Concordance Lines Research Articles

A corpus-assisted discourse study of parental concerns regarding multilingual child-rearing

ABSTRACT Many parents have concerns about raising their children with multiple languages. However, there is a paucity of previous research regarding parental concerns about multilingual child-rearing, particularly in multilingual societies. We address this gap with a corpus-assisted discourse study of parental concerns regarding multilingual child-rearing in Quebec, Canada. We created two corpora comprising 641 parents’ responses to an open-ended survey question regarding their main concerns about raising multilingual infants/toddlers (English corpus: 12,502 words, French corpus: 9,360 words). We examined frequencies, collocations, concordance lines, and longer segments to investigate the nature and strength of different concerns. Our results revealed that two previously-attested concern types – cognition concerns and exposure-fluency concerns – were most prominent. The results also provided more nuanced insights into the nature of these concerns. Moreover, the results revealed two additional concern types: concerns regarding trilingual/heritage language transmission and concerns about the effect of multilingualism on children’s identity and social/emotional well-being. These had not previously been attested. Our research makes a theoretical contribution by advancing knowledge about parental concerns and how they can contribute to the study of family language policies. Additionally, our findings may serve as the basis for improving support for multilingual families.

L2 Learners’ Perspectives on Data-Driven Learning for Identifying Properties of Near-Synonymous Words: A Convergent Mixed-Methods Study

This study examines second language (L2) learners’ perspectives regarding the affordances and challenges of using the Data-Driven Learning (DDL) to identify the properties of near-synonymous words. Employing a convergent mixed-method design, this study deciphers the perceptions of 40 undergraduate L2 learners majoring in English language teaching. After an initial identification of the learners’ vocabulary levels, the experienced benefits and barriers associated with carrying out experiential tasks were elicited via questionnaire data and open-ended survey questions. Descriptive statistics, including means and standard deviations, were revealed and thematic analyses of the responses to the survey questions were documented. The results indicate that completing tasks through the corpus was found to enhance their knowledge of collocations. Integrating corpus tasks into YouGlish (an online practice tool for authentic spoken English in context) was found to increase their awareness of the contextual properties of words. The identification of condensed language exposure, lexical inference, and elicitation of flexible and context-specific patterns were reported to be beneficial. Acknowledging these benefits, gaining familiarity with the corpus interface, encountering limited access to search queries, and analyzing large amounts of concordance lines posed challenges for learners. This research presents the implementation of the DDL supported by experiential learning, contextually rich input, and inductive reasoning tasks in vocabulary learning by further offering instructional implications in L2 contexts.

Using bundle analysis to uncover formulaic language patterns in seminar discussions

Seminars serve as a valuable instructional tool in higher education, enabling scholars to engage in discussions, ask questions, and gain a clear account of the topic through interactive sessions. This leads to the significance of deciphering the discursive patterns and linguistic choices made by speakers in these academic discussions, one of these patterns is lexical bundles. This study focused on identifying the most frequently used four-word lexical bundles in 78 seminar discussions sourced from three online repositories. Drawing on Biber et al.’s taxonomy, the identified bundles underwent functional categorisation. This involved examining their contextual meanings through concordance lines to reveal something of the discoursal and communicative practices inherent in this genre, and explore how speakers organise their discourse in a formulaic way. The findings demonstrate the prominent presence of formulaic bundles in seminar discussions. Stance, which relates to the speaker’s degree of knowledge, their attitude and judgments, emerged as the most salient function of bundles, followed by referential and discourse-organising functions. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of discourse decisions in seminars, and offer insights into the formulaic linguistic choices made by speakers as they interact with their audience.

Defining, labelling and evaluating poverty: A corpus-based discourse analysis of category construction in The Times newspaper 1900–2009

This paper explores the construction of different understandings of poverty in The Times newspaper (1900–2009). Using corpus-based discourse analysis, it examines the premodification of poverty with different nouns. Rising to prominence from the 1950s onwards, the resulting compound nouns, including world poverty and child poverty, facilitate the discursive construction of different types of poverty as distinct entities. Through close reading of concordance lines and collocate analysis, the paper investigates how these categories are presented as qualitatively similar/different and discusses how such representations reflect broader ideological contexts in the UK.

