Corpus-based Perspective Research Articles

Antecedents of a novel gender-neutral pronoun: a corpus-based approach to pronoun reference in Swedish

This paper provides a corpus-based perspective on the issues of pronominal systems and pronoun reference. Specifically, the paper examines the antecedents of Swedish third-person singular animate pronouns, with a particular focus on the recently introduced gender-neutral pronoun hen. Using Swedish Twitter corpora from 2015 to 2017 ( c. 1.6 billion words), the study provides a comparison of the general antecedent types as well as the specific antecedent lemmas used with each pronoun. The results show that, whilst there are considerable similarities between the use of hen and the more established gender-equal expression han eller hon (‘he or she’), hen is used substantially more often with nouns that refer to close personal relationships. In this regard, hen also bears closer resemblance to the feminine pronoun than to the masculine pronoun. Generally, the analysis demonstrates that language users are assigning a distinct set of functional properties to hen, making it a complement to the ‘old’ gender-specific and gender-equal pronouns, not a replacement.

A tale of two tool(kit)s: from canonical antonymy to non-canonical opposition in the Qur’anic discourse

Abstract A number of discourse functions of canonical antonyms have been quantified and classified in English and across languages, each of which is associated with typical syntactic frames. Taking such a classification of canonical antonymy as an analytical toolkit, (Davies, Matt. 2012. A new approach to oppositions in discourse: the role of syntactic frames in the triggering of noncanonical oppositions. Journal of English Linguistics 40(1). 41–73) quantified and qualified the role of these frames in triggering non-canonical oppositions in English news discourse. Synergizing the provisional typologies of canonical antonymy (Hassanein, Hamada. 2018. Discourse functions of opposition in Classical Arabic: The case in ḥadīth genre. Lingua 201. 18–44; Jones, Steven. 2002. Antonymy: A corpus-based perspective. London and New York: Routledge.) and non-canonical opposition (Davies, Matt. 2012. A new approach to oppositions in discourse: the role of syntactic frames in the triggering of noncanonical oppositions. Journal of English Linguistics 40(1). 41–73), this study has sought to develop a dynamic toolkit for the quantitative and qualitative analyses of non-canonical opposition across Arabic varieties and potentially other languages. The toolkit was tested quantitatively and qualitatively against a dataset of 2125 non-canonical oppositional pairs collected from the Qur’an with reference to the Qur’anic Arabic Corpus. Results showed that the syntactic frames which house a wide range of co-occurring canonical antonyms also house a wider range of non-canonical oppositions in binary and trinary representations of abstract and concrete entities. The role of syntactic frames in the triggering of non-canonical oppositions is quantitatively and qualitatively significant for locating and explicating the ideological repercussions of oppositions towards Qur’an interpretation. It is concluded that a synergy of typologies results in a replicable pathway for analysis.

Diachronic Developments of the Concessive Though-Fronting Construction in American English: A Corpus-Based Perspective

ABSTRACT This paper examines diachronic development patterns of the concessive though-fronting construction in American English, using corpus data. The findings of this study, on the one hand, show that the fronted expression has been dominantly an AdjP with a subject predicative complement function and a rather negative connotation, and that the major licensing verbs are linking verbs, which is in line with the previous observations in literature on its contemporary uses. However, the findings also show that the construction has undergone some interesting diachronic changes regarding the increasing dominance of AdjP as the syntactic category of the fronted expression, more diverse grammatical functions of the fronted expression than noted in previous literature, the change of the most preferred position of the concessive though-fronting clause, the strong preference for the singular countable bare NP without a/an, and the uses of the copula as the licensing verb. Furthermore, the attested data provide some examples that weaken the movement-based analysis. The findings, therefore, indicate that it is worth investigating its diachronic properties about expressions that occur in the pre-though position, the salient position of the concessive though-fronting clause, licensing verbs, and the relationship between the pre-though expression and its putative gap in detail.

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 role of theory in quantitative and qualitative second language learning research: A corpus-based analysis

The role of theory has been emphasized in both quantitative and qualitative research handbooks in applied linguistics, but no systematic study has been conducted to consolidate, expand, or modify these experience-based observations. By approaching this meta-theoretical issue from a corpus-based perspective, we offer new insights into the particular ways in which claims to scientific rigor are made in the two methodologies. A 1.3 million-token corpus of the introductions and literature reviews was created from 577 full-length articles (quantitative: 316; qualitative: 261) in four leading journals in L2 learning between 2013 and 2019. We performed linear mixed-effects modeling on the frequencies of theor- in the quantitative and qualitative subcorpora and analyzed the 1,812 collocates of theor- using the logDice statistics and Sketch Engine. Results showed that (1) the qualitative studies used theories more frequently, and (2) although theories were used by both bodies of research for structuring and grounding, the other roles assigned to theories were divergent: quantitative studies constructed theories as both agents and objects of specific positivistic reasoning processes, while qualitative studies either represented theories as dynamic agents with strong subjectivity or adopted a pragmatic, dialogic attitude when representing theories as objects.

