Abstract
English General Nouns, by Michaela Mahlberg, presents a corpus-driven theoretical approach to examining forms of nouns for meaning in context. The study is based on an analysis of twenty forms of general nouns, such as time, thing and people, which are identified as high-frequency nouns in the British section of the Bank of English. A corpus-driven approach is employed that allows linguistic descriptions to be defined by evidence from the data. Concordance lines are viewed through the lens of a corpus theoretical framework which prioritises lexis in the analysis of text cohesion. The analysis reveals descriptions of subtypes and functional categories for each noun type through quantitative and qualitative methodologies. At a time when sub-disciplines of linguistics are engaging in metareflections regarding concerns about methodology, epistemology and ethics (Ortega, 2005), Mahlberg’s book proves that studies in corpus linguistics have already understood the need for new approaches to data analysis. The mixed-method approach to corpus linguistics in the book appears to be a forerunner by emphasising the combination of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies.
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