SURFING AN ENGLISH CORPUS WITH OTHER LEARNERS OF ENGLISH

The paper describes some experiences of surfing an English corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA for short) with other learners of English. The challenges expressed by other learners inform us of the problems other users may have that we may not be aware of. Several examples of word-form searches, lemma searches, or part-of speech (POS) searches in both word/phrase queries and collocate queries are shown and explained. We can also limit our word/lemma searches to certain parts-of-speech, although the part-of-speech tagging is not always accurate. On top of that, there are wild-card symbols that we can use in our queries. The word/phrase query window in COCA enables us to search for just a word-form or a lemma, or a succession of word-forms, lemmas, and parts-of-speech as well as the wildcards, within limits. When we make a collocate query, we look for the co-occurrences of one item (a word, a lemma, a POS or a wildcard) that we put in the collocate window, and the item[s] we put in the word/phrase window. We also specify the distance of the ‘collocate’ and the word/phrase and the direction, to the right or to the left, or both to the right and left. Unless we change the default, it will search for the ‘collocate’ within the space of four words to the left and four words to the right of what we put in the word/phrase window. Searching a corpus together can reveal the misperceptions and difficulties that some learners may have, which if properly handled, can lead us to valuable insight as we learn from each other. We learn from other learners, for instance, that some of them are not aware that even though the frequency result of a collocate query shows just a word or the word-forms of a lemma, it is actually capturing the co-occurrences of that one word or that lemma with the item in the word/phrase window that we can see in the concordance lines. It is therefore advisable to give a reminder to always check the concordance lines. By checking the concordance lines we can judge whether or not the co-occurrences are indeed a case of collocation or just co-occurrences within the specified distance where actually the so-called ‘collocate’ does not relate to the item in the word/phrase window. While scrutinizing the concordance lines we can also check whether certain expressions are used in the meanings we have in mind. Whereas the ability, speed and accuracy in making these judgments, as can be expected, vary among corpus users, it is worth noting that the lemma-word form concept, POS codes, even some POS themselves are still a challenge for some learners. Examining the concordance lines can also reveal how speakers use the same expression in various ways. The paper ends with a discussion of the potential usefulness of the concordance lines as raw material that can be selected and edited to give learners additional exposure to what is obtained from other means of learning, hopefully leading to better language acquisition.

LEXICAL PROFILE OF A TURKISH SADNESS VERB DERTLEN-: A CORPUS DRIVEN ANALYSIS

This Study employs a corpus driven approach to analyze the lexical profile of a Turkish verb that communicates sadness which is considered to be a negative emotion. The study focuses on the data obtained from Turkish National Corpus (TNC) within the framework of Extended Lexical Units offered by (Stubbs, 2005). Depending on the concordance lines of the verb dertlen- its syntactic properties, collocational tendencies, context dependent semantic and pragmatic qualifications were identified to understand the probable semantic value of it in terms of cognitive traits of sadness. It was found that dertlen- refers to a sadness which is derived from others’ troubles rather than self-related issues and this finding was discussed within the framework of empathy- altruism hypothesis (Batson,1991). From this respect, the verb gives some clues about the Turkish culture which is characterized with ‘altruistic’ behavior. The study also shows that dertlen- refers to past/present time negativities more frequently when compared to future related sadness concepts. Underlining the validity of corpus-driven approaches, the corpus data demonstrated that this sadness verb has its own cognitive patterns and this schematic nature of dertlen- dictates a particular linguistic environment which also shapes semantic and pragmatic load of the verb. Finally, thanks to this research, we were able to place dertlen- correctly inside Scherer's (2001) cognitive evaluation patterns for sadness.

NEW PARADIGM OF CORPUS ANALYSIS OF MILITARY-POLITICAL NEWSPAPERS ARTICLES

This study using the corpus of newspaper articles from The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times attempts to explore contemporary methods of corpus analysis. It emphasizes that a corpus-driven approach is relevant for improving the technology of balancing text corpora. This approach is characterized by ways of representing corpus data and unifying decoded information based on the corpus. To this end, urgent news and international reports covering the political strategies of various countries in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war were analyzed. It is noted that understanding the essence of the defined issue required outlining the specifics of studying military-political language patterns within the corpus-driven approach. The research found that a variety of data types can influence the formation of the linguistic environment, which explains variations of language system models in textual dimensions. The results also showed random concordance lines, the semantic field of lexemes, and the most frequent units of the journalistic language system that reveal linguistic changes during the war period. Additionally, the study identifies final variables in statistical models, dominantsemantic positions of linguistic constructions, the valency of marked units, and their linguistic potential, status, and functions within the corpus. The importance of using Text Mining technology, the ANNOVA test, and Cortical.io software for data processing is also justified. It is concluded that improving corpus analysis methods depends on text attribution, hierarchical clustering, determining statistically significant differences between mean values of variables through analysis of variance. Moreover, the study enable the conclusion that the text processing mechanism plays an important role in the development of new paradigm of corpus analysis.

