British National Corpus Research Articles

Exploring British Accents: Modelling the Trap–Bath Split with Functional Data Analysis

AbstractThe sound of our speech is influenced by the places we come from. Great Britain contains a wide variety of distinctive accents which are of interest to linguistics. In particular, the ‘a’ vowel in words like ‘class’ is pronounced differently in the North and the South. Speech recordings of this vowel can be represented as formant curves or as mel-frequency cepstral coefficient curves. Functional data analysis and generalised additive models offer techniques to model the variation in these curves. Our first aim was to model the difference between typical Northern and Southern vowels /æ/ and /ɑ/, by training two classifiers on the North-South Class Vowels dataset collected for this paper. Our second aim is to visualise geographical variation of accents in Great Britain. For this we use speech recordings from a second dataset, the British National Corpus (BNC) audio edition. The trained models are used to predict the accent of speakers in the BNC, and then we model the geographical patterns in these predictions using a soap film smoother. This work demonstrates a flexible and interpretable approach to modelling phonetic accent variation in speech recordings.

Communicative efficiency and the Principle of No Synonymy: predictability effects and the variation ofwant toandwanna

AbstractThere is ample psycholinguistic evidence that speakers behave efficiently, using shorter and less effortful constructions when the meaning is more predictable, and longer and more effortful ones when it is less predictable. However, the Principle of No Synonymy requires that all formally distinct variants should also be functionally different. The question is how much two related constructions should overlap semantically and pragmatically in order to be used for the purposes of efficient communication. The case study focuses onwant to + Infinitive and its reduced variant withwanna, which have different stylistic and sociolinguistic connotations. Bayesian mixed-effects regression modelling based on the spoken part of the British National Corpus reveals a very limited effect of efficiency: predictability increases the chances of the reduced variant only in fast speech. We conclude that efficient use of more and less effortful variants is restricted when two variants are associated with different registers or styles. This paper also pursues a methodological goal regarding missing values in speech corpora. We impute missing data based on the existing values. A comparison of regression models with and without imputed values reveals similar tendencies. This means that imputation is useful for dealing with missing values in corpora.

Additional Meanings of Human Body-related Idioms: Context, Semantics

The paper addresses a vital issue of forming idioms with nominations of human body. Human body-related words nominating body parts, physiological and mental processes are used to form numerous English idioms. In given paper these idioms are referred to as human body-related. The paper aims at revealing the specifics of lexical and semantic constituents of the idioms with reference to their contexts. We collected 200 human body-related English idioms from academic books and dictionaries. The research comprised four stages. The thematic classification based on the lexical structure of the idioms revealed prevalence of the idioms comprising words head, eyes, heart, back, foot, and hand. The similarities found in the meanings of all the idioms under study provided semantic classification into five groups, namely, characteristics, action, state, causation, and ability. Next we focused on contextual and semantic specifics of the idioms. In particular, the idioms, containing the word head were studied in the texts of the British National Corpus. The contexts provided the following additional meanings of the idioms: higher position, achievements, location, expenses, and inability to do something. The revealed collocations follow AV+K type. The obtained results and developed algorithm may be applied to lexical and contextual studies of idioms and lexical groups.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to church: The use of the Present Perfect after the conjunction since

ABSTRACT Previous research on the Present Perfect suggests that the latter is acceptable in since-clauses only if the situation expressed by the subordinate clause extends in time up until the present, as in Tony has been happy since he has been taking Prozac, i.e. if the Present Perfect in the since-clause is a Universal Perfect whose predication is true at all subintervals in the time-interval delimited by since and not an Existential Perfect whose predication is true only at a certain moment therein, as in *Tony has been happy since he has visited Cape Cod. The present study puts the implications of this claim and others found in the literature to the empirical test through an examination of all of the 2,621 occurrences of the Present Perfect in since-clauses with pronominal subjects in the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. A significant proportion of the data is shown to contradict the generalizations proposed in previous studies. An explanation capable of accounting for all of the uses of the Present Perfect in since-clauses is put forward based on the complex meaning of this verbal structure which involves the notion of present stative after-phase of a past situation. The Present Perfect is possible in a since-clause whenever the beginning of the after-phase serves to mark the beginning-point in the past from which the main-clause situation unfolds towards the present. The beginning of the after-phase is argued to be interpretable in two ways: either as the first moment after the end of the prior situation or as the first moment in the process of accruing the after-phase itself.

