1,720,989 research outputs found
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
The Open ANC (OANC)
No full textThe American National Corpus (ANC) project is creating a massive electronic collection of American English, including texts of all genres and transcripts of spoken data produced from 1990 onward. The ANC will provide the most comprehensive picture of American English ever created, and will serve as a resource for education, linguistic and lexicographic research, and technology development. This open portion of the American National Corpus (OANC) contains approximately 15 millions words from the full corpus.Le projet American National Corpus (ANC) est en train de rassembler une collection volumineuse sur l'anglais américain qui comprend des textes de tous genres et des transcriptions de paroles à partir de 1990. L'ANC fournira l'image la plus complète de l'anglais américain construite à ce jour, servant de ressource pour l'enseignement, la recherche linguistique et lexicographique, ainsi que les technologies de la langue. Ce fragment en libre accès de l'American National Corpus (OANC) contient environ 15 millions de mots du corpus d'origine
Corpora and written academic English
Full text linkThe impact of corpora in the study of written academic English over the past twenty years has been enormous, transforming how we understand, study, and teach this key area of language use. Corpora provide language data which represent a speaker's experience of language in a particular domain and so therefore offer evidence of typical patterning of academic texts. It is a method which focuses on community practices and the ways members of particular disciplines understand and talk about the world. Bringing an empirical dimension to the study of academic writing allows us not only to support intuitions, strengthen interpretations, and generally to talk about academic genres with greater confidence, but it contrasts markedly with impressionistic methods of text analysis which tend to produce partial and prescriptive findings, and with observation methods such as keystroke recording, which seek to document what writers do when they write. It also differs from methods which employ elicitation methods such as questionnaires and interviews, or introspection methods like think-aloud protocols to understand the perspectives of writers or readers on how they use texts. Perhaps most significantly, corpus approaches to academic writing provide insights into disciplinary practices which help explain the mechanisms by which knowledge is socially constructed through language. Together, this research explicitly contradicts the view that corpus linguistics takes an impoverished, de contextualized view of texts and replaces it with a detailed picture of how students and academics write in different genres and disciplines. In this chapter I discuss some of the key studies and ideas which contribute to our understanding of academic writing in English. Section 1 offers an overview of published studies, while Section 2 describes a study which illustrates how corpus research can inform our understanding of academic writing. Research into academic writing in English This section discusses previous research,identifies a number of key studies, and provides an overview of the research methodologies that have been employed
Grammatical Variation
No full text© Cambridge University Press 2015. In this chapter, we use a fairly liberal definition of “grammatical variation,” including both genuinely variationist research – where grammatical variants are modeled as competing against each other – and text-linguistic research that explores variable text frequencies of particular grammatical constructions in corpora. Corpus-based research on grammatical variation is a wide research area, so the review we are offering is somewhat selective. By and large, research along these lines can be categorized into five groups: Variationist sociolinguistics. Researchers in this tradition are typically interested in how linguistic variation is conditioned by language-internal and language-external factors. Although early studies largely relied on the researcher's personal notes taken while listening to the audio recordings, state-of-the-art work is usually based on corpora consisting of fully transcribed sociolinguistic interviews (see Tagliamonte 2007). The bulk of this literature is concerned with phonological variation; however, grammatical variation has been subject to study since at least the 1980s (Torres Cacoullos and Walker 2009a; MacKenzie 2013; Poplack and Dion 2009; Poplack and Tagliamonte 1996; Scherre and Naro 1991; Tagliamonte and Temple 2005; Travis 2007; Weiner and Labov 1983). Diachronic linguistics. In this department we find work exploring grammatical variation with regard to resultant grammatical change - short-term or long-term, completed or in progress - on the basis of historical corpora (Biber and Gray 2011; Gries and Hilpert 2010; Hinrichs and Szmrecsanyi 2007; Hundt 2004; Nevalainen 1996; Raumolin-Brunberg 2005; Taylor 2008; Wolk et al. 2013). Register/genre/text type analysis. Work in this tradition is often focused on lexis, but many studies include features that come within the remit of grammatical variation (e.g. Biber 1988; Biber and Finegan 1989; Hundt and Mair 1999). Some analysts are exclusively concerned with grammatical variation (see Grafmiller 2014; and the papers in Dorgeloh and Wanner 2010). The Longman Grammar (Biber et al. 1999) backs up its comprehensive grammatical description of English with information about text type variation.status: Publishe
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