International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 21, Issue 4, 2016

This paper explores the effectiveness of Juilland’s D as a measure of vocabulary dispersion in large corpora. Through a series of experiments using the BNC, we explored the influence of three variables: the number of corpus-parts used for the computation of D, the frequency of the target word, and the distributions of those words. The experiments demonstrate that the effective range for D is greatly reduced when computations are based on a large number of corpus-parts: even words with highly skewed distributions have D values indicating a relatively uniform distribution. We also briefly explore an alternative measure, Gries’ DP (Gries 2008), showing that it is a more reliable and effective measure of dispersion in a large corpus divided into many parts. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of these findings for quantitative methods applied to the creation of vocabulary lists as well as research questions in other areas of corpus linguistics.

The paper aims to demonstrate the usefulness of a novel corpus-based approach to analyzing Halliday’s transitivity for application to critical discourse analysis (CDA). The approach expands transitivity analysis beyond the traditional profiling of participant roles and process types at grammatical level to conceptual subcategorization, in light of the fact that CDA researchers often end up delving into the meanings of individual processes as part of their transitivity analyses. The paper introduces a scheme for annotating transitivity both at grammatical and conceptual levels on the basis of Halliday & Matthiessen (2004) and applies it to a case study examining news reports from two ideologically opposed South Korean newspapers on a nationwide public movement against US beef imports. The analysis reveals that the two newspapers contrast with each other in representing the riot police and the demonstrators as Actor and Goal in material processes grammatically and in processes of violence conceptually.

This paper focuses on the use of certain linguistic features conveying impersonal style in late Modern English scientific prose (1700–1900). Samples are taken from two subcorpora of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing, one from the humanities (Philosophy) and the other from natural sciences (Life Sciences). The methodology applied is based on Biber’s (1988) Multidimensional Analysis, consisting of a study of register variation as manifested through sets of co-occurring linguistic features with a shared discursive function. The aim of the present study is to detect variation across scientific disciplines, genres, and subject matter. Findings are compared to those found in both diachronic and contemporary reference corpora.

Much recent research on figurative language and conceptual metaphor theory derives from corpus examination, and analysts are increasingly focused on the development of quantificational tools to reveal co-occurrence patterns indicative of source and target domain associations. Some mappings between source and target are transparent and appear in collocation patterns in natural language data. However, other metaphors, especially those that structure abstract processes, are more complex because the target domain is lexically divorced from the source. Using economic discourse as a case study, this paper introduces new techniques directed at the quantitative evaluation of metaphorical occurrence when target and source relationships are nonobvious. Constellations of source-domain triggers are identified in the data and shown to disproportionately emerge in topic-specific discourse.

This short paper introduces the HeliPaD, a new parsed corpus of Old Saxon (Old Low German). It is annotated according to the standards of the Penn Corpora of Historical English, enriched with lemmatization and additional morphological attributes as well as textual and metrical annotation. This paper provides an overview of its main features and compares it to existing resources such as the Deutsch Diachron Digital version of the Old Saxon Heliand as part of the Referenzkorpus Altdeutsch. It closes with a roadmap for planned future expansions.