British National Corpus Research Articles

The Function and Structure of Nominative Participial Constructions in Modern English

The following paper examines the syntactic construction and functional variety of nominative participial constructions in Contemporary English, focusing on the syntactic economy provided by nominative participial constructions and the contribution to discourse clarity. Based on examples from the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English, this chapter discusses how these sorts of structure embed delicate actions or states into sentences without elaborate clause structures. This chapter will explore how nominative participial constructions serve these discourse functions through the use of examples from academic, journalistic, and literary registers-foregrounding information, summarizing preceding actions, and emphatic purposes. The study also provides comparative insights into nominative participial constructions in relation to other forms of non-finite clauses, such as gerunds, which uniquely allow for condensation with a clearly identifiable subject even in highly reduced syntactic environments. In all, these findings contribute to a view that nominative participial constructions in English represent an instance of embodiment of the functional-syntactic interface: conciseness vs. richness of description, contributing to a more flexible and expressive syntax.

The Implementation and Students Perceptions of Corpora Utilized in Teaching and Learning Agreement and Disagreement Expressions

This study explored using English Corpora as a media in teaching and learning process. This study aims to know how the British National Corpus is used as a media in the teaching and learning process and how students' perceptions of it. This research was conducted at Junior High School in Karawang. The researcher used a case study approach with a questionnaire to collect the data. The data were processed in the descriptive, descriptive, and table. Based on the findings, using English corpora, especially British National Corpus, is worthwhile as a media in teaching and learning agreement by providing students with the actual usage of agreement and disagreement and examples of agreement and disagreement expressions. This study also shows that using British National Corpus can engage students in expanding their examples of agreement and disagreement expressions. The questionnaires also showed that after used the British National Corpus, students were satisfied, BNC increased students’ autonomous learning, and BNC helped them learn agreement and disagreement expressions by increase their comprehension.

Representation of Prepositions in ESL Textbooks of Lower Primary Classes: A Study of NCERT Textbooks in India

Prepositions are among the most difficult parts of speech for ESL learners owing to their polysemous nature and how they behave in different languages. The present study aims to determine how English prepositions are represented in English Language textbooks designed by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) for Classes I and II in India. For a comparison of the frequency of prepositions in English, we have selected the British National Corpus. The study revealed that though the choice of prepositions in the textbooks is as par with their occurrences in the standard English corpus, their senses are not always primary, i.e., spatial. We found instances of temporal and metaphorical senses as well. One significant finding of this study is the relatively very low frequency of temporal use of prepositions as compared to the proto-typical spatial sense in these textbooks. The metaphorical uses of some common prepositions, which are more abstract and complex, are higher in frequency, especially in the exercises for giving instructions.

Peculiarities of Adverb Placement in English Sentences (exemplified by the adverb "fairly")

The article deals with the problem of adverb placement in English sentences. The paper aims at studying the main tendencies and patterns which influence the choice of the syntactic position of adverbs in English. Special attention is paid to the correlation between the semantic and syntactic features of adverbs. The article also describes possible syntactic positions of adverbs belonging to different semantic classes and the factors which determine the change of the place of the adverb in the sentence. The paper also considers the peculiarities of functioning of adverbs in the sentence based on the analysis of the adverb "fairly". The material for study includes contexts of use of the adverb "fairly" taken from the British National Corpus (BNC). The research uses the following methods: descriptive and statistical methods, methods of contextual analysis and syntactic analysis. The relevance of the subject of the research is due to the fact that in modern English adverbs are characterized by a high level of variability in syntactic placement, and even adverbs belonging to the same semantic class may have different syntactic properties. The analysis showed that "fairly" can be used as an intensifying adverb, an emphasizer, an adverb of manner, an evaluation adverb; in a number of cases it can also acquire additional modal meanings or serve as a speech act-related adverb. Each meaning of the adverb is characterised by its specific variants of syntactic positioning: before the word it modifies, in medial position, in end position and as a parenthetic word detached from the rest of the sentence. The results of the research show the necessity to study the syntactic properties of adverbs in more detail and to clarify their existing dictionary definitions.