Pronominal Subject Expression in Spoken Modern Hebrew: A Diachronic Perspective

Abstract As a consequence of the sociolinguistic circumstances of its emergence, the morpho-syntactic profile of Modern Hebrew (MH) originates in several sources – classical layers of Hebrew, pre-existing written practices, contact-induced influence of the native languages of the early MH speakers and internal linguistic developments. Adopting a diachronic corpus-based perspective, the present study focuses on one morpho-syntactic feature, the distribution of first and second person free subject pronouns with suffix (qaṭal) and prefix ( yiqṭol) conjugation verbs. In contrast to the mainly synchronic studies of that feature in MH, the starting point of the present study is data extracted from historical recordings documenting the spontaneous speech of four generations of MH speakers over more than 50 years. Our data indicate two opposite trends: On the one hand, there is a relative stability in the rates of free pronoun usage from the 1960s until the 2010s in two aspects: the near obligatory presence of the free 1SG pronoun ani in the prefix-conjugation, and the relatively low rates of free pronouns in the remaining persons. On the other hand, a significant decrease in the use of the 1SG pronoun ani in the suffix-conjugation was found throughout the years.1

A Corpus-Based Approach to the Lemmatisation of Old English Superlative Adverbs

The aim of this article is to discuss the lemmatisation process of Old English adverbs inflected for the superlative from a corpus-based perspective. This study has been conducted on the basis of a semi-automatic methodology through which the inflectional forms have been automatically extracted from The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose and The York Toronto- Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry whereas the task of assigning a lemma has been completed manually. The list of adverbial lemmas amounts to 1,755 and has been provided by the lexical database of Old English Nerthus. Additionally, the resulting lemmatised list has been checked against the lemmatised forms compiled by the Dictionary of Old English and Seelig’s (1930) work on Old English comparative and superlative adjectives and adverbs. Through this comparison it has been possible to verify doubtful forms and incorporate new ones that are unattested by the YCOE. This pilot study has implemented for the first time a methodology for the lemmatisation of a non-verbal class and can be further applied to those categories that are still unlemmatised, namely nouns and adjectives.

Object-Verb in Early Modern English: Modelling Markedness

Abstract Although Verb-Object (VO) is the basic unmarked constituent order of predicates in Present-Day English, in earlier stages of the language Object-Verb (OV) is the preferred pattern in some syntactic contexts. OV predicates are significantly frequent in Old and Middle English, and are still attested up to 1550, when they “appear to dwindle away” (Moerenhout & van der Wurff 2005: 83). This study looks at OV in Early Modern English (EModE), using a corpus-based perspective and statistical modelling to explore a number of textual, syntactic, and semantic/processing variables which may account for what by that time had already become a marked, though not yet archaic, word-order pattern. The data for the study were retrieved from the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (1500–1710) and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (c.1410–1695), the largest electronic parsed collections of EModE texts. The findings reveal a preference for OV in speech-related text types, which are less constrained by the rules of grammar, in marked syntactic contexts, and in configurations not subject to the general linearisation principles of end-weight and given-new. Where these principles are complied with, the probability of VO increases.

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.

Phonetic fusion in Chinese conversational speech

AbstractThis paper presents a corpus-based perspective on the phonetic fusion of disyllabic words in a Chinese conversational speech corpus. Four categorical types that reflect the phonological features of reduction degrees are automatically derived from gradient, acoustic properties. A transcription experiment is conducted with the most common disyllabic words. Both automatic derivation by acoustic signals and human transcription by perceptual judgment refer to the same sound inventory. We have shown that the complete form of fusion occurring in conversation need not be legitimate syllables and it appears consistently in the form of syllable merger that represents a group of phonetic variants.

Iconicity and properties of Korean -ceney ‘before’ and -hwuey/-nase ‘after’ temporal clauses: A corpus-based perspective.

Iconicity and properties of Korean -ceney ‘before’ and -hwuey/-nase ‘after’ temporal clauses: A corpus-based perspective.

Interview with Florent Perek

Professor Florent Perek has a PhD in English and General Linguistics (University of Freiburg) and is a Lecturer in Cognitive Linguistics at the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics at University of Birmingham, UK. Professor Perek is the author of several articles in international peer-reviewed journals and has, among his most important publications, the 2015 book, Argument structure in usage-based construction grammar: experimental and corpus-based perspectives, edited by John Benjamins.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ENTREVISTA COM FLORENT PEREKFlorent Perek é Doutor em Inglês e Linguística Geral (Universidade de Freiburg, Alemanha) e Professor da área de Linguística Cognitiva do Departamento de Língua Inglesa e Linguística Aplicada na Universidade de Birmingham, no Reino Unido. Perek é autor de uma série de artigos em revistas renomadas internacionalmente e tem, entre suas importantes publicações, seu livro de 2015, o qual foi intitulado Estrutura argumental na gramática de construções baseada no uso: perspectivas experimental e baseada em corpus e foi editado pela John Benjamins.---Original em inglês.

