Corpus-based Investigation Research Articles

Metadiscourse Markers in Senior High School Students Academic Papers: A Constructed Learner Corpus-Based Investigation

Metadiscourse Markers in Senior High School Students Academic Papers: A Constructed Learner Corpus-Based Investigation

The translation of food in Hong Lou Meng: a cross-linguistic study based on the English and French versions

ABSTRACT This paper presents the results of a corpus-based investigation of the English and French translations of Chinese food-related culture-specific items (CSIs) in the classic Chinese novel Hong Lou Meng (A Dream of Red Mansions). The aim of the study is threefold: i) to determine what (translation) techniques were commonly used to render these Chinese CSIs through systematic quantitative analysis; ii) to determine whether the translations tended to be foreignized, neutralized, or domesticated; and iii) to compare the two target texts (TTs) in order to identify similarities and differences. The quantitative analysis was conducted within the existing theoretical framework, and methods from the field of corpus-based studies were used. The results indicate two significant similarities between the English and French TTs: first, neutralizing techniques are the most prominent, followed by foreignizing and domesticating techniques in descending order; second, direct translation and paraphrase are the most frequently used techniques. However, data from the two TTs show significant differences in the distribution of techniques, the degree of neutralization, and the frequency of several techniques (e.g. generalization and compression). Moreover, comparing the English and French translations of the same Chinese CSI reveals more cross-linguistic differences than similarities.

A Corpus-based Investigation on the English Majors’ Use of Cohesive Devices in Argumentative Writing

Many factors affect the quality of English writing. Among them, the cohesion of discourse has been an important topic in writing research. This study aims to investigate the use of local, global, and text cohesion features in Chinese English majors’ argumentative writing and how EFL learners of higher proficiency (Grade 4) develop their written discourse competence as compared with the lower proficiency (Grade 1). The Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL 2.0) was adopted as the main corpus. The research finds that connectives and lexical overlaps are more frequently used in English writing, and a tiny minority of cohesive devices showed growth across the two grade levels. The findings provide important insights for researchers and teachers on second language acquisition, English writing development and English writing teaching.

An In-depth Corpus-based Investigation of Unbound Reflexives

ABSTRACT This paper provides a comprehensive study of real-life uses of unbound reflexives (URs) in two syntactic structures, coordination and prepositional object structures, using a large amount of synchronic, diachronic, and dialectal corpus data from some Brigham Young University (BYU) corpora. Our findings show that 1) in contemporary American English, URs have different raw frequencies and proportion patterns in the two syntactic structures from anaphoric/cataphoric reflexives and also vary according to their person values; 2) the uses of URs in the two structures have shown decreasing tendencies for the past 200 years in American English; and 3) URs are more frequently used in Irish English than any other inner-circle variety of English in relation to anaphoric reflexives, which is more prominent in coordination structures than in prepositional object structures. Our findings also contribute to providing an empirical foundation for testing existing theories of URs and developing Binding Conditions in general.

A Corpus-Based Investigation of the Word Football in Contemporary Spoken English: Linguistic Profile and Cultural Values in 1994 and 2014

ABSTRACT The sport of football has played a prominent role in British society since 1863 (Russell 1999). The increasing popularity of this sport has stimulated research focused on the language of football in specialised settings (Levin 2008; Cornelia 2014; Hoffmann 2015; Ebeling 2021). An area that remains open to inquiry is that concerning the way the sport of football has been talked about and represented in conversation over the last decades in the UK. The present study aims to fill this gap and to examine the linguistic profile of the word football in the years between 1994 and 2014. It is a corpus-based investigation that has been undertaken by querying the spoken sections of the BNC corpora. The analysis reveals that there are signs of ongoing change witnessing the reconceptualisation of football which becomes a sport with a pervasive role in society that is especially dominated by a personal and social component.

Advice seekers’ legitimation strategies in online health communities

Previous studies of different online health communities have shown the importance of examining advice seekers’ legitimation strategies. However, most research has been based on the qualitative analysis of small samples from discussion threads. Using a specialized corpus comprising 1836 advice seekers’ initiating messages (317,540 words) and a corpus-assisted discourse analysis approach, this paper first identifies the recurrent lexicogrammatical patterns that advice seekers use and then connects these patterns to particular legitimation strategies according to the specific pragmatic functions they serve across texts. In this way, three major legitimation strategies are structurally classified with the identification of their typical lexicogrammatical realizations: justification of presence, amplification of details and evocation of feelings and emotions. Empirically, this corpus-based investigation complements previous qualitative research, extending prior findings drawn from small samples. Methodologically, this study demonstrates the potential value of investigating lexicogrammatical realization patterns using a corpus approach for exploring (online) health discourse.