Exploring Hedging in Spoken Discourse: Insights from Corpus Analysis

The present research deals with the phenomenon of hedging language, mainly focusing on the context of spontaneous verbal interactions. The main aim of the study is to analyze the occurrence of hedges in English spoken discourse as captured in the Spoken British National Corpus 2014. The research process deals with the differences in the usage of approximators and shields existing among men and women across different age groups and levels of education. The research methodology involves creating six sub-corpora, measuring hedge dispersion, examining selected hedges to ascertain their hedging function within the context and calculating frequencies within each sub-corpus. The research outcomes point to the prevalence of shields in spoken discourse. Plausibility shields are commonly used while attribution shields show lower usage. Adaptors contribute to mitigating certainty in utterances, whereas rounders play a less prominent role. These findings emphasize the nuanced interplay between linguistic strategies and speaker characteristics in spoken communication and highlight the importance of cooperative principles in discourse.

English-to-Hindi translation divergence study of English phrasal verbs

English phrasal verbs pose complex semantic interpretations and cause significant problems in their translation into the target language. The paper selects some frequent and highly polysemous English phrasal verbs listed with 10 or more senses in the English WordNet, collects sample English sentences from the British National Corpus and examines their Hindi translation equivalents in terms of the morpho-syntactic structure of Hindi verbs and the representation of semantic information. This study attempts to present the semantic equivalence in rendering the identical semantics in the verbal system of both languages under consideration. The study found that the most frequent and common way of realising the concepts represented by English phrasal verbs in Hindi is by incorporating the compound verb constructions in the Hindi language. Besides that, we observe multiple mapping patterns of English phrasal verbs in Hindi, including the simple Hindi verb (v), compound verb (v1-v2), and conjunct verb (noun/adjective/adverb-verb) constructions.

A META ANALYSIS OF NOMINAL PHRASES WITH DRAMA AS HEAD NOUN AND MODIFIER

This study conducts a meta-analysis of nominal phrases with "drama" as the head noun and modifier, aiming to clarify the terminology within the field of drama education and address discrepancies in term usage across various linguistic contexts. Utilizing a quantitative approach, the research analyzes the frequency and usage patterns of drama-related terms in the British National Corpus (BNC) and Google Scholar. Significant disparities were found, indicating broader usage and diverse applications in Google Scholar compared to the BNC. The study highlights the need for standardized terminology to enhance communication and comparability in academic research. By defining key terms such as "drama activity," "drama play," and "educational drama," the analysis contributes to reducing ambiguities and fostering a more coherent dialogue within drama studies, thereby facilitating more effective educational practices and interdisciplinary collaboration.

English Prepositions Expressing Temporal Limits: Semantic Features and Functioning

This article explores the semantics and usage of prepositions in the English that denote temporal limits of actions. A review of various lexicographical sources, reference literature, and grammars is conducted, highlighting that not all sources provide comprehensive information on the meanings and functioning of prepositions, often offering only general information. Practical material for the study is extracted from the British National Corpus, comprising approximately two thousand contexts. It is established that making a definitive conclusion about including a temporal limit within the timeframe allocated for an action is not always possible. This semantic ambiguity is noted in around 20% of the total number of analyzed contexts. The study demonstrates that to resolve ambiguity and ensure successful communication, addressees often resort to using clarifying elements or complete / partial paraphrasing of the message text. Clarifications are found to be most typical in texts of a scientific research nature, schedules, legal and economic documents. The article concludes on the necessity of further research related to the semantics and usage of prepositions.

Exploration on Advanced Intelligent Algorithms of Artificial Intelligence for Verb Recognition in Machine Translation

This article aimed to address the problems of word order confusion, context dependency, and ambiguity in traditional machine translation (MT) methods for verb recognition. By applying advanced intelligent algorithms of artificial intelligence, verb recognition can be better processed and the quality and accuracy of MT can be improved. Based on Neural machine translation (NMT), basic attention mechanisms, historical attention information, dynamically obtain information related to the generated words, and constraint mechanisms were introduced to embed semantic information, represent polysemy, and annotate semantic roles of verbs. This article used the Workshop on MT (WMT), British National Corpus (BNC), Gutenberg, Reuters Corpus, and OpenSubtitles corpus, and enhanced the data in the corpora. The improved NMT model was compared with traditional NMT models, Rule-Based MT (RBMT), and Statistical MT (SMT). The experimental results showed that the average verb semantic matching degree of the improved NMT model in five corpora was 0.85, and the average Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) score in five corpora was 0.90. The improved NMT model in this article can effectively improve the accuracy of verb recognition in MT, providing new methods for verb recognition in MT.

