Corpus-based Findings Research Articles

Cognitive and sociolectal constraints on the theme-recipient alternation: evidence from Mandarin

Abstract We explore the cognitive and sociolectal constraints that probabilistically regulate the theme-recipient (or “dative”) alternation in modern varieties of Mandarin and how these constraints interact with each other. Based on an extensively annotated corpus dataset and regression modeling, we found that the probabilistic grammar that shapes the theme-recipient alternation is fundamentally stable across regional and genre varieties of Mandarin. This general stability notwithstanding, significant variation regarding the importance of cognitive constraints across different sociolectal constraints is detected. Crucially, the analysis revealed that recipient syntactic complexity has a much greater effect in Taiwan Mandarin than in Mainland Mandarin. The effect of theme concreteness is also found to be significantly reduced in telephone conversations compared to broadcast news. Corpus-based findings were cross-validated using a psycholinguistic rating task experiment. While the results of the two approaches demonstrate substantial overlap, they also exhibit diverging patterns at the level of interaction between regional variety and recipient complexity, potentially indicating nuanced differences between the two approaches. The findings provide evidence that interactional patterns between cognitive and sociolectal constraints on probabilistic grammatical alternations may be shared across languages, despite their distinct socio-cultural factors that shape variation in human interaction.

Justification: Insights from Corpora

AbstractIn this paper I use insights from exploratory analyses on large English language corpora to consider the extent to which there is a widely used ordinary notion of justification that attaches to beliefs. I will show that this has ramifications for one broad approach to theorising about justification – the folk justification approach. I will argue that the corpus-based findings presented pose a challenge to the folk justification approach insofar as they suggest that “justify” is not widely used talk about the justification of our beliefs. I will conclude by presenting the possible solutions to this challenge, and remarking on their feasibility.

Why is this language complex? Cherry-pick the optimal set of features in multilingual treebanks

AbstractThis paper investigates linguistic complexity across natural languages from a corpus-based perspective and relies on the assumptions of linguistic profiling as a methodological framework. We focus in particular on the domain of syntactic complexity and analyze the distribution of a set of features taken as proxies of complexity phenomena at sentence level, which were extracted from 63 treebanks annotated according to the Universal Dependencies formalism. This dataset guarantees that the features considered are modeling the same linguistic phenomena in different treebanks, allowing reliable comparison among languages. We show that our approach is able to identify tendencies of structural proximity between languages not necessarily in line with typologically-supported classification, thus shedding light on new corpus-based findings.

The Dynamic Of Arabic Academic Writing In Postgraduate Program: Linguistic Corpus Analysis

This descriptive library research describes the active research topics and methods most interested postgraduate students majoring in Arabic in master's and doctoral degrees. It explains the representation of research dynamic map in Arabic learning supported by corpus linguistic analysis. This research applied two research approaches; the quantitative approach was used to describe the frequency of words used by the postgrad students in their academic writings analyzed by Antconc software. A qualitative approach was used to explain the representation of corpus-based findings. The data are taken from abstracts of Arabic academic writings belonging to one of the Indonesian public universities’ digital libraries. The results showed that students' most popular research topics in the last five years are education topics, namely materials and textbooks development; second, linguistics topics such as naḥwu and tarkīb, and language skills is mahārah kalam. This study shows that students tend to research naḥwu and tarkīb based on speaking skills material. The most widely used students research method was Research and Development (R RD). Students tend to develop teaching materials with various perspectives, as RD was a trend of research method. As a result, students are expected to gain an overview of the dynamic discourse map and research trends in Arabic learning as a foundation or preliminary research to select and determine research topics and methods for the final project. To avoid similarity, plagiarism, and saturation, one must choose variations in topics and types of research methods and follow existing trends.