The Bias Toward Single-Unit Turns in Conversation

ABSTRACT Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson argued that the rules for turn taking for conversation involve a confluence of pressures that bias turn size toward single turn constructional units (TCUs), which leads to an empirical prediction that turns are more likely to be composed of single (vs. multiple) TCUs. We directly test and confirm this “single-TCU bias” by using conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, and Bayesian statistics to assess the conversational subcorpus of the British National Corpus (BNC-C), which contains 475,509 turns of talk. Our results confirm this bias, showing that 67% of turns are composed of single TCUs; we discuss why this estimate is conservative. The mean word length for single-TCU turns was 4.5 (SD = 3.4), compared to 19.9 (SD = 22.6) for multi-TCU turns. Our findings reinforce the ideas that the natural habitat for an accountable social action is the single TCU (vs. the turn), and that interaction is fundamentally organized (i.e., both produced and understood) on an action-by-action basis, which is a TCU-by-TCU basis. Data are in British English.

Корпусный анализ широкозначных пар английских фразовых глаголов с сателлитами on/off

The paper aims to identify the role of phrasal verbs in the lexical-morphological structure of the modern English language. The scientific originality of the research lies in the fact that it uses the British National Corpus and EnTenTen15 based on the SketchEngine messenger to form the frequency representation of the highly frequent phrasal verbs with satellites ‘on/off’. The study demonstrates a range of relations between highly frequent phrasal verbs and their features in synchronic and diachronic aspects of the English language. As a result of the corpus-based analysis, it has been proved that satellite ‘on’ dominates in the opposition of satellites ‘on/off’. The frequency interpretation of eurysemic pairs of phrasal verbs with the studied satellites in different spheres of activity has been presented.

The Analysis of Sentence Construction and Meaning Interpretation of English Break Verbs and their Verbs Equivalence in Buginese Language

The purpose of this research is to compare the sentence form and meaning interpretation of 'Break' Verbs in English and Buginese. The sentence construction and the meaning interpretation of verbs confined to Break Verb from English and Buginese language were compared with regards to Dixon’s Affect Verbs Construction and Halliday’s Functional Grammar Construction. The data of this research were collected from two sources. The English data were collected from British National Corpus (BNC) while the Buginese Data was collected from field observation and interview on Soppeng Buginese speaking community. The data were collected and analyzed using Descriptive Qualitative Methods. According to the findings of this study, it was found eighteen Break Verbs in the English language and nineteen in the Buginese language; 2) The ‘Break’ Verbs in both languages are realized into sentences through a number of selections of constructions set up in the two theories that were examined in this research and some additional constructions where each construction plays some contribution to the meaning interpretation; 3) The Break Verbs found in both languages have some similarities and differences regarding their sentence construction and meaning interpretation.

A Comparative Analysis of Search for and Look for in Four Corpora

The main goal of this paper is to compare search for and look for in the TV Corpus (TVC), the Movie Corpus (MC), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and the British National Corpus (BNC). When it comes to the TV Corpus, it is interesting to point out that look for was preferable to search for in the TV programs of America, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland. A further point to note is that the frequency of search for (1,898 tokens) and look for (5,423 tokens) reached a peak in the 2010s. With respect to the Movie Corpus, it is interesting to note that look for was favored over search for in the movies of six countries. More interestingly, search for (515 tokens) and look for (2,259 tokens) reached a peak in the 2010s. The COCA clearly shows that search for truth (369 tokens) and look for ways (566 tokens) are the most preferred by Americans. It is significant to note, on the other hand, that 36.36% of forty four nouns are the collocations of both search for and look for in the COCA. Similarly, the BNC shows that search for evidence (19 tokens) is the most commonly used one in the UK, whereas look for work (34 tokens) is the most widely used one. Finally, it is noteworthy that 17.64% of fifty one nouns are the collocations of both search for and look for in the BNC.