A corpus-based developmental investigation of linguistic complexity in children's writing

Writing proficiency is associated with linguistic complexity. We used measures of linguistic complexity to investigate the development of children's narrative writing using a large corpus of short stories (N>100,000) written by children aged 5–13 in the UK. Linguistic complexity was assessed using both lexical (N = 30) and syntactic (N = 14) measures. Most measures were associated with age, with writing by older children showing greater lexical density, sophistication, and diversity than writing by younger children. Older children also used longer sentences, and longer T-units and clauses, and the density of smaller syntactic units inside larger units was also higher. Principal Component Analysis identified a number of dimensions associated with complexity, with the first two dimensions capturing nearly 50 % of variance. Lexical diversity was mainly represented on the first dimension and syntactic complexity on the second. Across the age range, there was wider variation in syntactic complexity than in lexical diversity, suggesting that syntactic development is subject to more individual differences than the ability to use a diverse set of lexical items. Our findings quantify the nature and content of children's writing through mid-childhood, and we discuss the utility of analysing children's writing using a computational, data-driven approach.

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.

U.S. administration’s press communications on Tunisia after the July 25, 2021 ‘state of exception’: The shaping of urgency discourse

July 25, 2021 was an exceptional day in Tunisia, ushering in a new chapter in its contemporary political history and triggering a wave of global responses to the declared ‘state of exception’. This research examines the U.S. administration’s press communications on Tunisia following this event. Specifically, it explores (i) the dominant crisis frames permeating these communications and their underlying political agenda and (ii) the extent to which the discourse they imparted signals a change in U.S. foreign policy towards Tunisia in crisis situations. To meet these research objectives, a corpus-based investigation was undertaken using an integrative framework combining qualitative (frames) and quantitative (keyness and collocations) approaches. Results revealed changing discourses around the theme of crisis, moving from a sense of togetherness to urgency. This may echo the cautious attitude of the American government and its heightened concern about Kais Saied’s transitional measures. In broad terms, the exploration offered a glimpse of how the dynamics of global politics unfold discursively. Importantly, the Biden administration’s construction of Tunisia’s political-democratic crisis in terms of urgency can have real-life consequences for international perceptions of the country’s future. Theoretically, the study’s implications touch primarily upon Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS, henceforth), particularly the evolving corpus linguistics concepts of keyness and collocation networks.

The syntactic status of V-final conjunct clauses in Old English: the role of priming

This study is a corpus-based investigation of the use of the V-final (VF) order in Old English conjunct (or coordinate) clauses. The aim of the analysis is to determine which of the two hypotheses formulated in earlier studies of the subject finds more convincing data support in the available corpora of Old English. According to one interpretation, conjunct clauses are a subtype of main clauses, and the VF order is used in both groups to signal continuation in discourse, especially with punctual, dynamic and relatively heavy verbs. Under the other view, VF conjunct clauses are syntactically subordinate, with the coordinating conjunction blocking verb movement like a complementiser. The present study shows that while both hypotheses are descriptively adequate, the main mechanism responsible for the use of the VF order in conjunct clauses is syntactic priming, with the VF order activated by a trigger clause (usually subordinate) and spreading to the following conjunct clause(s), which often results in long chains of subsequent VF clauses.

A Digital Humanities Approach to the Emergence of CULTURE as a Liquid Modern Word: Evidence From Synchronic and Diachronic Language Resources

As empirical approaches to the study of natural language based on digital technology, corpus linguistics and computational linguistics are two faces of the same coin, whosevalue lies in the attempt to integrate quantitative and qualitative aspects of linguistic analysis. This attempt has become all the more challenging in recent years as the language data at our disposal grows day by day. Indeed, the changing nature of language resources in the era of big data has inevitably also changed the research questions that it is possible to address (Hiltunen et al, 2017). The increase and variety of the data available has opened up new horizons, by empirically supporting research questions concerning social phenomena, or by providing new hints for tracking language change, as is the case with the novel discipline of Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Language Change (Alessi & Partington, 2020). These new research areas are continually evolving and expanding also thanks to a growing number of easy-to-access resources and tools so that the fields of corpus linguistics, digital linguistics and digital humanities “overlap, intertwine and feed off each other when it comes to making use of the increasing variety of resources available for linguistic research today” (Nevalainen, Suhr and Taavitsainen, 2019, p.1).It is against this background that the present article reports on the preliminary results of a corpus-based investigation into the process that has transformed the very specific material meaning of the word “culture” into the extremely elusive, liquid concept we are familiar with today. The analysis starts from the findings of earlier investigation of the lexico-grammar profile of the world “culture” based on contemporary synchronic corpus resources and attempts further exploration of these findings on the basis of diachronic language resources, such as Google Books and the English Historical Book Collection.

