Corpora And Lexis

This collection of research articles provides state-of-the-art research in corpus linguistics on lexis and lexico-grammar, focussing on major corpus resources (both corpora and software tools), their theoretical implications and the pedagogical applications of corpus findings.

Cognitive Linguistics, the branch of linguistics that tries to "make one's account of human language accord with what is generally known about the mind and the brain," has become one of the most flourishing fields of contemporary linguistics. The chapters address many classic topics of Cognitive Linguistics. These topics include studies on the semantics of specific words (including polysemy and synonymy) as well as semantic characteristics of particular syntactic patterns / constructions (including constructional synonymy and the schematicity of constructions), the analysis of causatives, transitivity, and image-schematic aspects of posture verbs. The key characteristic of this volume is that all papers adopt the methodological perspective of Corpus Linguistics, the rapidly evolving branch of linguistics based on the computerized analysis of language used in authentic settings. Thus, the contributions do not only all provide various new insights in their respective fields, they also introduce new data as well as new corpus-based and quantitative methods of analysis. On the basis of their findings, the authors discuss both theoretical implications going well beyond the singular topics of the studies and show how the discipline of Cognitive Linguistics can benefit from the rigorous analysis of naturally-occurring language. The languages which are investigated are English, German, Dutch, and Russian, and the data come from a variety of different corpora. As such, the present volume will be of interest to a wide range of scholars with many different foci and interests and should pave the way for further integration of usage-based techniques of analysis within this exciting paradigm.

This volume takes stock of current research in contrastive lexical studies. It reflects the growing interest in corpus-based approaches to the study of lexis, in particular the use of multilingual corpora, shared by researchers working in widely differing fields - contrastive linguistics, lexicology, lexicography, terminology, computational linguistics and machine translation. The articles in the volume, which cover a wide diversity of languages, are divided into four main sections: the exploration of cross-linguistic equivalence, contrastive lexical semantics, corpus-based multilingual lexicography, and translation and parallel concordancing. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to recent trends in contrastive lexical studies written by the editors of the volume, Bengt Altenberg and Sylviane Granger.

A hallmark of corpus linguistics is the study of patterns of language use. The studies presented in this volume all use corpora to investigate patterns of lexis from various perspectives. The first section, “Sequence and Order”, presents theoretical and practical aspects of the linguist’s task of uncovering the principles that determine such patterns. The next section, “Competing Constructions”, discusses the relationship between lexical patterns with similar meanings in the light of diachronic, regional and register variation. New developments in terms of lexicogrammatical meaning and patterning are dealt with in the section “Emerging Patterns”. The final section, “Correlating patterns and meaning”, discusses ways in which meaning can be studied in corpus data despite the lack of narrowly defined search terms. Though situated at different points on a continuum between lexical and grammatical emphasis, the studies all confirm the inseparability of lexis and grammar.

Computers offer new perspectives in the study of language, allowing us to see phenomena that previously remained obscure because of the limitations of our vantage points. It is not uncommon for computers to be likened to the telescope, or microscope, in this respect. In this pioneering computer-assisted study of translation, Dorothy Kenny suggests another image, that of the kaleidoscope: playful changes of perspective using corpus-processing software allow textual patterns to come into focus and then recede again as others take their place. And against the background of repeated patterns in a corpus, creative uses of language gain a particular prominence. In Lexis and Creativity in Translation, Kenny monitors the translation of creative source-text word forms and collocations uncovered in a specially constructed German-English parallel corpus of literary texts. Using an abundance of examples, she reveals evidence of both normalization and ingenious creativity in translation. Her discussion of lexical creativity draws on insights from traditional morphology, structural semantics and, most notably, neo-Firthian corpus linguistics, suggesting that rumours of the demise of linguistics in translation studies are greatly exaggerated. Lexis and Creativity in Translation is essential reading for anyone interested in corpus linguistics and its impact so far on translation studies. The book also offers theoretical and practical guidance for researchers who wish to conduct their own corpus-based investigations of translation. No previous knowledge of German, corpus linguistics or computing is assumed.

With fresh state-of-the-art perspectives on language patterning, 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.

This book bridges the current quantitative and qualitative text analyses, using grammar as a crucial source of investigation. Taking data from Czech, an inflected language, in which the most optimal conditions to respond to this research question are met, the book expands the understanding of language and text in ways that have not been executed before. For predominantly English-based quantitative research, this volume fills a crucial gap by examining the relationship between inflection and other phenomena (including discourse, translation and literature). For the current qualitative research, the volume provides large empirical data to confirm some of its claims, but more importantly, it demonstrates the important role of detailed grammatical concepts that have not been considered before. Besides addressing fundamental questions about text analysis methods, the volume presents a diverse array of Czech data that are unique in their own right and worthy of dissemination to the general audience. Taming the Corpus: From Inflection and Lexis to Interpretation is divided into three sections. Section 1 deals with phonotactics, poetic structure, morphological complexity used to differentiate literary style, and native speakers’ sense of grammaticality – issues pertinent to linguistic typology, cognition and language, and literary studies. Section 2 focuses on inter-language relations, especially the theory of translation. Section 3 demonstrates how quantitative analysis of texts can contribute to our understanding of society and connects the volume to legal language, construction of gender and discourse position and implicit ideology.

This alphabetic guide provides definitions and discussion of key terms used in corpus linguistics. Corpus data is being used in a growing number of English and Linguistics departments which have no record of past research with corpus data. This is the first comprehensive glossary of the many specialist terms in corpus linguistics and will be useful for corpus linguists and non corpus linguists alike. Clearly written, by a team of experienced academics in the field, the glossary provides full coverage of both traditional and contemporary terminology.