The American 'House of Cards' – A View from a Cultural, Political and Translation-Related Perspective

The present article offers an introduction to the relationship between the entertainment and translation industry, arguing that dubbings and subtitles are by-products of the entertainment industry, directly contributing to the success of the show. It also deals with the translator’s competence, offering examples of translation challenges from the (in)famous American TV show, House of Cards, connected to terms and expressions pertaining to general knowledge of the world and of the United States. The Introduction offers an insight into audiovisual translation and its successful branches and explains binge-watching and binge-translation as well, also including several scholars’ analyses of the TV show. The Methodological Background describes how a collection of term bases came into being starting from the original English script and several Romanian subtitles of the episodes of official (DVD-release and Netflix) and amateur (freely available online) versions. This is followed by thirty examples in two sets, discussing the translation of terms belonging to general knowledge and US geopolitics in particular. The Conclusions section discusses the terms of ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ translator irrespective of their qualifications, focusing instead on ‘quality assurance’, a rather subjective term. Certain corpus-based findings are also highlighted connected to the possibilities of relying on generalization, explicitation or calque referring to general culture and US politics focusing on the intelligibility of politicotainment, a term recently coined by Riegert.

Treatment of phraseology in Chinese–English dictionaries and Chinese dictionaries for learners

There is little doubt that phraseology is at the heart of all language use. This paper examines the treatment of phraseology in two influential Chinese–English dictionaries and four Chinese dictionaries for learners. Two high-frequency characters, namely eat and hit, were selected due to their highly polysemous and phraseological nature, and their phraseological behaviors examined in the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese. The entries in the Chinese–English dictionaries and Chinese dictionaries for learners for eat and hit were examined and their dictionary records compared with the results of the previous corpus-based study. The corpus-based identification and categorization of the phraseological behaviors of eat and hit revealed that some multi-character expressions could not be covered by the terms offered by the existing taxonomy (Sag et al., 2002). Accordingly, the taxonomy was revised for the appropriate categorization of Chinese phraseology. Comparisons between corpus-based findings and entry records in Chinese–English dictionaries showed a convergence in the overall treatment of phraseology in Chinese–English dictionaries. By contrast, inconsistencies in the learners’ dictionaries were observed. It was also found that the two Chinese–English dictionaries agree with each other on the overall inclusion and exclusion of phrases. Again, we also observed many differences in the way phrases are treated between Chinese–English dictionaries and learners’ dictionaries and also among the four learners’ dictionaries. It is worth noting that hardly any of the verb-particle constructions observed in the corpus are included in the dictionaries under observation. We propose that these constructions should also be treated as phrases and the dictionaries would be more user-friendly if these phrases were not hidden in the other longer phrases, and were given the same status as the headwords. A larger corpus and sampling in the future would better characterize the taxonomy of Chinese phraseology and provide more conclusive findings.

Exploring and categorising the Arabic copula and auxiliarykānathrough enhanced part-of-speech tagging

Arabic syntax has yet to be studied in detail from a corpus-based perspective. The Arabic copula kāna (‘be’), functions also as an auxiliary, creating periphrastic tense–aspect constructions; but the literature on these functions is far from exhaustive. To analyse kāna within the one-million word Corpus of Contemporary Arabic, part-of-speech tagging (using novel, targeted enhancements to a previously described program which improves the accessibility for linguistic analysis of the output of Habash et al.’s [2012] mada disambiguator for the Buckwalter Arabic morphological analyser) is applied to disambiguate copula and auxiliary at a high rate of accuracy. Concordances of both are extracted, and 10 percent samples (499 instances of copula kāna and 387 of auxiliary kāna) are analysed manually to identify surface-level grammatical patterns and meanings. This raw analysis is then systematised according to the more general patterns’ main parameters of variation; special descriptions are developed for specific, apparently fixed-form expressions (including two phraseologies which afford expression of verbal and adjectival modality). Overall, we uncover substantial new detail, not mentioned in existing grammars (e.g., the quantitative predominance of the past imperfect construction over other uses of auxiliary kāna). There exists notable potential for these corpus-based findings to inform and enhance not only grammatical descriptions but also pedagogy of Arabic as a first or second/foreign language.

