British National Corpus Research Articles

Representation of identity in English, German, Russian and Chechen idioms: A corpus approach

The article examines identity in English, German, Russian and Chechen idioms, as well as contexts of their use, obtained from the British National Corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American Language, the Corpus of the German Language Institute in Mannheim, the National Corpus of the Russian Language, as well as from the Corpus of the Chechen language and in the course of a psycholinguistic survey of Chechen speakers. In its inner form and meaning, sociocultural factors affecting the formation of identity are revealed. The contexts reveal new or additional meanings of idioms not reflected in dictionaries, the place and perception of identity through the prism of cultures and social experience. A comparative, semantic analysis of idioms showed that identity has different kinds: personal, civil, political, regional.

A high-frequency sense list.

A number of high-frequency word lists have been created to help foreign language learners master English vocabulary. These word lists, despite their widespread use, did not take word meaning into consideration. Foreign language learners are unclear on which meanings they should focus on first. To address this issue, we semantically annotated the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC) with high accuracy using a BERT model. From these annotated corpora, we calculated the semantic frequency of different senses and filtered out 5000 senses to create a High-frequency Sense List. Subsequently, we checked the validity of this list and compared it with established influential word lists. This list exhibits three notable characteristics. First, it achieves stable coverage in different corpora. Second, it identifies high-frequency items with greater accuracy. It achieves comparable coverage with lists like GSL, NGSL, and New-GSL but with significantly fewer items. Especially, it includes everyday words that used to fall off high-frequency lists without requiring manual adjustments. Third, it describes clearly which senses are most frequently used and therefore should be focused on by beginning learners. This study represents a pioneering effort in semantic annotation of large corpora and the creation of a word list based on semantic frequency.

A Corpus-Based Study of Metaphor of Modalization in English Academic Writing

Metaphor of modality in the Hallidayan linguistic framework is manifested through a transition from implicit modal expressions to explicit modal expressions, encompassing metaphor of modalization and metaphor of modulation. This article conducts a corpus-based investigation to examine the prevalence of metaphors of modalization in English academic writing. The study, which relies on data from the British National Corpus (BNC), reveals that modal expressions are more frequently used in less technical texts (i.e., in spoken texts rather than in written texts with regard to mode, in fiction texts rather than in academic texts with regard to genre, and in hard science texts rather than in soft science texts with regard to discipline). Furthermore, explicit subjective and explicit objective modal expressions exhibit opposite distribution patterns across modes, genres, and academic disciplines. Based on this general distribution pattern, this study then examines three distinct groups of PhD dissertations. It becomes evident that Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writers employ significantly fewer subjective projecting clauses compared to proficient native English writers in their academic writing. This difference arises from the rigorous training Chinese EFL learners receive, emphasizing the avoidance of authorial identity in academic writing. This study hereby concludes that while English academic writing may be becoming less formal, author involvement should not be encouraged in relatively more technical academic texts.

ДІЄСЛОВО В МОВНІЙ ТА КОНЦЕПТУАЛЬНІЙ КАРТИНАХ СВІТУ НОСІЇВ АНГЛІЙСЬКОЇ МОВИ

The paper studies the peculiarities of mental representations of the verb in the conceptual worldview and their reflection in the linguistic worldview of English language native speakers. Special attention is paid to the etymology and meaning of the word “verb” in the English language. In particular, its connection with the meaning “word” in general, which is manifested in the corresponding derivatives, is clarified. A tendency to define the verb through its syntactic function in scientific literature has been revealed. The key role of the predicate-argument structure, which reflects the linguistic worldview of English language native speakers, has been established. At the same time, the conceptual structure of the verb meaning and its mental representations shed light on the place of the verb in the conceptual worldview of English language native speakers. In the naive worldview of the English speakers, a tendency to associate the verb with an action or an act can be observed. High productivity of verbification in present-day English, as well as the overall high saturation of verbs in the English language corpora, estimated at 10.86 per cent, testify to the significance of the verb in English. The corpus analysis has been conducted based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the British National Corpus (BNC), the Strathy Corpus of Canadian English, and iWeb Corpus of modern web communication. The total distribution of verbs across the aforementioned corpora does not reveal any substantial variation. Nonetheless, the corpus data provide illuminating insights into the worldview of the native speakers of English. The prospects of further research in this direction lie in the construction of a mental model of the English verb, which would integrate the approaches to verb semantics within different modern frameworks, employing both experimental findings and empirical corpus data.