The ADV speaking-construction in American English: A quantitative corpus-based investigation

Abstract In this article, the author applies the theory of frame semantics, a usage-based model of construction grammar, and quantitative corpus-based methodology to investigate the nature of the ADV speaking-construction in American English, an adverbial participle construction that has not been previously explored using quantitative corpus-based methods. To investigate this construction, the author extracted its occurrences from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), analysed its structural, semantic, distributional and discourse-functional properties, and identified adverbs that frequently appear in the construction. The investigation reveals that the construction tends to combine with speech-functional adverbs, which evoke different semantic frames. It commonly occurs in spoken and written registers and serves various functions in discourse. In particular, it is used frequently in spoken discourse and academic prose to comment on the manner of conveying a message and to express speakers’ stances and attitudes toward various topics.

Lexicon and Logic: A Corpus-Based Investigation Into a Connection Between Prepositional Senses and Quantifier Scope

Abstract Previous research has indicated that abstract grammatical rules and forms fall short of predicting quantifier scope and that lexical/pragmatic knowledge plays a significant part in quantifier scope disambiguation (QSD). More recent works have argued that world knowledge in the form of relations among objects may be salient to QSD. This paper contributes to this line of research by providing support to the claim that there is a connection between our lexical knowledge about preposition meanings and quantifier scope. More specifically, we propose that certain prepositional senses encode dependency relations that have an effect on scope-taking preferences. For example, the preposition of expressing ‘part-whole sense’ contributes to our choice of the inverse scope reading for the construction a day of every month by introducing a dependency between wholes (months) and their respective parts (days). Quantifying over this dependency yields the inverse scope reading: for every month, there is a different day that belongs to it (every month > a day). Furthermore, universal quantification in locative and temporal prepositional phrases tends to support inverse scope. For example, the locative preposition on — as in a store on each side of the street — implies ‘disjointness’ (objects do not occupy more than one place at a time), and hence can be interpreted as a dependency between each side of the street and the respective stores located on them. Quantifying over this dependency yields the inverse scope reading: for each side of the street, there is a different store located on it (each side of the street > a store). For studying the connection between prepositional senses and quantifier scope in the wild, we use a scope-disambiguated corpus created by AnderBois et al. ( 2012), additionally annotated with prepositional senses using the Semantic Network of Adposition and Case Supersenses (SNACS) scheme proposed in Schneider et al. ( 2018, 2020). The results of the corpus study combined with psycholinguistic experiments support the claim made here that certain prepositional senses are strong predictors of quantifier scope.

Distinctive adjectives in two variants of the it-extraposition construction: a quantitative corpus-based investigation

Distinctive adjectives in two variants of the it-extraposition construction: a quantitative corpus-based investigation

A Corpus-based Investigation of Phrasal Complexity Features and Rhetorical Functions in Data Commentary

Introduction: In academic written texts, linguistic and rhetorical features are often interactively used as a vehicle for writers to construct their texts in order to accomplish specific communicative purposes. However, the effective integration of these resources may pose challenges for developing writers.
 Purpose: This study employed a corpus-based genre analysis approach to investigate phrasal complexity features and rhetorical functions in data commentaries written by Iranian undergraduate and graduate students. Through this approach, we aimed to examine a relatively unexplored genre of data commentary in terms of its phrasal complexity features, rhetorical functions, and their relationships. By analyzing these relationships, we sought to provide insights into the writing practices of Iranian undergraduate and graduate students in the context of data commentaries.
 Method: This study employed a convenient sampling method to select a total of 76 university students, which included 47 undergraduate students and 29 graduate students. The participants were involved in generating a corpus of 380 data commentaries, which were then thoroughly examined and compared. To identify instances of phrasal complexity features, the researchers utilized the AntConc software tool, applying regular expressions (regex) to extract potential occurrences. Additionally, a Python program was developed and implemented to calculate the frequencies of the identified PCFs. The researchers manually annotated the rhetorical function of the data commentaries to determine their specific usage.
 Results: Statistical analysis such as Mann Whitney U test and Spearman correlation test, revealed that graduate students significantly utilized more phrasal complexity features including attributive adjectives, nominalizations, and prepositional phrases (of) compared to undergraduate students. However, a qualitative analysis showed that the use of these linguistic features is influenced by the writing topics. Regarding rhetorical functions, graduate students used more moves and/or steps related to presenting and commenting data, while undergraduate students produced more moves or steps concerning personal asides. Moreover, certain phrasal complexity features and the moves and/or steps were found to be correlated, aligning with recent corpus-based studies.
 Conclusion: The study concludes with pedagogical implications.

