International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Online First

Support verb constructions figure among the most frequently investigated topics in the literature on collocation. So far, most studies of this kind have focused on bipartite structures, consisting of a verbal collocate and a nominal base. Accordingly, the analysis of how support verbs are distributed has concentrated almost exclusively on the lexical control exerted by the base. In this article, we draw attention towards the influence exerted by the participation of verb and noun in more complex patterns of lexical co-occurrence. We contend that the distribution of the support verb collocate is contingent not only on the base noun but also on other elements of the lexical context. This highlights the need to enrich the theoretical framework of collocation analysis with the additional descriptive category of ‘second-order collocate’. The proposal is illustrated with two case studies using a large-scale web corpus of English.

This paper examines the use of the three non-periphrastic subjunctives in Spanish in embedded clauses under obligatory subjunctive predicates in the past tense in three Spanish varieties: Argentinean, Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. By means of random forest and logistic regression analyses, I demonstrate that a grammar where the two “past” subjunctives make up one group, such that the variation can be modeled on a binary opposition between (morphologically) past vs. (morphologically) present, achieves better prediction accuracy and goodness-of-fit parameters than a grammar with a three-way split. The results suggest that, at least in complement clauses of obligatory subjunctive predicates, there appear to be no semantic differences between the two past subjunctives but there are still relatively large differences in how the three subjunctive forms are used across the three Spanish varieties studied. 1

Covid-19, the greatest global health crisis for a century, brought a new immediacy and urgency to international bio-medical research. The pandemic generated intense competition to produce a vaccine and contain the virus, creating what the World Health Organization referred to as an ‘infodemic’ of published output. In this frantic atmosphere, researchers were keen to get their research noticed. In this paper, we explore whether this enthusiasm influenced the rhetorical presentation of research and encouraged scientists to “sell” their studies. Examining a corpus of the most highly cited SCI articles on the virus published in the first seven months of 2020, we explore authors’ use of hyperbolic and promotional language to boost aspects of their research. Our results show a significant increase in hype to stress certainty, contribution, novelty and potential, especially regarding research methods, outcomes and primacy. Our study sheds light on scientific persuasion at a time of intense social anxiety.