International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 24, Issue 2, 2019

The present study compared 4-word lexical bundles found in a general engineering corpus (2,030,000 words) with those found in a corpus of texts collected from a Pathway engineering course for ESL (English as a Second Language) students (356,000 words) and a corpus of pedagogical materials used to teach advanced ESL students at an intensive English program (440,000 words). The results indicated that the structural and functional characteristics of the lexical bundles in the Pathway engineering materials were representative of the discourse features found in the general engineering corpus. This finding provides additional evidence of the overall appropriateness of the pedagogical materials selected for the Pathway course. Furthermore, the two engineering corpora also included a substantial number of bundles that were unique to the specific course materials, and, therefore, can potentially be targeted during language instruction.

Corpus-based studies of specialized registers typically sample texts using random methods as far as possible, but they disregard social characteristics of the speakers/writers. In contrast, in corpus-based studies of conversation and quantitative sociolinguistic studies, sampling is more typically designed to optimize social representation. To our knowledge, this study is the first to compare linguistic outcomes from random versus sociolinguistic sampling in a specialized register. Our data comes from the biographical radio chat show, Desert Island Discs (DID), at different points in time. We constructed two versions of a DID corpus: a sociolinguistic judgment sample based on guest demographics, and a random sample. We compare grammatical usage between them using an inductive (‘key POS-tags’) method and close manual analysis, uncovering some evidence of significant grammatical differences between the samples and differing patterns of diachronic change. We discuss the implications of our research for corpus design, representativeness and analysis in specialized registers.

This study aims to construct a corpus-informed list of Arabic Formulaic Sequences (ArFSs) for use in language pedagogy (LP) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. A hybrid mixed methods model was adopted for extracting ArFSs from a corpus, that combined automatic and manual extracting methods, based on well-established quantitative and qualitative criteria that are relevant from the perspective of LP and NLP. The pedagogical implications of this list are examined to facilitate the inclusion of ArFSs in the process of learning and teaching Arabic, particularly for non-native speakers. The computational implications of the ArFSs list are related to the key role of the ArFSs as a novel language resource in the improvement of various Arabic NLP tasks.

This paper presents an overview of the Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) and Non-AAC Workplace Corpus (ANAWC) (Pickering & Bruce, 2009). The corpus is the first resource of its kind that makes it possible to systematically study the typical language patterns of both AAC users and comparable non-AAC users in the workplace. We discuss the origin of the corpus and give an account of the methodology used for its collection and transcription. We also introduce several publications that demonstrate the novel qualitative and quantitative findings that can be generated on the basis of the corpora. This kind of research will be crucial to guide future developments in AAC development for workplace applications.

Kaleidographic is a dynamic and interactive data visualization tool that allows users to observe and explore relations between any number of variables. The tool is useful for displaying the complex ways in which textual elements interact across a range of texts. Thus far, the tool has been used to display the results of corpus studies as well as corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analyses that investigate text-image relations. To facilitate broader applications of the tool, it is now publicly available online for use without charge. This paper explains the background and motivation for Kaleidographic and presents two case studies demonstrating its utility. Limitations of the tool are discussed and its potential uses in corpus linguistics research and beyond are introduced.