Replicating corpus-based research in English for academic purposes: Proposed replication of Cortes (2013) and Biber and Gray (2010)

AbstractAccurate description of language use is central to English for academic purposes (EAP) practice. Thanks to the development of corpus tools, it has been possible to undertake systematic studies of language in academic contexts. This line of research aims to provide detailed and accurate characterization of academic communication and to ultimately inform EAP practice. Very few studies, however, have attempted to ascertain whether, and to what the extent, corpus-based findings have achieved such goals. The diverse nature of EAP, and the unique methodological challenges involved in compiling and using corpora, provide sufficient incentive for replication research in this area. The present article makes a case for replication of corpus-based studies in the field of EAP. It argues that replication research not only enhances the credibility of corpus linguistics for EAP pedagogy and research but also provides practical advice for EAP teachers and materials designers. It then looks at how two key corpus-based studies on the topic, Cortes (2013) and Biber and Gray (2010), can be replicated with respect to replication approaches described in Porte (2012).

Mapping the Research Theme and Method: A Corpus Based to Abstract of Arabic Education Undergraduate Program

This research aims to describe the research themes and methods most in-demand and explain the representation of research mapping in the Arabic Education undergraduate program in Universitas Islam Negeri Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang through linguistic corpus analysis. This study is essential to provide a real portrait of the reality of research trends among students. A quantitative approach is used to describe the frequency of words based on the Antconc application's linguistic corpus. Meanwhile, a qualitative approach is used to represent the meaning of corpus-based findings. The data are taken from Arabic abstracts on digital library. The results showed that the research theme most interested chosen by students in the last 5 years was the learning cluster, namely materials and textbooks, the language skills cluster, namely speaking skills, and the language element cluster, namely vocabulary. This shows that students tend to research vocabulary-based speaking skills material. The research method most widely used by students is Research and Development (R&D). Students tend to develop teaching materials or dictionaries, which are a trend of research methods. These mapping results are expected to be material for evaluation to determine the Arabic language research policies for lecturers and departments. For students and further researchers, it can be used as a basis and consideration for the description of the state of the art in choosing themes and research methods.

Affective stance in constructional idioms: A usage-based constructionist approach to Mandarin [yòu X yòu Y

The Mandarin Chinese [yòu X yòu Y] is a semi-formulaic construction with two open slots X and Y, which admit a range of lexical input. Existing studies of this constructional idiom are incomplete due to the lack of a theoretical commitment to construction-level form-function pairing on the one hand and limitations in empirical data to support putative structural constraints on the other hand. This study takes a usage-based constructionist approach and offers quantitative and qualitative analyses of both naturally occurring corpus data and elicited native speaker response data. Our corpus-based findings demonstrate that [yòu X yòu Y] as a constructional idiom is highly productive, admitting all three major lexical classes in its open slots with a preponderance of adjectives. Structural constraints on X and Y are subject to frequency of use and idiosyncrasies of lexical input. The compositional semantics of X and Y concentrates in the perceptual and evaluative domains of experience. Results from the response data demonstrate that [yòu X yòu Y] expresses personal affective stance (i.e. personal liking or disliking) toward the perceptual information specified in the X and Y slots. Native speakers are not only aware of, but are able to employ, this constructional meaning in affectively appropriate contexts when given options that differed in constructional pattern but not in core lexical input. Together, our findings point to the expression of personal affective stance as the constructional pragmatic function of [yòu X yòu Y] that is larger than the sum of the meanings of the components.

Variation Within Idiomatic Variation: Exploring the Differences Between Speakers and Idioms