Digitalizing the Humanitarian Discourse: Modern Technologies in Research and Educational Space of a University

Introduction. The article is devoted to the analysis and assessment of the methods of the humanitarian discourse digitalization while implementing them in the educational process. Digitalization of the educational space is associated with the use of discourse as an especially complicated communicative phenomenon, as well as with the use of digital technologies and the Internet space. At the same time, the question on the right implementation of the modern technologies in the educational process constantly rises.Purpose. In our study, we will consider the possibilities of the implementation of digital discourse technologies in the educational process.Theoretical justification. We investigated the capabilities of the «Ngram Viewer» search service, the «Cyborg Writer» experimental text editor, the «AI Search» text creation tool, the Russian National Corpus internet service, including its sections: «Educational Corpus», «Poetry Corpus», and «British National Corpus» in English. We also looked into potential of the «Genial.ly» platform, the website in the form of a landing page, the «Wordpress» platform and its potential in the refinement of humanitarian discourse. From the discourse point of view, we described the electronic research and educational space of Don State Technical University, and the scientific electronic library e-library.ru. Examples of projects implemented in the «Fundamentals of the Project Management» and «Business Communication» subjects' frames by students, and in which modern digital technologies were applied successfully, are considered.Discussion. The digitalization of humanities knowledge under modern conditions appears as an ambiguous process. On the one hand, digital technologies can supplement and improve the educational process. On the other hand, in this relatively new conditions, the researcher's activity and its results lose importance to a significant extent. Meanwhile, the digital transformation of education presents new tools to humanities teachers for broadening research, speeding up analysis and data processing, and improving accuracy in studies.

Emotion and Ageing in Discourse: Do Older People Express More Positive Emotions?

Abstract Several psychological lab studies have shown that older people feel more positive emotions than younger people. So far, however, there has been little research on whether older people also express more positive emotions in their discourse. This paper reports the findings of sentiment analysis from the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014) across 10 age groups, with details on eight emotions (anticipation, joy, surprise, trust, anger, disgust, sadness, and fear), followed by structural topic modelling to reveal the thematic concerns of different age groups. This research generally supports earlier psychological lab studies that the older generation’s discourse is more positive than that of the younger generation; however, the findings also show that positive and negative emotions fluctuate over the life span, with pronounced dips in overall positivity in the 20s, 40s, and 60s. Subsequent structural topic modelling explains why people are more positive or negative at certain ages.

“There was much new to grok”: an analysis of word coinage in science fiction literature

Abstract As can be witnessed in projects such as The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (Prucher, Jeff. 2007. Brave new words: The Oxford dictionary of science fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press), science fiction has been fertile ground for the creation of new words and concepts. Whereas the aforementioned dictionary was constructed by eliciting examples and citations from volunteers, this paper presents an initial foray into data-driven methods for uncovering lexis unique to science fiction. Words unique to science fiction texts are extracted by comparing a science fiction corpus against the British National Corpus (BNC Consortium. 2007. The British National Corpus, XML edition. Oxford Text Archive. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12024/2554 (accessed 29 June 2022)) to produce a list of 306 neologisms from 74 texts. In addition, this study seeks to examine the ways in which authors impart the meaning of such words to the reader, drawing on frameworks of semantic word relations and work in cognitive linguistics. This reveals the use of definitions and glosses by the authors, both in narration and direct speech, co-occurrence with synonyms, and the drip-feeding of attributes pertaining to the concept being referenced. In addition, characters can be shown to struggle with the concepts to which neologisms refer, allowing authors to explore themes of alienation and other-worldliness.

On a rare, yet interesting, usage of the Polish adjective ludzki compared to the English equivalent human

The lexemes ludzki and human are treated (e.g. in didactics and translation studies) as equivalents, which is refl ected in the dictionary descriptions of the meanings of these words. At the same time, the analysis of the contexts where the expression ludzki człowiek is used leads to other conclusions: not all contents of the Polish adjective are present in its English equivalent. Ludzki is also ‘one who suspends the operation of principles for the sake of another human being’. This component of a more general meaning (‘consistent with the human nature, conceived as good; hence: characterised by favourable disposition, understanding for other people; humane, merciful, gentle, kind’, SJPDor) seems to be absent from English (adjectives human and humane).This article applies the methodology based on the pragmatic analysis of the communication situation and consideration for the context of the utterance/statement (after Grzegorczykowa 1990). The language material used was derived from the following corpora: NKJP (National Corpus of Polish), BNC (British National Corpus), and COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English).