CONCEPTUAL “HEART” METAPHORS IN AMERICAN MOMMY BLOGS

Based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), this study investigates the use and conceptualization of “heart” metaphors in the self-built corpus of 500 American mommy blog posts in 2021-2022 using some corpus tools namely word sketch and concordance lines. The study aims at exploring the different ways of conceptualizing the metaphorical expressions and the frequency of each category of “heart” metaphor. The results show that HEART IS AN OBJECT is the most common metaphor in the mommy blog corpus, followed by HEART IS A CONTAINER and HEART IS A PERSON.

“I have known….” A Corpus-driven Study of Personal Pronouns in Letters of Recommendation in an L2 Context

In recent times, there has been an upsurge of scholarly attention on hitherto occluded genres such as the Letter of Recommendation (LoR). Although several studies have been conducted on the LoR, studies on lexico-grammatical features are rare. This study, therefore, adopts a corpus-driven approach to examine the use of personal pronouns (PPs) in LoRs written by Ghanaian academics. A specialized corpus of LoR, totalling approximately twenty thousand (20, 000) running words was created for this study. The concordance tool in AntConc (v. 3.2.4.) was employed to search for all instances of PPs in the corpus. The concordance lines were manually examined to determine the referents of the PPs. The study revealed the diversity of PP resources in LoRs. It was also found that the PPs were mainly recommender-oriented, recommendee-oriented, or requester-oriented, culminating in a proposed model of discourse-internal and external participants in LoRs. Again, the study revealed that LoR is typified by singular PPs, reflecting the fact that it is mainly authored by an individual for an individual. The findings have implications for the pragmatics of PPs and the scholarship on LoR. It is thus recommended that an intercultural study of LoR be undertaken to establish variations in the use of personal pronouns. Keywords: Corpus Linguistics, L2 Context, Letter of recommendation, English for Specific Purposes

Dynamicity of interaction in academic discourse: Evidence from a corpus-based study

Metadiscourse features are the rhetorical devices that serve to maintain the writer-reader and speaker-audience interaction. The way metadiscourse features are utilized in spoken and written modes may differ given the nature of these two modes of communication. For this reason, the present study set to unpack the distributional pattern of metadiscourse features as well as investigate the construction and maintenance of writer-reader and speaker-audience interaction in academic written and spoken English. To achieve this goal, two corpora of The British Academic Written English Corpus and British Academic Spoken English Corpus were utilized as the data gathering resources. To categorize the metadiscourse features, Hyland's taxonomy was selected. The quantitative analysis of the data showcased that the written corpus was more interactive oriented despite the fact that the spoken corpus showed a propensity towards the interactional category of metadiscourse features. On the other hand, the analysis of the concordance lines illustrated that academic conventions differed significantly in spoken and written academic English which resulted in a dynamic interaction between writer-reader as well as speaker-audience. The results of the study at hand may have implications in such lines of research as corpus linguistics, contrastive analysis and genre studies.

The impact of data-driven learning form-focused tasks on learners’ task engagement: An intervention study

Abstract Data-driven learning (DDL) form-focused tasks are a relatively new concept. These tasks involve using concordance lines to teach language in a way that integrates discovery learning, authentic language use, consciousness-raising, and the communicative use of language. Given their novelty, there haven’t been many studies on how they impact learners’ engagement. Therefore, this study sought to study whether DDL form-focused tasks influence English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ task engagement. A total of 114 Iranian EFL learners were randomly divided between comparison and intervention groups in a study that utilized an experimental (comparison group, pretest, and post-test) design within a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design. The comparison group completed 10 non-DDL form-focused tasks, whereas the intervention group completed 10 DDL form-focused tasks. The results of t-tests and repeated-measures ANOVA indicated that incorporating DDL form-focused tasks into English classes enhanced EFL learners’ task engagement in the short run. However, the impact of DDL form-focused tasks on EFL learners’ task engagement was not durable. Moreover, analyzing semi-structured interview data suggested that using DDL-enhanced tasks with a form-focused approach increases EFL learners’ task engagement by triggering their curiosity, improving their autonomy, enhancing their concentration and interest, and facilitating their discovery learning. The present study lends more credence to the application of such tasks. The paper ends with implications for English language teaching and materials development.

