Corpora Constructions New Englishes

This book takes an integrated approach to the fields of Corpus Linguistics, Construction Grammar, and World Englishes through a thorough constructional and corpus-based examination of the patterning of the versatile high-frequency verb make in British English and New Englishes. It contributes to Construction Grammar theory by adopting a verb-based, rather than construction-based, perspective on argument structure. This allows the probing of the interface between verb-independent generalizations and item-specificity from an underexplored angle that offers new insights into the shape of the constructicon. From a variationist perspective, it seeks to (i) identify features of New Englishes and gauge whether these features exhibit traces of conventionalization, and (ii) assess whether the degree of institutionalization of the New Englishes correlates with linguistic behavior, both from a social and cognitive perspective, thereby contributing to the budding effort to integrate the cognitive and social dimensions into the modeling of linguistic variation in World Englishes.

This book discusses ten grammatical items, with main focus on prepositions and plural nouns, to illustrate the structure of Japanese English or the English spoken by 32 Japanese nationals who are the L2 users of English. Adopting an inductive, theory-neutral, analysis of empirical data collected from recordings of presentational talks, the author demonstrates how standard and nonstandard grammatical forms are distributed, and categorizes these based largely on functional factors. The book describes grammatical forms as a fundamental aspect of linguistic study and adopts a corpus-driven approach to qualify structural features characterizing usage data. This formalization of language usage patterns also facilitates the development of ‘locally’ relevant norms and thus presents alternatives to the normative varieties traditionally adopted. It examines the effects of multicompetence and unpacks the grammar of Japanese English. The book is of interest to researchers, educators, and students concerned with issues related to World Englishes, English as a lingua franca, English language teaching, and multilingualism, this text is vital to studies in global English language use.

Using Corpora to Explore Linguistic Variation illustrates the ways in which linguistic variation can be explored through corpus-based investigation. Two major kinds of research questions are considered: variation in the use of a particular linguistic feature, and variation across dialects or registers. Part 1: “Exploring variation in the use of linguistic features” focuses on the study of specific words, expressions, or grammatical constructions, to study variation in the use of a particular linguistic feature. Part 2: “Exploring dialect and register variation” describes salient characteristics of dialects or registers and the patterns of variation across varieties. Part 3: “Exploring Historical Variation” applies these same two major perspectives to historical variation. One recurring theme is the extent to which linguistic variation depends on register differences, reflecting the importance of register as a key methodological and thematic concern in current corpus linguistic research.

A collection of cross-varietal studies on a spectrum of grammatical features in English varieties spoken all over the world. It explores the structural unity and diversity of New Englishes and thus investigates central aspects of dialect evolution and language change.

Despite its exceptional frequency and versatility, GET has never been a focus of research in its entire variability, which goes from lexical to grammatical uses, nor in large amounts of data from different varieties of English. The present corpus-based study deals with over 11,600 tokens of GET in written and spoken language from three varieties of English and thus provides new insights for variationist linguistics. Firstly, it offers a comprehensive semasiological-syntactic analysis of GET, i.e. an analysis of all its meanings and all the constructions into which it enters, suggesting ten categories as being necessary for its complete description. Secondly, it contributes to the understanding of factors that are at work in variation in World Englishes and lead to quantitative differences between regional standard varieties. Thus, the present study demonstrates that the use of GET in the New Englishes analysed is less affected by substrate effects than by the effects of Second Language Acquisition and the varying influence of British and American English norms. Moreover, it can be shown that the New Englishes display more grammatical uses of GET than does British English.

This collection of articles form a tribute to Jan Svartvik and his pioneering work in the field. Covers corpus studies, problematic grammar, institution-based and observation-based grammars and the design and development of spoken and written text corpora in different varieties of English.

Corpus linguistics on the move: Exploring and understanding English through corpora comprises fourteen contributions covering key issues in English corpus linguistics, including corpus compilation and annotation, original perspectives from specialized corpora, and insightful discussions of various grammatical and pragmatic features.

Corpus linguistics has become one of the most widely used methodologies across the different linguistic subdisciplines; especially the study of world-wide varieties of English uses corpus-based investigations as one of the chief methodologies. This volume comprises descriptions of the many new corpus initiatives both within and outside Africa that aim to compile various corpora of African Englishes. Moreover, it contains cutting-edge corpus-based research on African Englishes and the use of corpora in pedagogic contexts within African institutions. This volume thus serves both as a practical introduction to corpus compilation (Part I of the book), corpus-based research (Part II) and the application of corpora in language teaching (Part III), and is intended both for those researchers not yet familiar with corpus linguistics and as a reference work for all international researchers investigating the linguistic properties of African Englishes.