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International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Online First
Online First articles are the published Version of Record, made available as soon as they are finalized and formatted. They are in general accessible to current subscribers, until they have been included in an issue, which is accessible to subscribers to the relevant volume
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“People should get their booster”
Author(s): Hang (Joanna) Zou and Ken HylandAvailable online: 13 February 2024More LessAbstractDebates around the efficacy and dangers of vaccination have taken on critical importance with the Covid pandemic and WHO naming vaccine hesitancy as a major global health threat. We explore how writers use two types of blog, academic and journalistic, to promote key public health messages around the effectiveness and necessity of Covid-19 vaccinations to a broad, heterogeneous audience. Examining 120 Covid-19 vaccination themed posts from reputable news and academic blog sites, we compare the different ways writers present a stance and take a position towards vaccines and vaccinations in these different interactional contexts. Findings show that both types of bloggers are clearly aware of the need to convey a stance towards their topic and audiences feel entitled to position themselves in relation to vaccination issues, but with different emphases. The study has important implications for how healthcare information is disseminated and persuasion accomplished in these public arenas of discourse.
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Modeling the locative alternation in Mandarin Chinese
Author(s): Mengmin Xu, Fuyin Li and Benedikt SzmrecsanyiAvailable online: 29 January 2024More LessAbstractThe current study investigates the probabilistic conditioning of the Mandarin locative alternation. We adopt a corpus-based multivariate approach to analyze 2,836 observations of locative variants from a large Chinese corpus and annotated manually for various language-internal and language-external constraints. Multivariate modeling reveals that the Mandarin locative alternation is not only influenced by semantic predictors like affectedness and telicity, but also by previously unexplored syntactic and language-external constraints, such as complexity and animacy of locatum and location, accessibility of locatum, pronominality, definiteness of location, length ratio and register. Notably, the effects of affectedness, definiteness and pronominality are broadly parallel in both the Mandarin locative alternation and its English counterpart. We thus contribute to theorizing in corpus-based variationist linguistics by uncovering the probabilistic grammar of the locative alternation in Mandarin Chinese, and by identifying the constraints that may be universal across languages.
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Framing the path to net zero
Author(s): Matteo Fuoli and Annika BeelitzAvailable online: 07 December 2023More LessAbstractBig corporations are a leading contributor to global carbon emissions and their investment decisions have a significant impact on the world’s ability to tackle climate change. This study combines corpus and discourse approaches to examine how major corporate emitters have responded to the Paris Agreement, how they legitimize their practices amid mounting public pressure, and how companies operating in high- and middle-income countries differ in their framing of climate change. The results show that carbon majors place increasing focus on climate issues, widely support the goals of the Paris Agreement, and are increasingly making net-zero pledges. However, close inspection of linguistic patterns reveals a troubling disconnect between proclaimed goals, the solutions advocated for, and the radical steps needed to address the escalating climate crisis. Companies from middle-income countries devote comparatively less attention to climate change, which points to the need for better coordinated global efforts to address this problem.
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Political framing of Covid-19
Author(s): Ariana N MohammadiAvailable online: 14 November 2023More LessAbstractThe present study is a corpus-based discourse analysis of the metaphorical framing of Covid-19 in American political discourse. Drawing on data from a corpus of the White House briefings and statements, the study investigates the corpus profile of war and virus and illustrates how the Coronavirus is primarily represented as an enemy to go to war with, rather than a public health crisis to control and mitigate. The study further situates the militaristic framing of Covid-19 within the theoretical framework of moral panic and examines the discursive features that ultimately bridge the metaphorical representation of the pandemic and the construction of moral panic. The study points to nuanced discourse strategies used in the White House press briefings that reconstruct the enemy and regroup the Coronavirus with other so-called enemies of the United States, such as the Communists, as well as the Islamic radicals and the Latin gangs and cartels.
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Advancing Sino-Philippine linguistics and sociolinguistics using the Lannang Corpus (LanCorp)
Author(s): Wilkinson Daniel Wong GonzalesAvailable online: 26 October 2023More LessAbstractThis paper introduces the Lannang Corpus (LanCorp), a public 375,000-word collection of raw and transcribed recordings of Lannang languages spoken in metropolitan Manila, which have been annotated with part-of-speech tags and linked to 40 types of sociolinguistic metadata. It begins by providing an overview of the LanCorp (e.g. design, formats, accessibility). Then, it goes on to show various examples of how the corpus can be used for variationist sociolinguistic research, using Lánnang-uè data as a case study. The findings from the exploratory studies indicate that Lannang languages are influenced by sociolinguistic factors, demonstrating the intricate nature of the Sino-Philippine sociolinguistic ecology. Due to its large size, sociolinguistic metadata, and various formats, LanCorp can be used to study Lannang languages in general and how they are used by specific social groups. It enables scholars to investigate multilingual interactions in a wide range of sociolinguistic factors, furthering the field of Sino-Philippine (socio)linguistics.
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The inverse frequency effect
Author(s): David TemperleyAvailable online: 09 October 2023More LessAbstractRare syntactic constructions show an especially strong tendency to be repeated, but some rare constructions exhibit this tendency much more strongly than others. The reasons for this variation are not well understood. This exploratory study examines five rare noun-phrase (NP) expansions in English: <the A> (the rich), <a Nprop Nprop> (a Bob Gates),
sing Nprop Nprop> (architect Julia Morgan), pl Nsing> (the jobs data), and sing A Nsing> (home electronic equipment). Repetition tendencies are very strong in the first and second of these and somewhat strong in the third; in the fourth and fifth they are much weaker, only slightly higher than those of common NP expansions such as sing> (the black dog). To explain this variation, we suggest that constructions may be associated with different types of discourse: constructions with high repetition tendencies tend to occur in persuasive rather than informative discourse.
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Pinpointing prescriptive impact
Author(s): Beth MaloryAvailable online: 26 September 2023More LessAbstractThis paper presents a single-author case study which demonstrates that the statistical modelling technique change point analysis (CPA) can provide compelling evidence of prescriptive impact at an idiolectal level. It has been hypothesized that Late Modern English review periodicals consistently pushed a prescriptive agenda, and that this impacted language use ( McIntosh, 1998 ; Percy, 2009 ). A lack of empirical research has, however, left these claims unsubstantiated, partly because evaluating prescriptivist endeavours has proven challenging. Using a purpose-built 3-million-token idiolectal corpus spanning 7 decades, this paper reports that it is possible to discern a striking change in usage. Use of CPA enables this change to be located precisely, and correlated to the author’s exposure to a prescriptive review of her work. In demonstrating how effectively CPA can provide a sophisticated correlation indicative of causality, this paper showcases the suitability of this technique to the study of prescriptivism.
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Comparing Corpora
Author(s): Adam Kilgarriff
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