The contracts word list: Integral vocabulary for reading and writing English contracts

Both Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF) and Legal English as a Lingua Franca (LELF) users engage with legal contracts regularly. However, contractual language is notoriously complex, due in part to the vocabulary it contains. To help mitigate the challenges related to learning the vocabulary of contracts, this paper introduces a word list of American English contracts called the Contracts Word List (CWL). We describe the compilation of the Corpus of English Business Contracts (CEBC) that represents six major contract types in 48 million words. The extraction of prevalent and specialized words from the CEBC is described, following validation procedures in terms of the word list's reliability and stability. The final word lists contains 684 lemmas along with definitions, parts of speech, illustrative concordance lines, and adjusted frequencies from the full corpus and each major contract sub-type. We provide recommendations to ELF professionals and teachers on using the CWL.

A Corpus-based Teaching Design of Junior High School English Reading from the Perspective of Schema Theory

This paper takes the reading text The Night The Earth Didn＇t Sleep in Unit 4 of English for senior high School published by People's Education Press as an example to probe into the concrete process of designing English reading teaching activities assisted by corpus in senior high school under the guidance of schema theory. Through the word frequency list extracted from corpus, students are guided to predict the main topic of the text, so as to realize the lead-in of reading text, and trained to predict and to grasp the main facts, further to explore the content of articles and paragraphs through keyword list and concordance line, so as to map the text structure, which may contribute to students' reading skills of skimming and grasping key information; Finally, the corpus-based approach can also be used in the teaching of vocabulary and grammar at the linguistic level after acquiring the structure and content of the text at a macro level.

Review of Pascual & Mark (2021): Beyond Concordance Lines: Corpora in language education

Review of Pascual & Mark (2021): Beyond Concordance Lines: Corpora in language education

Surgical terminological units: structure, meaning, distribution

The article focuses on a crucial human-related issue of nominating surgical interventions. The authors dwell upon the terms of cardiovascular manipulations and lower limb amputation. Medical terminology is of primary significance to both professionals and non-medical subjects due to its vital nature. Given the prevalence of current anthropocentric research works, this study is relevant. The relevance is further supported by a set of approaches to the surgical terminology followed in the study, in particular, semantic, structural, contextual analysis as well as the tools of online and offline text processing. The complexity and sophistication of the surgical discourse requires detailed and multifaceted analysis for their meaning and contextual use clarification. The article aims at revealing the semantic and structural specifics of the surgical terms based on medical written and spoken texts. The research rested on approximately 200 terminological units retrieved from the texts of a surgical Handbook and surgical manipulation video scripts. The work was performed in four stages. The analysis revealed that structurally, nominal word combinations prevail over verbal ones. The most frequent verbal meanings are ‘to open’, ‘to close’, ‘to introduce’, ‘to remove’, ‘to connect’ and ‘to find’. The semantic classification of the terms revealed that the stages of surgery, anatomical structures and instruments are nominated more frequently. The concordance lines generated by the AntConc tool for the key terms provided vivid representation of their contextual functions, features and collocations with body parts, body systems, and implementation methods.

Generative AI for corpus approaches to discourse studies: A critical evaluation of ChatGPT

This paper explores the potential of generative artificial intelligence technology, specifically ChatGPT, for advancing corpus approaches to discourse studies. The contribution of artificial intelligence technologies to linguistics research has been transformational, both in the contexts of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. However, shortcomings in the efficacy of such technologies for conducting automated qualitative analysis have limited their utility for corpus approaches to discourse studies. Acknowledging that new technologies in data analysis can replace and supplement existing approaches, and in view of the potential affordances of ChatGPT for automated qualitative analysis, this paper presents three replication case studies designed to investigate the applicability of ChatGPT for supporting automated qualitative analysis within studies using corpus approaches to discourse analysis.The findings indicate that, generally, ChatGPT performs reasonably well when semantically categorising keywords; however, as the categorisation is based on decontextualised keywords, the categories can appear quite generic, limiting the value of such an approach for analysing corpora representing specialised genres and/or contexts. For concordance analysis, ChatGPT performs poorly, as the results include false inferences about the concordance lines and, at times, modifications of the input data. Finally, for function-to-form analysis, ChatGPT also performs poorly, as it fails to identify and analyse direct and indirect questions. Overall, the results raise questions about the affordances of ChatGPT for supporting automated qualitative analysis within corpus approaches to discourse studies, signalling issues of repeatability and replicability, ethical challenges surrounding data integrity, and the challenges associated with using non-deterministic technology for empirical linguistic research.