'Her dreadful plight': A corpus-assisted analysis of the indexical and stance properties of <em>poor thing</em>

Curiously, the English multiword expression poor thing (henceforth PT) often refers to entities that are neither economically impoverished nor inanimate objects. By using a mixed-methods corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis approach, we demonstrate that PT functions as an expression of affective stance based on evidence from two American English corpora. In cases where the social identities of speakers and referents can be determined, PT is frequently used by women and in reference to women, children, or animals. Additionally, the expression may refer to entities of low vitality due to illness or death. Our results indicate that PT conveys a complex social meaning by indexing a speaker’s compassionate stance alongside a referent’s misfortune, bundling together a set of (stereo)typically ‘disempowered’ personae. This analysis demonstrates the potential of corpus-based CDA investigations which analyze relatively infrequent lexical expressions that, nonetheless, have recognizable social meaning for speakers.

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.

Negative Concord without Agree: Insights from German, Dutch and English Child Language

Children acquiring a non-negative concord language like English or German have been found to consistently interpret sentences with two negative elements in a negative concord manner as conveying a single semantic negation. Corpus-based investigations for English and German show that children also produce sentences with two negative elements but only a single negation meaning. As any approach to negative concord and negative indefinites needs to account for both the typological variation and the child data, we revisit the three most current syntactic Agree-based analyses, as well as a movement-based approach and show that they either have difficulties with the child data or face challenges in the adult language variation or both. As a consequence, we develop a novel analysis of negative concord and negative indefinites which relies on purely morphological operations applying to hierarchical semantic representations within a version of the Meaning First architecture of grammar. We will argue that the typological variation between the main three different types of languages as well as the children’s non adult-like behaviour fall out from this in a straightforward fashion while the downsides of the Agree- and the movement-based accounts are avoided.

Self-mention in L2 (Czech) learner academic discourse: Realisations, functions and distribution across master's theses

This article explores self-mention in L2 (Czech) English-medium master's theses written in the humanities along three dimensions of analysis: realisation, authorial roles and distribution across rhetorical sections. While extending the scope of self-mention to cover nominal forms, the aim of the study is to find out how Czech graduates combine pronominal and nominal self-mention to modulate the degree of visibility and authority they convey in their texts. The contrastive corpus-based investigation compares a corpus of Czech English-medium master's theses with two reference L1 corpora representing learner and published academic discourse to examine differences pertaining to variation along culture, expertise and discipline dimensions. The findings indicate that realisation patterns of self-mention and preferences for specific authorial roles vary significantly across the corpora. Czech graduates tend to be reluctant to display a high degree of visibility and authority, prefer to adopt a stance of humility, and fail to approximate disciplinary patterns of self-mention. The paper argues that this is motivated by the efforts of students to blend L1 and L2 academic conventions, their lower level of rhetorical maturity, and the audience addressed by the students in the examination context of the master's thesis.

Spelling Variation in Inner-Circle Englishes

English is the language with the largest number of speakers in the world, when both native and non-native speakers are included. With an estimated 1,268 million users around the globe, linguistic variation is bound to occur. Research on World Englishes focuses on the study of this variation, though it has systematically disregarded the linguistic level of orthography. This neglect has operated under the assumption that most contemporary varieties must adhere to British English spelling norms. Nevertheless, recent studies on the Americanisation of English worldwide (Mair 2013; Gilquin 2018; Gonçalves et al. 2018) have brought the question of spelling variation back to the fore. The present paper thus analyses the distribution of the most distinctive spelling variants—i.e. -our/-or, -re/-er and -isation/-ization—in the varieties of the inner circle from a synchronic perspective. By means of a corpus-based investigation of English online, this study will outline the spelling usage patterns for the aforementioned varieties and will analyse the highly-likely Americanisation process in spelling on the Internet.