English adjectives of very similar meaning used in combination: an exploratory, corpus-aided study

This article reports on research into the phenomenon whereby English adjectives of very similar meaning are sometimes used in combination, either as an uncoordinated sequence (as in ‘simple straightforward’) or as a coordinated pair (as in ‘dull and monotonous’). One of the preliminary goals of the research is to identify areas of meaning in which such adjective combinations typically occur. In order to find relevant examples, the British National Corpus was used as a source of textual material to work from. The article explains the methodology employed to locate phrasal items of interest, which partly involved using the Phrases in English (PIE) database. Details are presented of ten specific areas of descriptive meaning where a number of different adjective combinations were found, as well as a set of emphasizing and/or intensifying adjectives with similar characteristics. Possible reasons are suggested for the doubling-up of meaning, and the relevance of the phenomenon to synonym studies is discussed. More than 200 corpus examples are included.

A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Adjectives and Synonyms -Beautiful, Handsome, and Pretty

The aim of this study was to investigate the three synonyms beautiful, handsome and pretty in terms of their meanings and collocation with the help of the Longman Dictionary of contemporary English 6th edition (2014) and the British National Corpus (BNC). Only 100 concordance lines of each synonyms were selected from the corpora. This study was also aimed at investigating the similarities and differences between the three synonyms. The findings of this research declare that these synonyms are similar in their core meaning but are different in their detailed meanings and collocation. The results also clarifies that corpus provide more additional information that is not the part of dictionaries. It is also clear from the study that synonyms cannot be used in all the contexts alternately. Moreover, this study states that corpus is more helpful for the teachers of English as well as for second language learners (L2) because it gives additional information regarding any set of synonyms than dictionaries give. The teachers as well as students should be guided that they may get additional information about data from corpus than the dictionaries. As a result the students will be able in differentiating synonyms in a set by using both the resources, Learners Dictionaries and corpora, and in this way they will be able to increase their vocabulary.

The Effect of Teaching English Synonyms through Data-Driven Learning (DDL) on Thai EFL Students’ Vocabulary Learning

This paper examines to what extent paper-based data-driven learning (DDL) activities can improve Thai EFL students’ vocabulary learning concerning three English synonymous adjectives, which are naughty, disobedient and rebellious, and explores the attitudes of the participants towards learning through the DDL activities. This study was a one-group pre-test post-test design conducted over a four-week period. The convenience-sampled participants were 30 Thai EFL students studying in the Faculty of Education, majoring in English. There were three research instruments in this study including pre/post-test, Thai version of attitudes questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The instructional treatment, the paper-based DDL materials, was designed based on the criteria of meanings, collocations, formality and grammatical patterns. The corpus data representing each synonymous adjective was drawn from The British National Corpus (BNC) with the assistance of the online tool Sketch Engine (SkE). Using paired-sample t-test, the results indicate a statistically significant difference in the mean scores (p < 0.001) suggesting that their vocabulary knowledge had been developed after learning through DDL activities. Furthermore, the participants had positive attitudes towards learning through DDL as they found it enjoyable and effective in learning English. Thus, the findings of the study have a profound impact in the fields of English language teaching as it is clearly seen that corpus data serves as a useful tool to explore the authentic language patterns and help enhance learners’ metalinguistic awareness.

Confidence intervals for ratios of means applied to corpus-based word frequency classes

The words we choose when we communicate with one another convey meaning and information. In written or spoken language, we tend to employ a relatively small number of words repeatedly whereas a large number of words in the lexicon are seldom used. By considering a ratio of means of the most prevalent word in a body of texts (or corpus) compared to that of the word in question, one can quantify the prevalence of the word in question. Furthermore, the concept of word classes or grouping words having similar measures of prevalence enables the investigator to compare the words. Using a sample of texts having varying lengths from a corpus, the sample mean relative frequency of a word and the maximum likelihood estimator using the zero-inflated beta distribution serve as two measures of the prevalence of a word. We construct and then compare asymptotic confidence intervals involving ratios of means for a number of words in the British National Corpus, a 100 million-word collection of written and spoken language of a wide range of British English. We also examine the sample sizes required to meet specific objectives regarding word classes and ratios of means.

Collocation Use in EFL Learners' Writing Across Multiple Language Proficiencies: A Corpus-Driven Study.