An Investigation Into Learners’ Cognitive Processes in Data-Driven Learning: Case Studies of Six Learners of Chinese

Abstract Data-driven learning (DDL), the direct use of corpus by learners in the second language classroom, has been shown to be effective in improving learners’ acquisition of various English linguistic items (Boulton & Cobb, 2017). However, it is still limited to our knowledge regarding how learners interact with DDL-related materials or tools and how DDL works in the learning/teaching of languages other than English. This study aims to closely examine the cognitive processes of six learners of Chinese in using printed concordance-based materials to learn Chinese resultative constructions. These materials contained adapted complete concordance sentences drawn from the Lancaster Corpus for Mandarin Chinese (McEnery & Xiao, 2004). The results show that in general, learners employed various strategies when scrutinising the concordance lines, particularly cognitive strategies such as summarising and grouping. Differences among individual learners were also found: learners who used more diverse strategies with higher frequencies could successfully infer the regularities, which led to learning gains. The study provides some implications for effective teacher guidance in DDL.

The conceptual nature of the Turkish emotion term ‘Heyecan’

Abstract This study aims at investigating the Turkish emotion concept heyecan (i.e., thrill, excitement, and nervousness), which can be used with different semantic contents depending on the context. The conceptual metaphor theory frames this analysis to reveal the metaphorical and metonymical conceptualizations of heyecan. For this purpose, the lemma heyecan is searched in the Turkish National Corpus, and 700 concordance lines gathered from the corpus are examined through the metaphor identification procedure to identify the source domains and interpret the conceptual coding. The findings reveal a folk model of heyecan in which several metaphors and metonymies characterize different dimensions of it: arousal–existence–disappearance, intensity–passivity, control, cause–effect, and individual–social. Qualitative and quantitative findings embody various linguistic metaphors that can be grouped under several source domain categories including substance in a container, location, and object as the most frequent ones, whereas physiological effect is the most frequent metonymy. The metaphors and metonymies are discussed with their examples in this study. The concordance lines show several emotion terms that heyecan is collocated with, among which the emotion families of ‘fear’ and ‘happiness’ outnumber the rest. This study demonstrates how corpus data are helpful in pinpointing the conceptual content of an emotion term in a coherent way.

Representation of Male and Female Characters in Woolf’s Selected Fictions: A Corpus Based Stylistic Analysis

The present research comprises a corpus-based stylistic analysis of Woolf’s selected fiction, To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway. This study aims to examine the representation of men and women in the chosen texts. For this purpose, adjectives have been chosen from both novels that have been employed with both male and female characters. The methodology utilized is mixed-method which merges the qualitative analysis with the quantitative one. The examples of tables along with concordance lines are taken from a specialized corpus of two novels with the aid of the software LancsBox (Version 6.0). The present study has revealed that the terms man and woman have occurred 184 times and 119 times respectively. The use of positive adjectives with male characters is more frequent than with female characters. Male characters portrayed by Virginia Woolf are shown as dominating, autonomous, and powerful. The adjectives employed with men are mostly related to their status and personality. Whereas, negative adjectives used with women reflect their demeaning, struggling, and inferior status. Actually, Woolf has employed adjectives to counteract gender bias in her chosen works, though she has portrayed women in a negative light and men in a positive light. This research will prove as a great contribution to the emerging field of corpus linguistics, integrating corpus studies with gender studies and it will recommend further investigation regarding gender roles in multiple contexts.

Meaning Representations of “Trans”, “Transgender”, “Transsexual” and “Tranny”: A Corpus-Based Analysis in Digital News and Magazines

The aim of this present study is to examine the English references in digital media that are commonly used to refer to the group of non-binary people and to explore the aspects of references used to portray their meanings towards LGBT people. The first-100 concordance lines of NOW Corpus were used as a main source of data. In order to analyze the data, two groups of the nodes: favorable terms (transgender and trans) and unfavorable terms (transsexual and tranny) were searched and analyzed by using descriptive percentage, thematic content analysis and corpus-driven discourse analysis. The findings revealed that the highest frequencies of references commonly used in digital news and magazines to refer to LGBT individuals are transgender and trans, respectively. Besides, two sub-themes were found in the concordance lines in terms of positive meanings: raising equality, showing advocacy and performance, and politics and policy and sarcastic or negative meanings: showing bias or discrimination, subgroup, abandonment and insecurity, difficulties and oppressions and derogatory and sexual desire. It can be concluded that some unfavorable terms are still underused in media, but they could reveal some positive meanings in terms of politics and policy. The implementations of study are that the meanings of some LGBT terms are dynamic, and that when used in media, content writers need to be aware of different meanings and contexts of the words.