International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2017

Based on the Bielefeld Speech and Gesture Alignment Corpus ( Lücking et al. 2013 ), this paper presents a systematic comparison of the linguistic characteristics of unimodal (speech only) and multimodal (gesture-accompanied) forms of language use. The results suggest that each of these two modes of expression is characterized by statistical preferences for certain types of words and grammatical categories. The words that are most frequently accompanied by a manual gesture, when controlled for their total frequency, include unspecific spatial lexemes, various deictic words, and particles that express difficulty in word retrieval or formulation. Other linguistic items, including pronouns and verbs of cognition, show a strong dispreference for being gesture-accompanied. The second part of the paper shows that gestures do not occur within a fixed time window relative to the word(s) they relate to, but the preferred temporal distance varies with the type of functional relation that exists between the verbal and gestural channel.

Impolite behaviour tends to attract more evaluative comment than other facework, making it easier to investigate synchronically and diachronically. A reliance on metapragmatic commentary is not optimum for UK parliamentary studies, however, as MPs cannot use “insulting or rude language” that breaks the chamber’s “rules of politeness” (www.parliament.uk). The work reported here thus offers three innovative methods of tracing MPs’ facework as they negotiated the “unparliamentary language” prohibition, and the results gleaned when the methods were applied to Hansard records (1812–2004). Method 1 prioritises portmanteau tags made up of USAS semtags. Method 2 prioritises themes derived from the HTOED. Method 3 draws on ‘meaning constellations’ (i.e. simultaneous searches of multiple tags). The UK parliamentary website highlights the “considerable ingenuity” displayed by MPs in order to circumvent their unparliamentary language prohibition. All methods have found examples of such ingenuity, many of which are characterized by multiple facework intentions ( Archer 2015 ).

The ability to successfully position oneself in relation to one’s claims through the use of stance markers is of central importance for academic writers. This study, which uses data from one expert corpus (LOCRA) and three learner corpora (ALEC, VESPA and BATMAT), investigates the use of morphologically related stance markers that occur in different syntactic constructions (such as possibly, the possibility of and it is possible that). In doing so, it examines to what extent lexis, level of expertise in academic writing and L1 transfer influence the distribution of the different realizations of stance under investigation. The results show that all three variables are important predictors. In addition, differences pertaining to information structure are found to influence the distribution of two largely synonymous constructions (disjuncts and the introductory it pattern). The findings suggest that there are principled explanations for why one construction is used instead of another functionally similar construction.

Stance and voice are two crucial elements of social interactions in academic writing. However, their conceptual constructs are elusive and their linguistic realisation is not fully explored. A relatively overlooked feature is the “noun + that” structure, where a stance head noun takes a nominal complement clause (as advantage that in Flow cytometry offers the advantage that long term is available). This construction allows a writer to express authorial stance towards complement content and attribute a voice to that stance through pre-modification. This paper examines this construction in a corpus of 60 journal articles across six disciplines extracted from the BNC corpus. Developing an expressive classification of stance nouns and the possible voice categorisation, this study shows that the structure is not only widely used to project stance and voice, but that it displays considerable variation in the way that it is used to build knowledge across different disciplines.

Syntactically annotated corpora are highly important for enabling large-scale diachronic and diatopic language research. Such corpora have recently been developed for a variety of historical languages, or are still under development. One of those under development is the fully tagged and parsed Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG), which is aimed at facilitating research into the highly under-researched diachronic syntax of Low German. The present paper reports on a crucial step in creating the corpus, viz. the creation of a part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German (MLG). Having been transmitted in several non-standardised written varieties, MLG poses a challenge to standard POS taggers, which usually rely on normalized spelling. We outline the major issues faced in the creation of the tagger and present our solutions to them.