[, Studies in Corpus Linguistics]

This book explores the affordances of disciplinary corpora for the teaching and learning of the language of dentistry, within the field of English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP). We extract disciplinary register features and vocabulary from three key genres of the dentistry discipline (published experimental research articles, case reports, and novice/professional research reports within the Dental Public Health domain), before integrating these features into ESAP pedagogy in the form of corpus-based ESAP materials that promote student-led direct engagement with disciplinary corpora – an approach known as 'data-driven learning'. This book is a timely and relevant addition to the field of corpus linguistics and ESAP, and is especially targeted at ESAP professionals who are required to teach disciplinary discourses but who may struggle to know what to teach as non-experts of the target discipline.

Published in 2005, Michael Hoey’s Lexical Priming – A new theory of words and language introduced a completely new theory of language based on how words are used in the real world. In the ten years that have passed, the theory has since gained traction in the field of corpus-linguistics. This volume brings together some of the most important contributions to the theory, in areas such as language teaching and learning, discourse analysis, stylistics as well as the design of language learning software. Crucially, this book introduces aspects of the language that have so far been given less focus in lexical priming, such as spoken language, figurative language, forced primings, priming as predictor of genre, and historical primings. The volume also focuses on applying the lexical priming theory to languages other than English including Mandarin Chinese and Finnish.

People have a natural propensity to understand language text as a succession of smallish chunks, whether they are reading, writing, speaking or listening. Linguists have found that this propensity can shed light on the nature and structure of language, and there are many studies which attempt to harness the potential of natural chunking.This book explores the role of chunking in the description of discourse, especially spoken discourse. It appears that chunking offers a sound but flexible platform on which can be built a descriptive model which is more open and comprehensive than more familiar approaches to structural description. The model remains linear, in that it avoids hierarchies, and it concentrates on the combinatorial patterns of text.

The linear approach turns out to have many advantages, bringing together under one descriptive method a wide variety of different styles of speech and writing. It is complementary to established grammars, but it raises pertinent questions about many of their assumptions.

This book brings together corpus linguistics and pragmatics by extending the emerging corpus analytic framework of local grammar to speech act research, aiming to enrich the toolkit of corpus-based speech act studies. It outlines four directions in which local grammar can be useful for investigating speech acts, namely, a local grammar approach to annotating speech acts, developing local grammars of speech acts, identifying speech act constructions via the lens of local grammars, and applying local grammars into contrastive speech act studies. These directions are illustrated with studies on apology in contemporary spoken British English, which shows that local grammar can be an innovative approach to advance speech act studies and that such research has significant implications and applications. The book should be of interest to researchers and students in corpus linguistics, pragmatics, construction grammar, and L2 speech act research and teaching.

This book brings together a variety of approaches to English corpus linguistics and shows how corpus methodologies can contribute to the linking of diachronic and synchronic studies. The articles in this volume investigate historical changes in the English language as well as specific aspects of Middle and Modern English and, moreover, of English dialects. The contributions also discuss the development of English corpus linguistics generally and its potential in the future. Special focus is given to the continuity between Middle and Modern English – much in line with the linking in previous studies of Middle English and Old English under the generic term “medievalism”. This volume highlights the continual development of English from the medieval to modern period.

Multilingual corpora have been used in cross-linguistic research for 30 years. New technologies have dramatically changed the processes of compilation and exploitation of tailor-made corpora for linguistic research. The studies included in this volume showcase current cross-linguistic research utilising parallel, comparable, and novel types of corpora beyond this traditional two-fold distinction. The first part of the volume draws on specialised comparable corpora of newspaper opinion articles, social media texts, and economic discourse. Parallel corpora are the focus of the second part, and are used to shed light on diverse areas such as translation history, bilingual phraseology extraction, and lexico-grammatical contrastive analysis. Recently, the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has implied a dramatic shift in corpus-based cross-linguistic research. This book offers valuable insights for scholars in contrastive linguistics and translation studies, delineating potential uses of parallel and comparable corpora in Machine Translation, automated translation quality assessment, post-editing, and other AI-enhanced applications.

Focusing on the multi-faceted topic of Eurolects, this volume brings together knowledge and methodologies from various disciplines, including sociolinguistics, legal linguistics, corpus linguistics, and translation studies. The legislative varieties of eleven EU official and working languages (Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latvian, Maltese, Polish, Spanish) are analyzed using corpus methodologies in order to investigate the variational dynamics and translation-induced patterns of the different languages. The underlying assumption is that, within the sociolinguistic continua of the EU languages, it is possible to single out specific legislative varieties (Eurolects) that originate at a supra-national level. This research hypothesis is strongly supported by the empirical findings derived from detailed corpus analyses of each language. This work represents the first systematic and comprehensive linguistic research conducted on a wide range of EU languages using the same protocol and applying corpus methodologies to the extensive Eurolect Observatory Multilingual Corpus.

This book describes an approach to lexis and grammar based on the concept of phraseology and of language patterning arising from work on large corpora. The notion of 'pattern' as a systematic way of dealing with the interface between lexis and grammar was used in Collins Cobuild English Dictionary (1995) and in the two books in the Collins Cobuild Grammar Patterns series (1996; 1998). This volume describes the research that led to these publications, and explores the theoretical and practical implications of the research. The first chapter sets the work in the context of work on phraseology. The next two chapters give several examples of patterns and how they are identified. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss and exemplify the association of pattern and meaning. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 relate the concept of pattern to traditional approaches to grammar and to discourse. Chapter 9 summarizes the book and adds to the theoretical discussion, as well as indicating the applications of this approach to language teaching. The volume is intended to contribute to the current debate concerning how corpora challenge existing linguistic theories, and as such will be of interest to researchers in the fields of grammar, lexis, discourse and corpus linguistics. It is written in an accessible style, however, and will be equally suitable for students taking courses in those areas.

This work is designed, firstly, to both provoke theoretical discussion and serve as a practical guide for researchers and students in the field of corpus linguistics and, secondly, to offer a wide-ranging introduction to corpus techniques for practitioners of discourse studies. It delves into a wide variety of language topics and areas including metaphor, irony, evaluation, (im)politeness, stylistics, language change and sociopolitical issues. Each chapter begins with an outline of an area, followed by case studies which attempt both to shed light on particular themes in this area and to demonstrate the methodologies which might be fruitfully employed to investigate them. The chapters conclude with suggestions on activities which the readers may wish to undertake themselves. An Appendix contains a list of currently available resources for corpus research which were used or mentioned in the book.

Perspectives on Corpus Linguistics is a collection of interviews with fourteen well-known researchers in the field of linguistics. Each interview consists of a set of ten questions: the first seven are common to all contributors while the last three are connected to the research experience of each guest. In the general questions, the invited scholars explore (sometimes controversial) topics such as the concept of representativeness, the role of intuition and the status of Corpus Linguistics. In the specific questions, they provide a thorough discussion of materials and methods in corpus research as well as theoretical and applied perspectives on the use of corpora in language studies. Whether experts or novices, the volume should be of interest to all those who want to learn about corpus linguistics and carry out research in this fascinating and growing area.