International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 23, Issue 4, 2018

Abstract

An important component of fluent linguistic production and a key distinguishing feature of particular modes, registers and genres is the multi-word expressions referred to as ‘lexical bundles’. These are extended collocations which appear more frequently than expected by chance, helping to shape meanings and contributing to our sense of coherence and distinctiveness in a text. These strings have been studied extensively, particularly in academic writing in English, but little is known about how they may have changed over time. In this paper we explore changes in their use and frequency over the past 50 years, drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words taken from top research journals in four disciplines. We find that bundles are not static and invariant markers of research writing but change in response to new conditions and contexts, with the most interesting changes within disciplines. The paper also discusses methodological approaches to studying bundles diachronically.

Abstract

This study investigates the textual colligation of stance phrases at the levels of sentence, paragraph and text in empirical research articles from agriculture and economics. We extracted the textual positions of stance phrases with the software Wordskew (Barlow, 2016) in two purpose-built corpora of around three million tokens. The results show that stance phrases display similar distribution patterns in the two disciplinary corpora; however, we found significant differences with respect to the frequency of stance phrases in particular textual positions in each corpus. The findings consolidate Hoey’s (2005) premise that certain expressions are primed to occur in particular textual positions. We contend that the textual positions of stance phrases may be a result of the routinised discourse function that they serve, and that the appropriate timing of stance-taking is of particular communicative importance.

Abstract

Using collocation-based approaches, semantic prosody analyses of lemmas like alleviate and cure yield judgments of negative prosody, which contradict common sense. This poses a challenge to the concept of semantic prosody and the principle of co-occurrence. To solve such contradictions, this paper proposes a new approach to semantic prosody analysis named ‘prosody concord’. The approach adopts collostruction as the locus of analysis on the basis of the explication of the unit of meaning model, and uses a mechanism for semantic prosody determination that incorporates multiple sources of information such as interactions of words, collocations, colligations and semantic preferences. Case studies of the lemmas budge, credibility, cause and alleviate show that the proposed approach can solve the contradictions and provide a consistent means for semantic prosody analysis.

Abstract

The present study accounts for the use of general extenders (GEs) in spoken and written registers. The repertoire and usage of GEs is analysed in Lithuanian by focusing on their distribution across different registers, their structural properties, and discourse-pragmatic functions. The study is based on a reference corpus of Lithuanian, which includes four subcorpora of written discourse and a subcorpus of spoken discourse. The findings indicate that there are some significant cross-generic differences in GE frequency, but most frequently GEs in Lithuanian are used in written academic discourse. With regard to the structural types of GEs, adjunctives are considerably more frequent than disjunctives. GE structure allows for a large degree of variation, and in spoken interaction GEs can include deictic elements. Concerning discourse-pragmatic functions, GEs are predominantly used to serve textual and interpersonal functions, which appear to be strongly related to the structural type of the GE and discourse settings.

Abstract

This short paper introduces BasiScript, a 9-million-word corpus of contemporary Dutch texts written by primary school children. The data were collected over three years with 17,216 children contributing texts throughout this period. Each word token in the corpus is annotated with the correct orthographical form, the associated lemma and the part of speech. The most frequent polysemous words have been annotated for word meaning, while all words in the lexicon that was derived from the BasiScript corpus have been annotated for corpus and subcorpora frequency, dispersion, length, family size, family frequency, orthographic neighborhood size, and orthographic neighborhood frequency. Images of the texts are available to researchers. The present article describes the corpus and presents a comparison of BasiScript with BasiLex (a Dutch corpus with texts primary school children are likely to read, completed in 2015) by means of frequency profiling.

This article reviews Hong Kong English: Exploring Lexicogrammar and Discourse from a Corpus-Linguistic Perspective