Corpus-based research on idiomatic variation has shown that idioms can be utilized with an extensive range of variation, including the possibility of idioms occurring with adjectival modification (e.g. make rapid headway), lexical variation (e.g. the calm/lull before the storm), and partial forms (e.g. birds of a feather [flock together]). Previous experimental research eliciting variation within idioms has tended to focus on unintended ‘slips of the tongue’, or errors in production. To date, no experimental study has explored the creativity that speakers can employ when using idioms. This study, by contrast, aims to elicit conscious and spontaneous productions of idiomatic variation, exploring just how creative speakers can be when using idiomatic expressions. Participants were asked to create headlines for newspaper snippets using provided idioms. They were explicitly told that the expression did not have to be exact and that they could be as creative as they wanted. The headlines for each idiom and each speaker were then examined. Variational patterns are observed for both idioms and speakers. For instance, some idioms (e.g. jump on the bandwagon) typically occur with partial forms, lexical variation, and/or adjectival modification; whereas other idioms (e.g. call the shots) are predominantly used in their canonical form. Similarly, some speakers (e.g. Speaker 14037) demonstrated considerable flexibility and playfulness when using the expressions, while other speakers (e.g. Speaker 14020) preferred minimal, if any, modification to the idioms. These results not only converge with previous corpus-based findings, but they also highlight the individual differences between speakers, as well as reveal how creative and innovative speakers can be when using idiomatic expressions.

Using Genre- and Corpus-based Findings to Inform the Writing of the Discussion Section of a Research Article

Using Genre- and Corpus-based Findings to Inform the Writing of the Discussion Section of a Research Article

Default sarcastic interpretations of attenuated and intensified similes

This study tests the Defaultness Hypothesis (Giora et al., 2015b, 2018), aiming to show that, “fully abstract phrasal patterns” (Goldberg, 2003, 2006), strongly attenuating (i.e., weakening) highly positive concepts, generates sarcastic interpretations by default – i.e., automatically, without relying on supportive context or internal incongruity. According to the Defaultness Hypothesis, for an interpretation, activated automatically, to be considered as default, it has to be novel, free of internal incongruity, and free of contextual support.The results of our studies support the prediction of the Defaultness Hypothesis, showing that strongly attenuated highly positive concepts (of novel, isolated similes, involving no internal incongruity) generates sarcastic interpretations by default.Additionally, our experimental results diverge from previous corpus-based findings, in which attenuated similes, containing negative internal incongruity, were found to be more sarcastic than their non-attenuated counterparts (Veale, 2013). Given that Veale's corpus-based studies relied heavily on items' internal incongruity, his findings cannot be considered default interpretations. However, our experiments, involving items free of internal incongruity do reveal a significant difference between the attenuated and non-attenuated similes. We conclude that, as predicted by the Defaultness Hypothesis, it is attenuating highly positive concepts that affects sarcasm by default, i.e., even without relying on internal incongruity.

A corpus-based analysis of Post-Auxiliary Ellipsis voice mismatches in Late Modern English

ABSTRACT This paper analyses Post-Auxiliary Ellipsis voice mismatches between the antecedent clause(s) and the ellipsis site(s) in Late Modern English, using the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE) (1700–1914). This study focuses on two subtypes of Post-Auxiliary Ellipsis, namely VP ellipsis and Pseudogapping. The results show that voice mismatches were possible in Pseudogapping and VP ellipsis in Late Modern English with low frequencies. This fact serves as counterevidence for the claim about the impossibility of finding voice mismatches in Pseudogapping and confirms corpus-based findings for Present-Day English. As for VP ellipsis, corpus-based studies show that voice mismatches are not attested in Present-Day English. Since they occur in Late Modern English with low frequencies, this contrast may be due to the stylistics or register of the corpora analysed.

Using Corpus Analyses to Help Address the DIF Interpretation: Gender Differences in Standardized Writing Assessment.

