[, Studies in Corpus Linguistics]

This volume comprises a collection of contrastive studies on language and time. Languages represented include Czech, French, German, Mandarin, Norwegian and Swedish, all of which are contrasted with English. While the amount of published research on temporal relations in general is considerable, less work has been carried out on comparing how we talk about time in various languages and how languages change over time. Several methodological challenges are addressed and solutions proposed, such as how to deal with poor quality historical data and how to identify n-grams in typologically different languages for purposes of comparison. The results of the various studies show how multilingual corpora can increase our knowledge of language-specific features as well as linguistic, typological and cultural differences and similarities across languages.

University students must cope with a bewildering array of registers, not only to learn academic content, but also to understand course expectations and requirements. While many previous studies have investigated academic writing, we know comparatively little about academic speech; and no linguistic study to date has investigated the range of academic and advising/management registers that students encounter. This book is a first step towards filling this gap. Based on analysis of the T2K-SWAL Corpus, the book describes university registers from several different perspectives, including: vocabulary patterns; the use of lexico-grammatical and syntactic features; the expression of stance; the use of extended collocations ('lexical bundles'); and a Multi-Dimensional analysis of the overall patterns of register variation. All linguistic patterns are interpreted in functional terms, resulting in an overall characterization of the typical kinds of language that students encounter in university registers: academic and non-academic; spoken and written.

This book provides a comprehensive description of the situational and linguistic characteristics of undergraduate student writing, considering both assignment type and discipline. Drawing on a corpus of more than 900 undergraduate student assignments from four disciplinary groups (Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Life Sciences), the book combines corpus-based analyses of linguistic features with analyses of communicative purposes and text characteristics. Variation in University Writing takes a new approach to register variation by grouping assignments by their communicative purpose (to argue, to explain, to compare, to describe, to narrate a personal event, to give a procedural recount, to give personal advice, and to propose), rather than register categories. A multidimensional analysis provides a detailed description of the linguistic patterns of undergraduate writing. The findings presented in this book will be of interest to teachers of writing, instructors of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), and researchers of university writing.