressions.

This paper focuses on the identification of academic written genres from two corpora of reading material in Spanish that undergraduate and graduate university students are assigned in order to access specialized information across seven disciplines, namely Biotechnology, Chemistry, Economics, History, Linguistics, Literature and Physics. A group of 31 genres were identified across the discourses of the disciplines under study. Among the most frequent genres, “Textbook”, “Research Article”, and “Disciplinary Text”, were identified. Contrasting reading material, the importance of the “Research Article” is highly relevant, as it was the only genre that emerged in all seven disciplines. What I am proposing is that, regarding generic variation, there are clear-cut differences in the academic discourse of disciplines pertaining to Social Sciences and Humanities (SS&H) and Basic Sciences (BS), as it has been initially proposed (Parodi 2010a, 2014). However, the findings show that Economics academic discourse is closer to BS in terms of genre constitution.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to learner corpus research into formulaic language in native and non-native German. To this effect, a corpus of argumentative essays written by advanced British students of German (WHiG) was compared with a corpus of argumentative essays written by German native speakers (Falko-L1). A corpus-driven analysis reveals a larger number of 3-grams in WHiG than in Falko-L1, which suggests that British advanced learners of German are more likely to use formulaic language in argumentative writing than their native-speaker counterparts. Secondly, by classifying the formulaic sequences according to their functions, this study finds that native speakers of German prefer discourse-structuring devices to stance expressions, whilst British advanced learners display the opposite preferences. Thirdly, the results show that learners of German make greater use of macro-discourse-structuring devices and cautious language, whereas native speakers favour micro-discourse structuring devices and tend to use more direct language.

This paper shows how corpus methods can be usefully employed in the field of psychology of religion in triangulation with other empirical instruments. Current international surveys mirror an on-going transformation in subjective meanings in religious discourse cumulating in the question: what do people actually mean when they describe themselves as spiritual, religious or neither? The paper presents results of a cross-cultural study with 1,886 participants in the US and Germany. The thematic goal is to explore subjective understandings by examining personal definitions of religion and spirituality. Methodologically, the study shows how the key word procedure can be used to compare the semantic profile of subjective concepts between different languages and cultures by contrasting them to standard language and by using socio-biographical context variables to build contrasting sub-corpora. To control the in-equivalence of existing reference corpora in terms of size and design a so-called reference control corpus (RCC) is introduced.