Frame integration and head-switching

Abstract Employing Frame Semantics as implemented in the Berkeley FrameNet database, this paper analyzes English sentences expressing concerns of risk derived from the British National Corpus and their Japanese translations (created for the purposes of the current study). It introduces the ideas of content and interpretation predicates, frame integration, and head-switching as effectual devices for recognizing obscure constructional equivalences across languages. Our findings shed light on the development of a new contrastive framework for verbal predicativity: that is, a framework based on the recognition of content and interpretation predicates and how it intersects with the categorical distinction in lexicalization patterns between verbs and adverbs.

Idioms in General English Corpora: on Frequency, Register, and Cross-Variety Variation

Research into idioms and phraseology has become an established part of the corpus linguistic research agenda and has often revolved around either corpus-based or corpus-driven methodologies. At the same time, a relatively recent approach to socio-variational aspects of language in the form of Cognitive Sociolinguistics has contributed to establishing an ideal platform for the study of variation in the varieties of English. The present paper rests on these two research strands in a survey devoted to variation on the level of idioms in present-day English, namely those denoting competition. While idioms, first and foremost, are theoretically identified with the frameworks of Phraseology, Cognitive Linguistics, and Applied Linguistics, among others, this study will make use of a corpus-based method of idioms introduced by Moon and Gustawsson’s idioms frequency and significance threshold, paired with Moze and Mohamed’s sociolinguistic profiling of idioms. The Idioms will be examined in two national varieties of English, namely those spoken in Great Britain and the USA, which are represented in the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English, respectively. With the assumption that the concept of competition is variety-specific, the main questions to be answered during the analysis are: (1) To what extent can the frequency of use of idioms be regarded an element of variation? and (2) Are there any differences in the prominence of specific variables, such as frequency, register, gender, and age across the two varieties under study? The preliminary findings indicate a significant amount of similarity, but upon closer examination of the data, some important variations are emphasised. Thus, a discussion of the results provides a basis for an inter-variety comparison of the idioms denoting competition and, in so doing, adds to the universality / variation debate.

Functional-Semantic Features of Complex Sentences of Purpose in British and American Variants of English

The functional-semantic features of purpose clauses introduced by conjunctions so that, lest, in order that, for fear that, in the hope that, and to the end that are examined in this study. These conjunctions differ in their frequency and expressiveness. The material for the study was taken from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus. The novelty of the research lies in specifying the list of differential features of the categorical grammatical value of complex sentences of purpose. It is demonstrated that complex sentences with purpose conjunctions are used in literary, journalistic, scientific, and conversational texts, but their frequency differs not only depending on the type of discourse but also on the language variant. Based on statistical data, it is confirmed that Present Subjunctive forms are the most commonly used in purpose clauses regardless of the language variant. Types of purpose clauses are analyzed: proper-purpose, argumentative-purpose, syncretic, and anti-purpose clauses. It is established that the first ones, which are not complicated by additional shades of meaning, are most frequent in American texts, while the third ones, containing indications of circumstances for achieving the goal, are most commonly used in British texts.

Lexical Demands of Academic Written English: From Students’ Assignments to Scholarly Publications

The article presents a lexical study that investigates the lexical demands of academic written texts at different levels of writing. By employing the British National Corpus/ Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) word list and the Academic Word List (AWL), the present study analyzed data from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, which contained 2,761 student assignments, and the Public Library of Science One (PLOS ONE) corpus which included 4,000 scholarly articles. Results from the analyses demonstrated significant differences in lexical difficulty between students’ assignments and scholarly publications. The proportion of academic vocabulary in written texts was also found to increase as the writers’ levels went up. Cross-discipline comparisons highlighted the difference in lexical difficulties between scientific disciplines.