Лексико-семантическая группа английских номинаций небольшого возвышения над землей как способ репрезентации типов знания

Based on the linguocognitive approach, the article studies the linguistic conceptualization of elevations of land in English. The material was obtained from authoritative English-English dictionaries and the British National Corpus. The aim was to identify peculiarities of linguistic conceptualization of the terrain by means of landscape words forming a lexico-semantic group and denoting an elevation of land. The author performed an etymological and component analysis of the meanings of elements of the lexico-semantic group using dictionary definitions of its lexical constituents, followed by a cognitive interpretation of the semantic components of the latter and a determination of the constitutive cognitive features of the images of the designated objects. It is concluded that the landscape nouns under study have two-dimensional meaning, which is determined by visual perception: the cognitive content of English nouns denoting an elevation of land represents not only structural knowledge – a form of categorization of information that is a given, existing knowledge representing the experience of all generations – but also phenomenological knowledge arising from sensory (immediate) observation. In addition, the author determined the ability of some of the sensually perceived features of landscape objects in the vertical space (shape, size) to serve as a cognitive basis for metaphorical images, which indicates that such features are of particular importance for the everyday life of British people. The results of this study have theoretical significance and contribute to further development of cognitive linguistics by revealing the cognitive mechanisms of perception, categorization and conceptualization of elevations of land.

Word frequency and cognitive effort in turns-at-talk: turn structure affects processing load in natural conversation.

Frequency distributions are known to widely affect psycholinguistic processes. The effects of word frequency in turns-at-talk, the nucleus of social action in conversation, have, by contrast, been largely neglected. This study probes into this gap by applying corpus-linguistic methods on the conversational component of the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Freiburg Multimodal Interaction Corpus (FreMIC). The latter includes continuous pupil size measures of participants of the recorded conversations, allowing for a systematic investigation of patterns in the contained speech and language on the one hand and their relation to concurrent processing costs they may incur in speakers and recipients on the other hand. We test a first hypothesis in this vein, analyzing whether word frequency distributions within turns-at-talk are correlated with interlocutors' processing effort during the production and reception of these turns. Turns are found to generally show a regular distribution pattern of word frequency, with highly frequent words in turn-initial positions, mid-range frequency words in turn-medial positions, and low-frequency words in turn-final positions. Speakers' pupil size is found to tend to increase during the course of a turn at talk, reaching a climax toward the turn end. Notably, the observed decrease in word frequency within turns is inversely correlated with the observed increase in pupil size in speakers, but not in recipients, with steeper decreases in word frequency going along with steeper increases in pupil size in speakers. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of speech processing, turn structure, and information packaging. Crucially, we propose that the intensification of processing effort in speakers during a turn at talk is owed to an informational climax, which entails a progression from high-frequency, low-information words through intermediate levels to low-frequency, high-information words. At least in English conversation, interlocutors seem to make use of this pattern as one way to achieve efficiency in conversational interaction, creating a regularly recurring distribution of processing load across speaking turns, which aids smooth turn transitions, content prediction, and effective information transfer.

Semantic prosody, semantic transfer and semantic change

Abstract This article investigates semantic prosody in a diachronic perspective. Although prosodies have been shown to change over time, there is no consensus regarding the source of such changes. The present study explores this further through a corpus study of the development of the lemmas fabric, fabricate and fabrication from the late 15th century to the late 20th century, drawing on material from Early English Books Online, the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts and the British National Corpus. The results of the study show that prosodic changes coincide with the emergence of new senses and indicate that these processes are related to and possibly caused by semantic transfer induced by persistent prosodies over time.

Development of verb argument constructions in L2 English learners: A close replication of research question 3 in Römer and Berger (2019)

Abstract This study closely replicates the analyses of the third research question in Römer and Berger (2019), which reported that the associations between verbs and verb argument constructions (VACs) used by German and Spanish learners of English move closer to a native usage norm as the learners’ proficiency increases. This study conducted the same correlation analyses from the original study but with a substantially expanded version of the learner corpus used therein. Additionally, we conducted zero-inflated negative binomial analyses to estimate the relationship between the frequencies of verb-VAC combinations in the British National Corpus (BNC) and in the learner subcorpora representing different proficiency levels. Our findings were consistent with the original study in showing significant positive correlations between frequencies of the verb-VAC combinations in the BNC and in the learner subcorpora but further revealed the potential effect of topic on the learners’ VAC usage. Implications for future studies are discussed.