Addressing differential item functioning (DIF) provides validity evidence to support the interpretation of test scores across groups. Conventional DIF methods flag DIF items statistically, but often fail to consolidate a substantive interpretation. The lack of interpretability of DIF results is particularly pronounced in writing assessment where the matching of test takers’ proficiency levels often relies on external variables and the reported DIF effect is frequently small in magnitude. Using responses to a prompt that showed small gender DIF favoring female test takers, we demonstrate a corpus-based approach that helps address DIF interpretation. To provide linguistic insights into the possible sources of the small DIF effect, this study compared a gender-balanced corpus of 826 writing samples matched by test takers’ performance on the reading and listening components of the test. Four groups of linguistic features that correspond to the rating dimensions, and thus partially represent the writing construct were analyzed. They include (1) sentiment and social cognition, (2) cohesion, (3) syntactic features, and (4) lexical features. After initial screening, 123 linguistic features, all of which were correlated with the writing scores, were retained for gender comparison. Among these selected features, female test takers’ writing samples scored higher on six of them with small effect sizes in the categories of cohesion and syntactic features. Three of the six features were positively correlated with higher writing scores, while the other three were negative. These results are largely consistent with previous findings of gender differences in language use. Additionally, the small differences in the language features of the writing samples (in terms of the small number of features that differ between genders and the small effect size of the observed differences) are consistent with the previous DIF results, both suggesting that the effect of gender differences on the writing scores is likely to be very small. In sum, the corpus-based findings provide linguistic insights into the gender-related language differences and their potential consequences in a testing context. These findings are meaningful for furthering our understanding of the small gender DIF effect identified through statistical analysis, which lends support to the validity of writing scores.

Making a little go a long way: A corpus-based analysis of a high-frequency word and some pedagogical implications for young Spanish learners

This study explores the different uses of the word little, its equivalents in Spanish and its teaching to young Spanish learners. First, it aims at analyzing the lexico-grammatical behavior of little in a corpus of children’s short stories, where its prevailing use, preceding countable nouns, has been found to be much more frequent than in other domains and registers. A contrastive study follows, which examines how little has been translated in an English-Spanish parallel corpus; the results show that diminutives constitute an important equivalent. Finally, some didactic implications are proposed, with the application of corpus-based findings to the teaching of English to young Spanish learners from an approach that combines lexical syllabi and story-based methodologies.

Corpus Analysis of Argumentative Versus Explanatory Discourse in Writing Task Genres

Background: Contemporary research in composition studies emphasizes the constitutive power of genres. It also highlights the prevalence of the most common genre in students’ transition into advanced college writing, the argumentative essay. Consistent with most research in composition, and therefore most studies of general, first-year college writing, such research has primarily emphasized genre context. Other research, in international applied linguistics research and particularly English for Academic Purposes (EAP), has focused less on first-year writers but has likewise shown the frequent use of argumentative essays in undergraduate writing. Together, these studies suggest that the argumentative essay is represented more than other genres in early college writing development, and that any given genre favors particular discourse features in contrast with other genres students might write. A productive next step, but one not yet realized, is to bring these discussions together, in research that uses context-informed corpus analysis that investigates students’ assignment contexts and analyzes the discourse that characterizes the tasks and genres students write. This study offers an exploratory, context-informed analysis of argumentative and explanatory writing by first-year college writers. Based on the corpus findings, the article underscores discourse as an integral part of the sociocognitive practices embedded in genres, and accordingly considers new ways to conceptualize student writing genres and to inform instruction and assignment design. Research questions: Four questions guided the inquiry: What are the key discursive practices associated with annotated bibliographies and argumentative essays written by the same students in the same course? What are the key discursive practices associated with visual analyses and argumentative essays written by the same students in the same course? What are the key discursive practices associated with the two argumentative tasks in comparison with the two explanatory tasks? Finally, how might corpus-based findings inform the design of particular assignment tasks and genres in light of a range of writing goals? Methodology: The article outlines a context-informed corpus analysis of lexical and grammatical keywords in part-of-speech tagged writing by first-year college students across courses at a U.S. institution. Using information from assignment descriptions and rubrics, the study considers four projects that also represent two macro-genres: an annotated bibliography and a visual analysis, both part of the explanatory macro-genre, and two argumentative essays, both part of the argumentative macro-genre. Results: The corpus analysis identifies lexical and grammatical keywords in each of the four tasks as well as in the macro-genres of argumentative versus explanatory writing. These include generalized, interpersonal, and persuasive discourse in argumentative essays versus more specified, informational, and elaborated discourse in explanatory writing, regardless of course or task. Based on these findings, the article discusses the discursive practices prioritized in each task and each macro-genre. Conclusions: The findings, based on key discourse patterns in tasks within the same course and in macro-genres across courses, pose important questions regarding writing task design and students’ adaptation to different genres. The macro-genre keywords specifically inform exploratory sociocognitive “profiles” of argumentative and explanatory tasks, offered in the final section. These argument and explanation profiles strive to account for discourse patterns, genre networks, and purposes and processes—in other words, multiple aspects of habituated thinking and writing practices entailed in each one relative to the other. As discussed in the conclusion, the profiles aim to (1) underscore discourse patterns as integral to the work of genres, (2) highlight adaptive discourse strategies as part of students’ meta-language for writing, and (3) identify multiple, macro-level (e.g., audience), meso-level (paragraph- and section-level), and micro-level (e.g., discourse patterns) aspects of genres to help instructors identify and specify multiple goals for writing assignments.

