1,721,010 research outputs found
Reading Concordances. John Sinclair; London: Longman,
No full textProf. John Sinclair’s pioneering role in the field of ELT as editor-in-chief of the
Collins-Cobuild dictionaries and grammar is well known. Just as remarkable has
been his contribution to the development of modern language theory, particularly as
regards the relationship between grammar and lexis. He has successfully illustrated
how technological developments, principally the advent of electronic corpora and
the software to interrogate them, influence and refine perceptions of language and
how these clearer perceptions affect both linguistic theory and pedagogical practice.
The present volume also has a dual impetus: one pedagogical, the other theoretical.
On one level, it is a textbook which aims to introduce corpus work to ‘students,
researchers and workers in the language’, more specifically, to show them how
to ‘interrogate a corpus in order to retrieve evidence that is relevant to a linguistic
enquiry‘ and then to refine those queries further until a ‘neatly organised body of
evidence’ (p. ix) is available as a report on the findings. On the second, a large
number of theoretical points are made, and despite the disclaimer that ‘they are not
gathered and organised into a specific stance’ (p. ix), the reader is guided in Socratic
question-answer fashion to an appreciation of what, elsewhere, Sinclair has called 'lexical grammar'
Journal of Corpora & Discourse Studies
No full textThe Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies showcases research into language as a vehicle of communication which incorporates the use of corpus techniques. The Journal is highly interdisciplinary in nature, first, in combining discourse analysis with corpus linguistics and, second, in accommodating an ever-increasing number of other disciplines which employ the analysis of spoken or written texts beyond linguistics proper which use corpus techniques to help analyse the texts they employ, including political science, sociology, history, literary criticism, business studies, healthcare, and many more. We particularly welcome papers which address methodological issues concerning the use of corpora in these and other fields.
The journal is on-line open-access with the opportunity to store research data on the publisher’s server. The language of publication is English, but we welcome submissions on all other languages.
Published by Cardiff University Press.
Editor in chief, Alan Partington. Editors, Costas Gabrielatos and Amanda Potts. Reviews editor, Sylivia Jaworska. Technical editor, Jane Johnson.
The first issue is planned for July 2018
Aims, Tools and Practices of Corpus Linguistics
No full textThe discipline of Corpus Linguistics, in essence, entails the compilation of very large archives of
running texts for subsequent linguistic analysis. The final ends of Corpus Linguistics lie in the
scope of Artificial Intelligence, that is, teaching machines to comprehend and produce natural
language. A vital correlated aim is to improve translation techniques, both human and machine.
Intermediate ends include furthering our knowledge of how language is structured and how humans
use it to communicate meaning, to express evaluations and to influence the behaviour of their
interlocutors (i.e. persuasion)
Eric Friginal and Jack A. Hardy. 2014. Corpus-based Sociolinguistics. London: Routledge.
No full textA critical review of Eric Friginal and Jack A. Hardy. 2014. Corpus-based Sociolinguistics. London: Routledge
Semantic Prosody and Semantic Preference.
No full textIn this paper I wish to examine the two related concepts of semantic prosody and semantic preference. I will begin the section on each with a definition, attempt a review of relevant current positions and then describe a number of corpus-based experiments I conducted to throw light on the two phenomena. Finally, I will try to draw some conclusions about the relationship between them
Corpus-assisted Comparative Case Studies of Representations of the 'Arab world'
No full textIn this study I employ techniques from corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), along with notions from functional grammar, in a multi-comparative study of how the Arab world is represented in various written media. The first comparison is between the representations in two UK newspapers, the left-leaning Guardian and the right-leaning Telegraph. The second comparison is between these representations and those found in an Arabic English-language newspaper, the Daily News Egypt. In a further diachronic comparison, the objective is to see if there are any changes in the representations in the Western newspapers between 2010 and 2013, given the intervening events in the Middle East and North Africa. The study ends with a discussion of some of the issues frequently encountered in this kind of research
Modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies: methodologies for tracking language change over recent time
Full text linkThis paper presents a description of the tools and methodologies employed in the novel discipline of
modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies. The main instruments are a set of three ‘sister’ corpora of
parallel structure and content from different moments of contemporary time, namely 1993, 2005 and 2010, along
with a number of corpus interrogation tools. The methodologies are the particular techniques devised by the SiBol
research team1 for employing these interrogation tools to shed light on the various research questions treated in the
paper. The first part of the paper outlines ways in which these tools and techniques can be used to track changes in
the grammar, lexis and discourse practices of UK broadsheet or ‘quality’ newspapers. Given the important role of
newspapers, some of these changes may well be indicative of general changes in UK written English. The second
part, instead, describes a number of studies conducted by the research group into how the reporting of various social and cultural themes and issues, ranging from what is seen as a moral issue, to the rhetoric of appeals to science,
to how antisemitism is debated, has developed over the time period in question. The concluding section discusses
the relationship between the methodologies employed in modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies and
wider scientific research methodology.
1 SiBol is a portmanteau of Siena and Bologna, the two universities involved in initiating the project. http://www3.lingue.unibo.it/clb
Corpus Analysis of Political Language
No full textTypes of Corpus-Assisted Studies Into the Language of Politics. Potential Sources of Data. Types of Research Objectives. The Added Value of Using Corpor
Using corpora in discourse analysis.
No full textIn the linguistics literature, ‘discourse’ is often defined in two, not mutually exclusive, ways, structurally, for instance, ‘language above the sentence or above the clause’ (Stubbs, 1983: 1) and functionally, for example, ‘language that is doing some job in some context’ (Halliday, 1985: 10). We shall privilege the functional viewpoint here, though analysing the structures of discourses are important in shedding light on the jobs being done. It has to be stressed that discourse is not a special form of language, but a perspective upon it, language described not only as a set of interacting units and systems, but also precisely that implied by Halliday, as an instrument put to work, and the work which it does is the attempt by one participant or set of participants to influence the ideas, opinions and behaviour of other participants.
Most forms of traditional non corpus-assisted discourse analysis have practised the close-reading (that is, ‘qualitative analysis’) of single texts or a small number of texts in the attempt to highlight both textual structures and also how meanings are conveyed. Some types, such as much work in critical discourse analysis (CDA), use few concepts from linguistics proper, tending to rely on the analyst’s knowledge and experience (and prejudices) of similar texts, in a manner reminiscent of literary analysis (though with a politically-driven purpose). Other traditional discourse analysis is more linguistically-grounded. Thompson (1996a: 108-112), for instance, demonstrates the power of functional grammar, in particular transitivity analysis, in displaying how meanings, including what we might call non-obvious meanings, are communicated.
In what follows we will attempt to outline ways in which corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) can help build upon traditional qualitative linguistic analysis, what ‘added value’ it can bring. We contend that it can contribute in two ways, firstly by combining close reading with statistical ‘overview’ analysis, very generally of a large number of tokens of the discourse type under scrutiny and secondly by integrating into the analysis of discourses a number of insights into how discourses function which have developed within the field of corpus linguistics
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