Democratization and Gender-neutrality in English(es)

“Democratization” and “gender-neutrality” are two concepts commonly used in recent studies on language variation. While both concepts link linguistic phenomena to sociocultural changes, the extent to which they overlap and/or interact has not been studied in detail. In particular, not much is known about how linguistic changes related to democratization and gender-neutrality spread across registers or varieties of English, as well as whether speakers are aware of the changes that are taking place. In this paper we review the main theoretical issues regarding these concepts and relate them to the main findings in the articles in this issue, all of which study lexical and grammatical variation from a corpus-based perspective. Taken together, they help unveil some of the conscious and unconscious mechanisms that operate at the interface between democratization and gender-neutrality.

Relative clauses in Agul from a corpus-based perspective

AbstractThis paper gives an account of participial clauses in Agul (Lezgic, Nakh-Daghestanian), based on a sample of 858 headed noun-modifying clauses taken from two text corpora, one spoken and one written. Noun-modifying clauses in Agul do not show syntactic restrictions on what can be relativized, and hence they instantiate the type known as GNMCCs, or general noun-modifying clause constructions. As the text counts show, intransitive verbs are more frequent than transitives and experiencer verbs in participial clauses, and among intransitive verbs, locative statives with the roots ‘be’ and ‘stay, remain’ account for half of all the uses. The asymmetry between the different relativization targets is also significant. Among the core arguments, the intransitive subject (S) is the most frequent target, patient (P) occupies second place, and agent (A) is comparatively rare. The preference of S and, in general, of S and P over A also holds true for most other Nakh-Daghestanian languages for which comparable counts are available. At the same time, Agul stands apart from the other languages by its high ratio of non-core relativization which accounts for 42% of all participial clauses. Addressee, arguments and adjuncts encoded with a locative case, as well as more generalplaceandtimerelativizations show especially high frequency, outnumbering such arguments as experiencers, recipients, and predicative and adnominal possessors. Possible reasons for the high ratio of non-argument relativization are discussed in the paper.

Core Urdu Vocabulary for Chines Business Community in Pakistan , A Corpus-based Perspective

With the dawn of 21st century, the world has grown into a global village and the need for inter-communal interactions has also increased many times. Urdu language is said to be one the third biggest language of the world along with Chines and English and its speakers are constantly on the rise. With the emergence of the CPEC (China Pakistan Economic Corridor), Urdu has assumed ever increasing importance due to the geo-political and geo-economic condition of the south Asian region. The undertaken study is a systematic attempt in this regard to work out a list of most frequent words of the Urdu language for the Chinese business community in Pakistan. Schmitt (2000) asserts that that learning a non-native vocabulary is a continual process as the core vocabulary should encompass the ever changing linguistic needs of the time. The name of the Urdu corpus for the undertaken research is urTenTen that has been compiled from internet data. The corpus belongs to TenTen corpus family that is corpora of the web with more than ten billion words. The corpus has been tagged according to Unified Parts of Speech (POS) Standard in Indian Languages. In order to process data, “sketch Engine” has been used. List of frequent words for the Chines Business Community has been retrieved from urTenTen corpus with the help of sketch engine. The retrieved list of core Urdu vocabulary is supposed to be useful for the Chines business who are supposed to interact with the Urdu speakers of the region.

Breadth of EFL Vocabulary Building at Secondary Level in Pakistan: A Corpus-based Perspective

Vocabulary learning is one of the challenging tasks in a foreign language classroom. In order to make this process motivating and friendly, one of the useful techniques is to unburden the teacher and to provide the learners with maximum autonomy. Graves (2007) asserts that EFL learners should have the vocabulary size of approximately 3,000 to 6,000 English words. The undertaken study is an attempt in this regard to determine the breadth of the EFL vocabulary at secondary level. A corpus of Pakistani English has been compiled in this regard. In order to process data, Wordsmith Tools, a statistical method for analyzing corpus data, has been used to retrieve the frequency list. Afterwards, the results have been analysed with SPSS. The findings establish the fact that the determining the breadth of vocabulary with the help of corpus is very significant in developing EFL vocabulary at secondary level.