Parameters of antecedent – possessive postcopular anaphor correlation: the case of definiteness effect

The paper aims at finding correlation between possessive postcopular anaphor in English existential there-sentences and its antecedent. English there-sentences provide a site for the phenomenon known as definiteness effect, one of the most controversial and still not fully resolved issues in linguistics today. The current state of this problem determines the relevance of this article. The subject of the study is the relationship of possessive post-сopular noun phrases and their antecedents. So, the features of the definiteness effect are studied in terms of anaphor - antecedent distance. The purpose of the work is to establish some possible patterns of mutual arrangement of these units. The corresponding tasks are the following: collecting data that satisfy the input conditions; identifying the antecedents of a possessive anaphor; establishing the distance between the anaphor and the antecedent. The British National Corpus is the source for the research material. The novelty of the study lies in the very formulation of the problem, which has not been previously raised in the scientific literature, as well as in the results obtained. The findings are the following: the authors have identified certain types of antecedents united in enlarged groups, namely, explicitly expressed antecedents and antecedents without verbal embodiment. The detected distance between antecedents and their possessive anaphors is fixed as minimal, within the framework of neighbouring sentences, in some cases tending to zero value. A correlation is found between the type of antecedent, its location and distance from the possessive anaphor. The authors assume that such distance may serve as an additional licensing stipulation ensuring the admission of possessive noun phrases to the postcopular position of English existential sentences.

Gender asymmetries of the category “appearance” in the English language (based on the analysis of attributive-nominal word combinations with the core lexemes “man” and “woman”)

The relevance of this article is determined by the increasing interest in the asymmetries of gender-sensitive categories like “appearance” or “beauty”. The history of the issue and detailed results of contemporary studies in this field have been outlined in the article. The category of appearance has long been considered gender-biased and asymmetric, being related more to women than to men. Present-day studies offer support for the idea that notions of appearance and beauty are unevenly linked to women, resulting in a multitude of societal and individual difficulties. Certain modern linguists even argue that the concept of beauty is employed as a narrative to perpetuate women’s feelings of discontent and self-criticism. Our work presents an attempt to measure the relevance of this supposition against practical data of the semantic analysis of collocations with the core lexemes “man” and “woman”. A total of 2,814 noun phrases relevant to the category of appearance have been extracted from the texts of the British National Corpus of the English language. Three subcategories have been distinguished in the process of continuous sampling: parametric characteristics of appearance, general characteristics, and assessments. The method of comparative analysis allowed us to make conclusions regarding the degree of validity of assumptions about the asymmetry of the category of appearance in the English language. The analysis was carried out in two stages: the first stage required a general comparison of the amount and semantic nature of attribute-nominal word combinations with the core lexemes “man” and “woman”. The second stage of analysis was based on connotational analysis of nominal constructions semantics in the context of positive and negative characteristics of females’ and males’ appearance. The summary data of the study allowed us to present reliable evidence-based conclusions about the objective characteristics of the category of appearance. The study questions the widespread belief that the category of appearance is gender-biased and suggests considering it as a significant androgenic characteristic relevant to both men and women.

English-to-Hindi Mapping of Compositional Verb-Particle Constructions

The present study investigates the semantic correspondence in the Hindi translation equivalents of compositional English verb-particle constructions (EVPCs) with the particle up. The compositional constructions include the directional and aspectual functions of particles. The study concentrates on the semantic representation of literal spatial directional and aspectual completive functions of the particle up in Hindi, a major Indian language. The researchers selected some frequent EVPCs, took examples from the British National Corpus and manually translated them into Hindi with the help of relevant dictionaries and corpus resources, including native speaker intuitions. Further, the obtained Hindi translational equivalents were analyzed for morphosyntactic structure and semantic correspondence. The study found that the compositional EVPCs are mapped in Hindi by simple(v) and complex verb constructions(verb/noun/adjective/adverb-verb). The spatial directional sense of the particle up is either lexicalized in the simple Hindi verb or polar verb (v1) of the Hindi compound verb(v1-v2), whereas in Hindi conjunct verb constructions, this directional sense is explicitly realized as a verbal modifier (generally adverb). The vector verb (v2) of the Hindi compound verb appears to map the aspectual-completive sense of the respective particle.