The investigation of learners’ interlanguage could greatly contribute to the teaching of English as a foreign language and the development of teaching materials. The present study investigates the collocational profiles of large-scale written production by English learners with varied L1 backgrounds and different proficiency levels. Using the British National Corpus as reference corpus, learners’ collocation use was extracted by corpus query language and further identified by t-score via Python programming language. The collocation list consists of 2,501 make/take + noun (the direct object) collocations. Findings show that proficient learners tend to use collocations containing more semantically complicated and abstract noun elements for varied communication tasks. Moreover, advanced learners are inclined to use collocations comprised of more difficult and longer noun elements.

English verb-argument construction profiles in a specialized academic corpus: Variation by genre and discipline

This study investigates genre and discipline effects on the frequency and contingency profiles of English Verb-Argument Constructions (VACs), with implications for English for Specific Purposes pedagogy. Specifically, 11 VACs that have featured prominently in recent analyses of general domain English usage in the British National Corpus are examined in a specialized corpus of 400 research articles. Analysis includes normalized frequency, type-token ratio, frequency rank, and delta P as a measure of verb-construction association strength, with the results analyzed across disciplines and in comparison to previous analyses on general domain English corpora. A clear consistency was found in the frequency and frequency ranks of VACs across the specialized and general corpora, which points towards the importance and meaningful nature of abstract constructions. At the same time, variation in the verb-construction contingency profiles also highlights the importance of genre and community. Findings are discussed within usage-based perspectives, with careful attention to the implications for English for Specific Purposes pedagogy.

A A Corpus-Based Study on Synonyms in Chinese Learners’ English: A Case Study of “Affair” and “Event”

Using British National Corpus (BNC) as the reference corpus and Chinese Learner’s English Corpus (CLEC) as the observed corpus, this paper attempts to analyze synonyms in Chinese learners’ English based on “event” and “affair.” By comparing the frequency, colligation, collocates, and semantic prosody of the two words in BNC, it is found that “event” and “affair” differ from each other in terms of frequency and semantic prosody. The same comparison is made between BNC and CLEC. It is found that Chinese learners’ English vocabulary is rather small, and there is no significant difference in the semantic prosody of the two words between English native speakers and Chinese English learners except that Chinese English learners have a misunderstanding about “love affair,” which may be attributed to their negligence of semantic prosody in the process of learning.

CONCEPT A WORK OF GENIUS IN THE WORLD VIEW OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING SOCIETY

The article is dedicated to the investigation of the verbalization of the concept A WORK OF GENIUS in the world view of the English-speaking society. The study is based on general explanatory dictionaries of the English language, specialized dictionaries and encyclopedias, English artistic, publicist and scientific texts, as well as the British National Corpus. The English conceptual field GENIUS consists of three segments connected by a cyclic relationship. Each of these segments is denoted by a corresponding nuclear concept: GENIUS as a phenomenon, GENIUS as a person, and A WORK OF GENIUS. The ontological cycle consists of the following three parts: 1) a person endowed with 2) the gift of genius creates 3) a masterpiece that is recognized as a work of genius (in art or science), and this gives its creator the status of a genius. The nuclear components of the structure of the given concept are almost identical in both versions of the world view, which indicates the stability and universality of the key characteristics of the phenomenon of genius in the picture of the world of English-speaking society. The nuclear components reflect extraordinary mental and creative abilities of a genius and originality of his work. At the same time, the naive picture of the world demonstrates the existence of a rather voluminous periphery in the structure of the corresponding concepts, in which evaluative and often opposite in content features predominate. The relatively small amount of peripheral features of all nuclear concepts in the scientific picture of the world is accounted for by the fact that in scientific discourse the most frequent conceptual features are nuclear components. We see the prospect of the research in the possibility of further studies of geniuses in the paradigm of linguopersonology, contrastive linguistics and psycholinguistics.