Why-stripping in English: A corpus-based perspective

Why-stripping in English, a type of elliptical constructions, consists of the expression why and a focus bearing remnant (e.g., Why me?). The construction shares certain properties with related constructions such as Sluicing and Stripping but at the same time has its own independent peculiarities. This paper first reviews some key properties of the construction and investigates its uses with attested corpus data. In accounting for how unexpressed expressions in such an elliptical construction can be resolved, there have been two competing trends, movement-and-deletion and direct interpretation (DI) approaches. The former postulates unpronounced syntactic representations at the ellipsis site while the latter consults the semantic/discourse information present in the antecedent. A variety of the corpus data we have identified as Why-stripping challenge the movement-and-deletion approach that heavily depends upon the syntactic information in the antecedent in order to resolve the elided parts. The paper briefly sketches how the attested data can be accounted for within a DI approach. (Kyung Hee University · Universite de Paris)

Media Discourses and Communal Stances on Climate Change in Cameroon

Climate change is arguably one of the most unforeseen global threats of the 21 st century. More than ever before, national and international conferences are organised regularly with heated political debates on why, who, how and when to frame polices with eco-protective strategies. In the face of these heated political debates, the role of the media in informing public opinions on the stakes of the crisis is indispensable. While the media mitigate and communicate climate change stories, there are observable discrepancies and diverse communal stances on the issue. The present study investigated the frequency and mitigation of media transmission of climate change realities in four leading Cameroonian newspapers and the stances of vulnerable locals towards the issue. From a corpus-based perspective, 30 editions of three Cameroonian leading newspapers published between the months of April and June 2018 were closely analysed to find out the frequency of publication and the degree of mitigation of climate change stories. Three publishers and 200 farmers were interviewed to ascertain their stances on the issue. The results revealed a relatively insignificant recurrence of climate change stories which stems from publishers’ subjective categorisation of “current” news in the country. Informed farmers perceived the issue as a distinct domestic phenomenon with a possible national effect, while their uninformed counterparts attributed the crisis to the natural order of climatic variation on planet earth. Such perceptions certainly inhibit against effective agencies to climate change solutions. Keywords : Media Discourses, Communal Stances, Climate Change, Cameroon DOI : 10.7176/RHSS/9-14-03 Publication date :July 31 st 2019

The impact of teaching specialized terminology on translation performance

PurposeIn an effort to bridge the gap between applying translation corpora, specialized terminology teaching and translation performance of undergraduate students, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the possible impacts of teaching specialized terminology of law as a specific area of inquiry on translation performance of Iranian undergraduate translation student (English–Persian language pairs). The null hypothesis of this study is that using specialized terminology does not have statistically significant impacts on the translation performance of the translation students.Design/methodology/approachThe design of this research was experimental in that there was pretest, treatment, posttest and random sampling. In other words, this research was pre-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design. This design was used in this research as the number of subjects who participated in the research was limited. Apart from being experimental, this research enjoyed a corpus-based perspective. As Mcenery and Hardie (2012) claim, corpus-based research uses the “corpus data in order to explore a theory or hypothesis, typically one established in the current literature, in order to validate it, refute it or refine it” (p. 6). Table I shows the design of this research.FindingsThe results of this research indicated that on the whole, the posttest results had statistically significant differences with that of the pretest. In this regard, the quality of students’ translation enhanced after using the specialized terminology in the form of three types of corpora. Indeed, there was a general trend in the improved quality of the novice translators in translating specialized and subject-field terminologies in an English–Persian context.Originality/valueThis paper is original in that it probes into one of the less researched areas of Translation Studies Research and employs corpora methodology.

Teaching metadiscourse features and IELTS writing performance of Iranian EFL learners

PurposeIn spite of the growing interest in using corpora in language teaching and learning, applying computers and software (especially corpora software) is still new in second language teaching and learning. In addition, employing a learner corpus-based perspective in teaching metadiscourse features in International English Language Testing System (IELTS) writing tasks is not reported to the best knowledge of the researchers. Understanding and spotting this gap, the purpose of this paper is to utilize a learner corpus-based approach in teaching metadiscourse features and investigate its possible impacts on IELTS writing performance of the Iranian second language learners. Therefore, this study addressed the following research questions and hypotheses.Design/methodology/approachThe current research utilized a quasi-experimental research design. In addition, this research used a learner corpus-based methodology. The corpus-based methodology was exploited to enable the researchers to have access to a large body of authentic language materials. In other words, a corpus-based methodology was used due to the fact that it made it possible for the researchers to elicit the metadiscourse features from a large number of authentic writing materials and to employ them during the treatment process with authentic examples.FindingsThe findings showed that there was a positive correlation between teaching metadiscourse features and writing performance of IELTS learners; in that, teaching metadiscourse features could soar the writing performance of the subjects. In addition, interactional metadiscourse features had more impact than interactive metadiscourse features on writing performance.Practical implicationsThe results of this research can have useful implications for second language teachers and learners as well as researchers in learner corpus as they can learn the creation and application of learner corpora in second language teaching and learning.Originality/valueThis paper is value in that it uses corpus software and methodology in teaching metadiscourse features in writing section of IELTS test.