Health Metaphor and Embodied Meaning in English Economic Discourse

In economic discourse, economists use conceptual metaphors to explain complex and abstract economic concepts or theories. Among them, health metaphors based on physical experience are widely used. Therefore, this article selects health metaphors with the highest frequency in the British National Corpus as research object, and conducts analysis on its typical usage. Results show that the vast majority of health metaphors tend to map economy as a healthy organism. Moreover, the health metaphors that appear in economic discourse have signifi-cant embodied meanings.

A Contrastive Corpus-based Study of American and English Adjectives: ‘Important’ and ‘Significant’

This contrastive corpus-based study aims to analyze the similarities and differences of two synonyms “important” and “significant” concerning on the degree of formality in their distribution across genres as well as their collocations and semantic preference. The corpus data derived from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC) which represent varieties of English usage across different cultures (American and British). This study analyzed the top 20 noun collocates with Mutual Information (MI) scores value of at least three. The corpus data from COCA and BNC explored some shared characteristics and contrastive features. The findings discovered that the two adjectives have the same core meaning and degree of formality since their highest frequency in academic texts whereas frequencies are the lowest in informal genres i.e. TV and movie subtitles and fiction. In certain conditions, these synonyms are different in terms of noun collocation due to the fact that these synonyms co-occur with particular noun collocates. Interestingly, the findings also confirm two adjectives are near synonyms as they share only two similar theme of semantic preference. In consequence, the two synonyms cannot be used interchangeably in all contexts. Moreover, it was found that the corpora provide some useful details that are deficient in the dictionary.

Vocabulary Thresholds Study for Business English Major Based on the Range Corpus

The texts have been selected from 45 articles of 15 units of Selected Readings of Business English and from prominent economic English newspapers in China and the United States—China Economic Net and The Economist. Employing the vocabulary corpus software, Range32, we conducted a statistical examination of vocabulary coverage and the frequency of corresponding terms in the British National Corpus (BNC). This rigorous analysis aims to ascertain whether the content of the textbook aligns with the requisites of specific professional tests. Additionally, it serves to assist students and learners of Business English in China by aiding them in identifying suitable English-language reading materials. This research provides a valuable reference, guiding individuals toward reading newspapers that align with their vocabulary proficiency in English. The study findings indicate that to attain a fundamental comprehension of the reading materials, achieving a 95% vocabulary coverage requires a command of 4,000 to 5,000 vocabulary words for Selected Readings of Business English, 4,500 to 5,000 vocabulary words for China Economic Net, and 5,000 to 6,000 vocabulary words for The Economist. For a more fluent reading experience, corresponding to a 98% vocabulary coverage, a mastery of 7,500 to 8,000 vocabulary words is necessary for Selected Readings of Business English, 8,500 to 9,000 vocabulary words for the China Economic Net, and 10,000 to 11,000 vocabulary words for The Economist. And this study suggests that the vocabulary thresholds for Business English majors should be 4,000 to 6,000 (95% vocabulary coverage) and 8,000 to 11,000 (98% vocabulary coverage)

A corpus-based analysis of light verb constructions with MAKE and DO in British English

The comparison of light verb constructions with the verbs make and do has not received much attention. The present paper is an attempt to contribute to the study of these constructions. It aims to analyze the light verbs make and do in combination with the same deverbal nouns to identify similarities and differences between the two light verbs and examine the contribution of the light verbs and deverbal nouns to the light verb construction in terms of semantic and syntactic features. The research is corpus-based, and the data for analysis are collected from the British National Corpus (BNC). The semantic description deals with characteristics such as generality, polysemy and aspectual meaning, and the syntactic description focuses on complementation. The analysis of findings demonstrates that, despite some similarities, almost all constructions with the two light verbs show either meaning or/and complementation differences. The study also reveals that both light verbs and deverbal nouns have an impact on the semantics and syntax of the construction. Light verbs may affect light verb constructions semantically in terms of generality and polysemy, and the aspectual meaning of constructions depends on both light verbs and deverbal nouns. Likewise, both light verbs and deverbal nouns have an influence on complementation, but in their own way: light verbs on the selection of complements and deverbal nouns on complementation patterns.