A preliminary investigation of the acoustic factors impacting decision making in speaker attribution

Attributing utterances to speakers in a good quality recording of clear speech might seem to be a simple and straightforward task, yet transcribers have been shown to “regularly and obliviously get it wrong” (Love 2020: 156). This issue has received very limited attention, and our research focuses on the issue from a forensic linguistic perspective where attributing an utterance to a speaker in a forensic case could effectively be accusing them of having committed a crime. Literature on speaker attribution/recognitionnever shows 100% accuracy even in very good acoustic conditions, with marked drops in performance when features are masked (as they often are in forensic situations). In this preliminary study, five phonetically trained listeners transcribed an audio file of six people engaged ina panel discussion from television (we focus on audio only). The speech of two female speakers is correctly attributed in almost all cases, so we pay attention to the acoustic features of four male voices. Listeners werealmost never correct in their judgements about the exact number of speakers in the recording and made multiple attribution errors. We show that this is because of the fundamental nature of the speech acoustics; within-speaker variation is larger than between speaker variation for F0, intonational properties, and speech rhythm. Love, R. (2020). Overcoming challenges in corpus construction: The spoken British National Corpus 2020. Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics. New York: Routledge.

Gender Discrimination in Job Titles in English Language: A Corpus-Based Critical Study

Males and females have the same rights as members of society but females are discriminated against in terms of job titles. Fairclough's three-dimensional model was used to identify, expose, and challenge the implicit ideologies behind the use of such job titles and pronouns used after these job titles. This research is a mixed method research that aims to analyze the use of male-representing, female-representing, and neutral job titles and the use of pronouns after the use of these job titles in the British National Corpus (BNC). 15 job titles were selected for the study. Only those job titles were selected for which female-representing and neutral job titles were available and that are more frequently used by the people. Sketch Engine was used to know the frequencies of these job titles. The frequencies of these job titles were compared to know what type of job titles are used more in the British National Corpus (BNC). The study showed that there is a big difference between the frequencies of male-representing and female-representing job titles and the frequency of male-specific pronouns is more than the frequency of female-specific pronouns after the use of male-oriented and female-oriented job titles and this leads to discrimination of females. It is suggested that job titles should be used appropriately so that no gender can be discriminated against.

Multifunctionality of the discourse marker okay in spoken English: A sociolinguistic examination linked to age

ABSTRACT The present study aims to examine the discourse marker (henceforth DM) okay by making use of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014). The objective is to investigate the multifunctional status of okay, and to examine sociolinguistic variation by taking age as the main variable. Many studies have been undertaken to describe the linguistic features of the DM okay and have demonstrated that it is susceptible to variation according to gender (Johannsen et al. 2015) and age (Stenström et al. 2002; Torgersen et al. 2011). On no occasions, however, have the multifunctional features of okay been described by accounting for sociolinguistic variation exhibited by people of all ages in spoken English. The present study is a corpus-based investigation that aims to fill this gap and examine the linguistic features and sociolinguistic variation exhibited by okay in contemporary English. The analysis reveals that there is variation in the use of okay among people of different ages and changes in apparent time. Specifically, signs of change concern the collocational profile and uses of the DM okay with the function of a response form, especially in the age group 0–14.

A Corpus-Based Study of Interpersonal Metaphors of Modulation in Academic English

This article presents a study on the synchronic distributions of interpersonal metaphors of modulation based on the British National Corpus (BNC). The synchronic research reveals that interpersonal metaphors of modulation are mode-sensitive to written texts. Regarding genre distribution, metaphorical obligations driven by the explicit orientation dominate fiction texts. In contrast, the objective orientation drives obligations to be more prevalent in academic texts or more technical genres. The objective orientation of metaphorical inclinations is notably prevalent in newspapers and magazines other than academic texts. Besides, the findings highlight that the inherent personal and subjective characteristics of interpersonal modulations remain unchanged in their metaphorical forms, demonstrating less objectivity compared to ideational metaphors in highly technical disciplines.

The Syntactic Pasts of Nouns Shape Their Prosodic Future: Lexico-Syntactic Effects on Position and Duration.

