[, Studies in Corpus Linguistics]

This book describes new methodological and technological approaches to corpus building and presents recent research based on the Norwegian Newspaper Corpus. This is a large monitor corpus of contemporary Norwegian language, compiled through daily harvesting of web newspapers. The book gives an overview of the corpus and its system architecture, and presents tools used for tasks such as text harvesting, annotation, topic classification and extraction and frequency profiling of new words and phrases. Among the innovative technologies is Corpuscle, a corpus query engine and management system which is flexible enough to handle very large corpora in an efficient way. The individual research contributions based on the corpus explore different aspects of Norwegian, including the occurrence of anglicisms, neologisms and terminology, and the use of metonymy and metaphor in newspaper language. The book also describes an innovative method of applying correspondence analysis and implicational analysis to investigate interdependencies between morphosyntactic variants.

This volume showcases studies that recognize and provide evidence for the inseparability of lexis and grammar. The contributors explore in what ways these two areas, often treated separately in linguistic theory and description, form an organic whole. The papers in Section I (Setting the Scene) introduce some of the key methodological approaches and theoretical positions at the lexis-grammar interface, while Section II (Considering the Particulars) contains papers that report on case studies and show concrete applications of the central methods and theories. Exploring the Lexis-Grammar Interface is a stimulating collection of papers for anyone who wishes to learn more about and get fresh state-of-the-art perspectives on language patterning.

This book is an attempt to revisit the main specifically corpus-linguistic statistics/measures the field has been relying on for decades: frequency, dispersion, association, and keyness. The book first discusses the purpose of these measures and how they have been measured. Then, the book makes three main proposals: First, that many measures of dispersion, association, and keyness are too confounded with frequency and how to 'take frequency out of them' to obtain conceptually cleaner and more interpretable measures. Second, that many existing measures can be replaced by the simple information-theoretic measure of the Kullback-Leibler divergence and that it, too, can have frequency 'removed' from it. Third, that corpus linguistics should abandon the tradition of trying to describe its findings with a single number and adopt a tupleization approach instead, where we use several separate dimensions of information for description and interpretation. The book is written in an informal, hands-on style and comes with its own R package featuring functions, example data, and several thousand lines of code exemplifying all applications.

This book introduces a methodology and research tool (DART) that make it possible to carry out advanced corpus pragmatics research using dialogue corpora enriched with pragmatics-relevant annotations. It first explores the general use of spoken corpora for pragmatics research, as well as issues revolving around their representation and annotation, and then goes on to describe the resources required for such an annotation process. Based on data from three different corpora, ranging from highly constrained, task-oriented, ones (SPAADIA Trainline & Trains 93) to unconstrained dialogues (Switchboard), it next presents an in-depth discussion and illustration of the potential contributions of syntax, semantics, and semantico-pragmatics towards pragmatic force. This is followed by a description of the largely automatic annotation process itself, and finally an analysis of how a set of more than 110 potential speech acts defined in DART contributes towards establishing the specific communicative characteristics of the three corpora.

This book examines delexical verb + noun collocations such as make a decision, give rise to and take care of in Swedish and Chinese learner English. Using a methodological framework that combines learner corpus research with a contrastive perspective, the study is one of the very few in the field to incorporate corpora of the learner’s L1 to investigate the effects of L1 influence. The book provides a highly detailed and multi-faceted analysis of delexical verb + noun collocations in terms of frequency of occurrence, lexical preferences and morphosyntactic patterns. Quantitative and qualitative results on overuse, underuse and errors are presented with linguistically and pedagogically relevant interpretations that include cultural and discourse aspects. More importantly, the book throws light on how L2 learners may alternate between the open-choice principle and the idiom principle as well as the extent and nature of L1 influence on their collocational use.

The present volume is intended as a reference book on Wikipedia corpus studies, from corpus construction to exploration and analysis. Wikipedia is a complex object, difficult to manipulate for linguists and corpus researchers. In addition to the encyclopedic articles consulted by millions of users, it contains vast spaces of written discussions, aka talk pages, where Wikipedia authors negotiate the collaborative editing of articles, make evaluations, or discuss related topics. The proposed volume covers Wikipedia articles, their revision histories, and discussions, with a focus on discussions, which have not been studied extensively so far and have also been neglected in previous corpus building efforts. Wikipedia discussions are instances of computer-mediated communication (CMC), thus constituting a completely different, interaction-oriented linguistic genre. Sophisticated tools and methods of linguistic annotation and corpus exploration are needed to exploit the huge and valuable corpus resources that can be constructed from the Wikipedia discussions. The present volume aims at encouraging and facilitating Wikipedia corpus studies, providing standards, recommendations, and innovative methods to build and explore Wikipedia corpora, and presenting corpus studies that make the most of the peculiarities of Wikipedia.

This is corpus linguistics with a text linguistic focus. The volume concerns lexical inequality, the fact that some words and phrases share the quality of being key – and thereby reflect or promote important themes – in some textual contexts, while others do not. The patterning of words which differ in their centrality to text meaning is of increasing interest to corpus linguistics. At the same time software resources are yielding increasingly more detailed ways of identifying and studying the linkages between key words and phrases in text databases. This volume brings together work from some of the leading researchers in this field. It presents thirteen studies organized in three sections, the first containing a series of studies exploring the nature of keyness itself, then a set of five studies looking at keyness in specific discourse contexts, and then three studies with an educational focus.

Language Acquisition in CLIL and Non-CLIL Settings builds a bridge between Second Language Acquisition and Learner Corpus Research (LCR) methodologies to take the evaluation of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) to a new level. The study innovates in two main ways. First, it is based on a highly diversified L2 database which includes learner corpus data as well as experimental data from the same learners. These linguistic components of the database are complemented with extensive information on learner variables, including cognitive and affective factors, which are rarely studied in LCR. Second, the study relies on multifactorial statistical analyses to assess the effectiveness of CLIL itself as well as the impact of the selectivity inherent in the CLIL system, which has frequently been ignored. The linguistic focus of the study is the English passive, which is investigated in CLIL and non-CLIL teaching materials, and subsequently related to learner output.

The Language of Outsourced Call Centers is the first book to explore a large-scale corpus representing the typical kinds of interactions and communicative tasks in outsourced call centers located in the Philippines and serving American customers. The specific goals of this book are to conduct a corpus-based register comparison between outsourced call center interactions, face-to-face American conversations, and spontaneous telephone exchanges; and to study the dynamics of cross-cultural communication between Filipino call center agents and American callers, as well as other demographic groups of participants in outsourced call center transactions, e.g., gender of speakers, agents’ experience and performance, and types of transactional tasks. The research design relies on a number of analytical approaches, including corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, and combines quantitative and qualitative examination of linguistic data in the investigation of the frequency distribution and functional characteristics of a range of lexico/syntactic features of outsourced call center discourse.

While native corpora and corpus linguistic tools and methods have been used and applied for quite some time in the development of learning and teaching materials, learner corpora are only just beginning to impact the field of language teaching, testing and assessment. This volume helps to close this still existing gap and highlights the great potential of learner corpus research for language pedagogy by presenting a selection of 11 original studies on learner corpora, conducted by established experts as well as by excellent young researchers. The papers included in the volume present new corpora and methods; studies on written as well as spoken learner corpora and on using data-driven learning scenarios in the classroom.

All papers include sections on practical and concrete language-pedagogical applications. This volume will be of significant interest to researchers working in corpus linguistics, learner corpus research, second language acquisition and English for Academic and Specific Purposes, as well to language teachers and materials developers.