The role of scaffolding in children’s questions: Implications for (preschool) language assessment from a usage-based perspective

AbstractThis article outlines a range of theoretical, empirical, and practical desiderata for the design of (preschool) language assessments that follow from recent insights into language development from a cognitive-linguistic and usage-based perspective. To assess children’s productive communicative abilities rather than their ability to judge the acceptability of complex sentences in isolation is a new perspective in language testing that requires theoretical motivation as well as operationalizable criteria for judging the appropriateness of children’s language productions, and for characterizing the properties of their language command. After a brief review of the basic rationale of current strands of preschool assessment in Germany (Section 2), the fundamental usage-based assumptions regarding children’s developing linguistic competence and their implications for the design of preschool language diagnostics are characterized (Section 3). In order to assess children’s language production, in particular its flexibility and productivity in context, a test environment needs to be created in which children are allowed to use a certain range of language in meaningful contexts. Section 4 thus zooms in on the central question of scaffolding. Section 5 presents corresponding corpus evidence for adult strategies of prompting children to elaborate their answers and for typical child responses. Sections 6 and 7 discuss the corpus-based findings with respect to their implications for the design of ( preschool) language assessment and point to further challenges.

Stance and Grammatical Complexity in Conversation: An Unlikely Partnership Discovered through Corpus Analysis

The present paper attempts to synthesize results from two independent lines of corpus-based research: One focused on grammatical complexity, and the second focused on the expression of stance. The paper begins by describing an unexpected pattern of use in conversational discourse: Despite the fact that conversation is co-constructed by multiple participants, producing language in real-time and discussing personal topics, it is characterized by an extremely dense use of dependent clauses. Corpus-based findings regarding the use of stance expressions are less surprising, showing how stance devices are more commonly used in conversation than in academic writing. The main focus of the present paper is to explore the intersection between these two lines of research, showing how many grammatically complex structures in conversation are used to support the functional prominence given to the expression of stance in that register. That is, utterances in conversation often involve two grammatical components, with an idea or a report of an action occurring as the dependent clause, and an expression of stance occurring as the main clause that provides the interpretive frame for the information in the dependent clause. As a result, it is not a coincidence that personal expressions of stance as well as complex grammatical structures are both so prevalent in conversational discourse.

Less is more: possibility and necessity as centres of gravity in a usage-based classification of core modals in Polish

In this paper we present the results of an empirical study into the cognitive reality of existing classifications of modality using Polish data. We analyzed random samples of 250 independent observations for the 7 most frequent modal words (moc ‘can’, mozna ‘it is possible’, musiec ‘must’, nalezy ‘it is necessary’, powinien ‘should’, trzeba ‘it is required’, wolno ‘it is allowed’), extracted from the National Corpus of Polish. Observations were annotated for modal type according to four different classifications of modality, as well as for morphological, syntactic and semantic properties using the Behavioral Profiling approach. Multiple correspondence analysis and (polytomous) regression models were used to determine how well modal type and usage align. These corpus-based findings were validated experimentally. In a forced choice task, ‘naive’ native speakers were exposed to definitions and prototypical examples of modal types or functions and then labeled a number of authentic corpus sentences accordingly. In the sorting task, naive native speakers sorted authentic corpus sentences into semantically coherent groups. In this article we discuss the results of our empirical study as well as the issues involved in building usage-based accounts on traditional linguistic classifications.