International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 9, Issue 2, 2004

Corpus-based research throws up a number of methodological challenges. Many of these are evident in any type of research which attempts to compare authentic data of any kind, but the difficulties are accentuated by the availability of vast amounts of data in this case. In particular, questions relating to how one selects the features to be compared and, more importantly, how the findings may be interpreted, invite us to elaborate our methodology far more explicitly than in other types of research. The accessibility of the same body of data to other researchers also means that (a) the findings can be assessed and challenged in other studies, and (b) other researchers can invoke different, and perhaps more plausible explanations of the same findings by appealing to parameters that may have been downplayed or ignored in previous studies. These issues have been extensively debated in the literature on corpus linguistics, but rarely – if ever – in the context of corpus-based translation studies. A small-scale study involving comparisons between corpora of translated and non-translated texts in English in terms of frequency and distribution of recurring lexical patterns is used to examine some methodological issues in corpus-based translation research and suggest different ways in which the same findings may be interpreted depending on the variables on which individual researchers choose to focus.

The absolute majority of scholarly work in descriptive translation studies is product-oriented. In this article, the focus is moved from product-oriented to process-oriented translation studies by compiling an English – Lithuanian Phases of Translation Corpus (PT corpus). The PT corpus is analysed using quantitative and qualitative analyses. The quantitative analysis using frequency information highlights the difficult word types that either are missing or are inconsistently translated in successive Lithuanian translated versions. The qualitative analysis continues the quantitative research by help of parallel concordancing. The problematic cases of translation are extracted and cases of normalization, systematic replacement of terminology, and influence by the original language are reported.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the extent of grammatical variation between late Middle English and Present-day English. To that end, we compare the automatic output which the English Constraint Grammar Parser (ENGCG-2) offers of an updated medieval text from The Book of Margery Kempe and its corresponding modern version. In the first half of the paper we focus on the description of the parser. This system parses every constituent and associates it with a complex tag which provides morphological and syntactic information. The second half of the paper is devoted to the evaluation of the results obtained after the application of the parser to the medieval and the contemporary passages. By examining the instances exhibiting either unjustified ambiguity or parsing failure we determine to what extent morphosyntactic rules designed for Present-day English can be suitably applied to earlier stages of the language.

Patterns describe the syntactic behaviour of lexical items by specifying their local environment. This paper reports on a pilot study to automatically recognise those patterns in text. This study has been successful in producing a system that identifies patterns using only limited linguistic knowledge. It also has raised several issues which will have to be dealt with in future work.

This paper discusses the construction and analysis of a corpus of an individual's own academic writing. Following an examination of the area of academic writing and the position of academic writing corpora within it, the paper discusses how a ‘personal corpus’ might be put together, along with issues of the necessary quality and quantity of ‘text’, and problems which may arise in the construction of a personal corpus. The paper also proposes a background, general ‘reference’ corpus against which features of academic writing may be measured, whilst admitting that accessibility to, or production of, such a potentially large corpus will generally be beyond the means of many researchers interested in small-scale analyses. Using concordancers, some limited analyses of lexical, syntactic and discourse features are then presented to show how a potential personal profile might emerge. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limitations facing the analysis of one's own writing, but suggests that, despite limitations, worthwhile insights can be gained in respect of one's personal language awareness.

This paper reports the findings of a corpus-based study oflet-imperatives in English. Unlike the ordinary lexical verbletmeaning “allow”, theletoflet-imperatives serves merely to mark illocutionary meaning. In ‘first person inclusives’, the variant with us-contraction is found to have increased in popularity over recent decades. Furthermore the occurrence of cases wherelet'scan not be interpreted as a contraction oflet ussuggests that syntactic reanalysis has reached an advanced stage amongst some speakers. ‘Open’let-imperatives, which despite their distinctively optative or deontic-assertive force are grammatically closer to ordinary imperatives, are found to have decreased in popularity in recent decades.

This paper compares several methods (MI,T-score, Dice) for the extraction of collocations and presents a new method called Gravity Counts. The respective methods are evaluated and compared, measuring the combinability and collocability for each pair of words within the moving span of three words in the corpus of “The Times” newspaper for the year 1995. The collocability of words is the basis for detection of the collocational chains, i.e. frequent recurrent uninterrupted strings of word-forms, with clear-cut boundaries, found in the corpus. Collocational chains obtained with the help of different methods are compared and their lexical, grammatical and semantic features discussed.