Phrasal prosody is often viewed as a level of linguistic representation at which the phonetic profile of an utterance varies independently of the lexical items it contains. For example, the same word, when produced at the edges of prosodic phrases, will take longer to produce than when it is produced within the edges of a phrase. Lengthening effects have also been found for words when placed in different syntactic or lexical contexts. Recent evidence suggests that lexico-syntactic information-for example, the global syntactic distributions of words-affects phonetic duration in production, irrespective of other factors. The present study asks whether these lexico-syntactic effects on duration interact with prosodic position within the phrase. Specifically, we ask whether (a) the lexico-syntactic information of a word determines its prosodic position, and (b) whether, beyond any categorical effects on positioning, lexico-syntactic factors affect duration within prosodic positions. We address these questions using the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. We operationalize syntactic information as the diversity and the typicality of the syntactic distributions of nouns based on a dependency parse of the British National Corpus. We find that earlier positions in the prosodic phrase generally prefer words with higher syntactic diversity. In addition, diversity and typicality modulate duration more reliably in nonfinal positions. Together, our results point to an early influence of lexico-syntactic considerations on prosodic planning.

The Passive across Two Registers of Present-Day British English: A Corpus-Based Lexico-Grammatical Perspective

Abstract This paper explores the use of the passive in present-day British English, focusing on its register-specific lexico-grammatical patterns. The interaction of the grammatical structure, lexis, phraseology and register is examined on the basis of two sub-corpora of the British National Corpus 2014 – academic prose and informal conversation. The results have corroborated the findings of previous studies in that the pattern ‘BE / GET V-ed’ is populated by verbal participial forms which create a cline with departicipial adjectives. The communicative needs of registers have been shown to have a decisive impact on the frequency of passive patterns and the specific lexical choices associated with the patterns. In both registers, the ‘BE / GET V-ed’ patterns appear to constitute the core of larger fixed phraseological units, e.g., can’t be bothered to/with, or it should be noted that.

A case study of delexical nouns in an EFL setting

This paper demonstrates the relevance of delexical nouns (way, end, case and point) based on corpus findings, course book analyses and classroom experiments. To this end, first, delexical noun functions and frequencies have been studied in-depth in two large English language corpora: Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and British National Corpus (BNC). Additionally, the study reviewed the compound nouns' dictionary meanings. Two coursebooks, namely New English File and Face2Face, have been investigated to determine if delexical nouns are addressed in English language coursebooks to provide ideas to guide the learners in the classroom. Finally, a data-driven learning (DDL) experiment was carried out to assess the participants’ familiarity with the delexical nouns and their collocations. The results of the quantitative analysis from the study demonstrate that delexical nouns are introduced in the course books but are not explicitly explained. Consequently, there are no actual exercises to practise them. The classroom experiment findings reveal the participants’ positive attitude towards how the four delexical nouns, way, end, case and point, were introduced and taught.

From Needs Analysis to the Establishment of a University Vocabulary List for English Majors

This paper concerns the academic vocabulary needs of undergraduate English majors in a tertiary context in Azerbaijan. Based on the results of the previous studies, it is suggested that developing an appropriate course material to meet the specific learning needs of these students will be beneficial for them. Thus, this study aims to identify the percentage of the running words and high-frequency word families beyond the 2,000 most-frequent words in the university textbook corpus to help the students to attain 98% lexical coverage. To address English majors’ scant academic vocabulary knowledge, a University Vocabulary List has been created. First, a university textbook corpus comprising the words used in 11 subject-specific course textbooks across subject areas taught at Azerbaijan University of Languages was compiled. Next, the range and frequency distribution of the words beyond the British National Corpus scale 2,000-word families was examined. Finally, the 396 most frequently occurring word families in the corpus were chosen; these formed the proposed University Vocabulary List for English majors, accounting for a 6.96% lexical coverage. The University Vocabulary List for English majors and the British National Corpus 2,000 high-frequency word families, including proper nouns, provide a text coverage of 97.28%, which is only marginally lower than the suggested lexical threshold of 98% suggested by Laufer and Ravenhorst-Kalovski (2010) and Nation (2006). It is, therefore, argued that the University Vocabulary List represents a sufficiently frequent and relevant vocabulary load for English majors whose secondary educational background and first-year general English textbooks have not equipped them for the linguistic challenges they face at the initial stages of their tertiary education. The article concludes by stating the pedagogical implications for developing these learners’ knowledge and use of the most frequent word families.