Corpus Linguistics 25 Years On

This volume offers a state-of-the-art picture of work undertaken in the field of computer-aided corpus linguistics. While the focus is on English, central insights can be generalised to other languages, as well. As a work intended to mark the Silver Jubilee of ICAME, the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English, the book combines surveys of the discipline by some of its major pioneers, including founders of ICAME itself, with cutting-edge work by younger scholars. It is divided into three sections: “Overviewing years of corpus linguistic studies”, “Descriptive studies in English syntax and semantics”, and “Second Language Acquisition, parallel corpora and specialist corpora”. The book bears witness to the impressive advances that have characterised the development of corpus linguistics over the past few decades – from terminological issues to practical applications, from theoretical and descriptive research to applied approaches, from monolingual to multilingual and specialist corpora, from corpus design to corpus exploitation tools.

Approximately a quarter of a century ago, the Multi-Dimensional (MD) approach—one of the most powerful (and controversial) methods in Corpus Linguistics—saw its first book-length treatment. In its eleven chapters, this volume presents all new contributions covering a wide range of written and spoken registers, such as movies, music, magazine texts, student writing, social media, letters to the editor, and reports, in different languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese) and contexts (engineering, journalism, the classroom, the entertainment industry, the Internet, etc.). The book also includes a personal account of the development of the method by its creator, Doug Biber, an introduction to MD statistics, as well as an application of MD analysis to corpus design. The book should be essential reading to anyone with an interest in how texts, genres, and registers are used in society, what their lexis and grammar look like, and how they are interrelated.

The papers published in this volume were originally presented at the Third North American Symposium on Corpus Linguistics and Language Teaching held on 23-25 March 2001 at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. Each paper analyses some aspect of language use or structure in one or more of the many linguistic corpora now available. The number of different corpora investigated in the book is a real testament to the progress that has been made in recent years in developing new corpora, particularly spoken corpora, as over half of the papers deal either wholly or partially with the analysis of spoken data. This book will be of particular interest to undergraduate and graduate students and scholars interested in corpus, socio and applied linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, and language teaching.

First-Year Writing describes significant language patterns in college writing today, how they are different from expert academic writing, and how to inform teaching and assessment with corpus-based linguistic and rhetorical genre analysis.

An investigation into the way people use language in speech and writing, this volume introduces the corpus-based approach, which is based on analysis of large databases of real language examples stored on computer.

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.

This work aims to provide insights into the way a corpus can be used, the type of findings that can be obtained, the possible applications of these findings as well as the theoretical changes that corpus work can bring into linguistics and language engineering. Topics include the rise of corpus linguistics, delexicalization, semantic prosodies and different corpora for different purposes.