An exploration of the structural and colligational characteristics of lexical bundles in L1–L2 corpora for English language teaching

Multi-word expressions are formulaic language universals with arbitrary and idiosyncratic collocations. Their usage and mastery are required of learners of a second language in achieving naturalness. However, despite the importance of multi-word expressions to mastering a second language, their syntactic architecture and colligational possibilities have received little attention in English language teaching (ELT). This study examined lexical bundles, a type of multi-word expressions, to understand their structure and co-occurrence possibilities with other syntactic elements. It was aided by an automated frequency-driven approach using two corpora, the British component of the British National Corpus – a first language (L1) corpus – and a purpose-built Nigerian Media Discourse corpus – a second language (L2) corpus. Two items of lexical analysis software were used to extract three-word lexical bundles with a minimum of 50 frequencies per corpus. The syntactic structures of the identified lexical bundles were determined, and their in-corpus usages were analysed for their colligational characteristics. Results showed that both corpora had instances of general and genre-specific lexical bundles (LBs) with varying frequencies. Five categories of lexical bundles with different structural patterns and peculiar colligational characteristics were identified in the study. Since lexical bundles are more frequently found in both L1–L2 texts, mastering how they are used will further enhance the teaching of English as a second language. The teaching of lexical bundles as a multi-word expression is therefore recommended in ELT as a way of enhancing learners’ proficiency and naturalness in English.

The effect of the British National Corpus' Frequency Lists What’s App Group Discussion on L2 Learners' Receptive Vocabulary Size

This quasi-experimental study aimed to examine the effects of vocabulary learning through WhatsApp chat group discussion on L2 students' vocabulary size at a university in Pakistan. British National Corpus' (BNC's) frequency lists were used for the treatment of the experimental group. Thirty students were placed into each group, one experimental and one control group. Instruments used to collect data included an established vocabulary size test, and interviews were conducted to measure the perception of participants from the experimental group about vocabulary learning from the frequency lists through WhatsApp. The independent t-test observed that the experimental group had a significant treatment effect, and improvement was observed in the mean score p-value < .05. The qualitative data were thematically analysed. The primary conclusion of this study is that the WhatsApp group vocabulary discussion did significantly help improve the experimental group's mean score, illustrating the positive impact of the WhatsApp vocabulary peer discussion on the group's vocabulary size.

Концепт “insularity” как часть понятийной картины мирабританцев и его языковая репрезентацияв британском варианте английского языка (на материале языка СМИ)

. In modern research, works on peculiarities of various cultures and the connection between concepts and cultures are becoming more and more topical. The article deals with the concept of ‘insularity’ as part of British conceptual worldview. The purpose is to analyze the linguistic means representing the concept of ‘insularity’ in British English. British mentality inevitably finds its linguistic manifestation in British English. This statement is supported by examples from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the dailyBritish newspaper The Guardian. In the course of research, the author analyzed dictionary definitions of lexemes that form an integral part of the concept in question. These lexical units are noted to carry negative connotations and be labeled ‘disapproving’ in authoritative monolingual dictionaries. The material was selected from the contexts presented in the BNC and The Guardian using the continuous sampling method. The main research methods employed are contextual, linguocognitive, and discourse analyses. The lexical items were taken from authoritative monolingual dictionaries, in which more than a half of the analyzed lexical units are marked as ‘disapproving’. Among these were words such as ‘complacent’, ‘philistine’, etc. Having analyzed the usage of the words ‘insular’, ‘insularity’, and other lexical units as used for characterization of the British, the author draws a conclusion about the role the concept of ‘insularity’ plays in shaping British conceptual worldview. Further research in the field would promote better understanding of British mentality and the peculiarities of British English.

A Corpus-based Analysis on Distributional Patterns of Collocations in Chinese High School English Textbooks

The paper explores the distributional patterns of collocations identified in Chinese high school textbooks in comparison with collocations found in the native reference corpus. Six series of Chinese high school English textbooks from the six publishers were compiled as the textbook corpus. The British National Corpus (BNC) was selected as the native norm. Three collocation types, adjective + noun collocation (ANC), verb + noun collocation (VNC) and noun + noun collocation (NNC), were investigated in the paper. The distribution of the collocations was compared between the two corpora in terms of four statistical measures: density, diversity, repetition and association strength. The results showed that whereas the diversity of collocations was higher in the native reference corpus than in the textbook corpus, the other measures showed the opposite pattern. This may partly be due to the pedagogical nature of the textbooks. Moreover, the findings revealed that the textbooks represent a comparable number of VNCs, over-represent ANCs and under-represent NNCs in comparison with the native reference corpus. The findings suggest that textbook authors take account of incorporating more diverse collocations and more NNCs to model more native-like texts in the teaching materials targeting higher-grade students.