Corpus Linguistics Methodology Research Articles

Functioning of Modern Borrowings in the English Language: Socio-Cultural and Discursive Dimensions

Background/Objectives: The purpose of this article is to study the functioning of modern loans in the English language in socio-cultural and discursive dimensions. Methods: The study was conducted using the methodology of corpus linguistics by applying authentic electronic corpora of English texts of free access: To verify this hypothesis, the method of probabilistic and statistical analysis was implemented which consisted in collection, synthesis and study of statistical data on the representation of the studied language in the texts of selected electronic corpora for statistically significant period of time in space of various types of discourse. Findings: The results showed that at the present time borrowings from French, German, Spanish, African, Indian and other languages continue to emerge in the English language and are actively functioning in key areas of existence. The growth in loan words from African and Asian languages, especially from the Japanese language can be referred to a new trend in the 20th-21st centuries. The undertaken study confirms the relationship of the current stage of the borrowing process with the need to designate new concepts that native speakers of English have acquired as a result of a glimpse at the social and public life and culture of different peoples in a given period. The present study shows that the latter borrowed vocabulary functioning in English at the end of the 20th-beginning of the 21st century is referred to such spheres of existence as culture, social and political life, everyday life and the most permeable discourses in these areas are the colloquial and journalistic discourse types. Applications/Improvements: The resulting findings can serve as a theoretical and methodological basis for further studying the functional potential of modern lexical borrowings in the paradigm of anthropocentric linguistics applying modern electronic text corpora.

Towards Interactive Multidimensional Visualisations for Corpus Linguistics

We propose the novel application of dynamic and interactive visualisation techniques to support the iterative and exploratory investigations typical of the corpus linguistics methodology. Very large scale text analysis is already carried out in corpus-based language analysis by employing methods such as frequency profiling, keywords, concordancing, collocations and n-grams. However, at present only basic visualisation methods are utilised. In this paper, we describe case studies of multiple types of key word clouds, explorer tools for collocation networks, and compare network and language distance visualisations for online social networks. These are shown to fit better with the iterative data-driven corpus methodology, and permit some level of scalability to cope with ever increasing corpus size and complexity. In addition, they will allow corpus linguistic methods to be used more widely in the digital humanities and social sciences since the learning curve with visualisations is shallower for non-experts

Grammar emerges through reuse and modification of prior utterances

Given the growing consensus that grammar emerges as language is used in social interaction, how grammar emerges through interaction still remains much unknown. This study demonstrates that the beginnings of the emergence of constructions can be found in individual interactions. Through an investigation on videotaped English conversations and corpora using discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and corpus linguistic methodologies, I find that conversational participants have a tendency as high as 80% or more to reuse words in prior turns. I argue that reuse as the mechanism of resonance motivation and modification as the mechanism of relevance motivation work competitively and conjointly, shaping the emergence of grammatical structures of a language. Reuses lead to formation of the fixed frame; modifications form the category for an open slot. In summary, grammar emerges through interaction among participants who are constantly reusing and modifying prior utterances to achieve current interactive goals.

‘Islamonausea, not Islamophobia’: The many faces of cyber hate speech

Abstract Muslims have been the target of discriminatory attitudes – especially after 9/11 – by certain sectors of society, leading to what is known as ‘Islamophobia’. This exclusionary tendency sees its most common manifestation in hate speech. Hate speech is multifaceted: it can attribute false assumptions to a religion, ascribe despicable facts to a religious community, mock their traditions and practices or, in the harshest cases, employ threat and verbal abuse. In the technological society we live in, the channel most commonly used for the expression of Islamophobia is social media; giving rise to a new variety of Islamophobia: Cyber Islamophobia. The aim of this article is to study how Cyber Islamophobia is articulated discursively by the average netizen (as opposed to the mainstream media), taking as its point of departure the analysis of a corpus of more than 10,000 tweets compiled around the hashtag #jihad. The study shows how discourse on social media amplifies and is more explicit in expressing the stereotypes and negative representations of Muslims present in mainstream media. The concept of ‘jihad’ is largely related with violence and war, and such acts are associated with Islamic religious duty. Narratives ‘otherizing’ Muslims are promoted and Islam is depicted as being ‘at war’ with the West. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that in this corpus, the vast majority of online discourse on jihad is carried out not by Muslims themselves, but by people with a clear Islamophobic/racist bias. In the light of Critical Discourse Analysis and the Corpus Linguistics methodology, we focus on a twofold target: (1) to identify the virtual communities created around certain religious and socio-political values; and (2) to unveil the correlations between them and the evaluation of Muslims and Islam by social media users.

The use of attributive clauses in spoken Lithuanian

The syntactic features of spoken Lithuanian are still under-researched due to insufficient data bases, limited technologies, and research methodologies. During the last years, the "Corpus of Spoken Lithuanian" (developed at Vytautas Magnus University; 225,000 words; 80 hours of digitalized audio recordings) has been syntactically annotated, and this has enabled complex automatized syntactic analysis. In the present paper, one of the first such studies is presented and its results are discussed. The corpus linguistics methodology has been employed.The paper deals with the frequency and basic types of attributive clauses in spoken Lithuanian language. The results of the study have highlighted that attributive clauses tend to be more frequent (up to 15% of all subordinate clauses) in public speech, and they are significantly less frequent (up to 7% of all subordinate clauses) in private spontaneous speech.The position of a subordinate clause after the head noun is unmarked and the most frequent in public speech and spontaneous private speech. Consequently, 65% and 88% of all attributive adjectives followed the head noun in private spontaneous speech and in public speech. Since in Lithuanian the word order is not so strict, in private spontaneous speech constructions with a subordinate clause before the head noun are used.The analysis of subordinating conjunctions and relative pronouns has revealed that in public speech the link between a subordinate clause and an independent clause tends to be expressed by the relative pronoun "kuris", "kuri" (‘which’). Namely, in public speech, this pronoun is employed in 85% of all attributive clauses. The number of relative pronouns in private spoken speech reaches only 30%, whereas the subordinating conjunction "kur" (‘where’) has been used in the majority of attributive clauses (51%).The findings of the study reveal the main tendencies in the distribution and frequency of attributive clauses and suggest that the usage of attributive clauses depends, to a large extent, on the register of spoken language.

TheZhuangzi, hermeneutics and (philological) corpus linguistics

The classical Chinese textZhuangzitells us that the meaning of a word, or a text, is not fixed, but consists of the many perspectives offered in debate. Each new contribution interprets what has been said and thus adds to its meaning. This is akin to the approach of modern hermeneutics. What a text means is determined by its intertextual links to previous texts, and by the traces it leaves in its subsequent interpretations. The practical approach of philology and the methodology of corpus linguistics provide the foundation of the task of interpretation, by establishing the textual evidence on which interpretation has to rest. My paper exemplifies theZhuangzi’s strategy in moving on from the textual evidence to their manifold interpretations, thus interweaving corpus linguistics, philology and hermeneutics.

Life in the ghetto: How the media represent British lifestyle migration to France

This study is part of a wider analysis of migrant identity within the context of British lifestyle migration to south-west France. The study uses an integrated methodology of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis (Social Actor Analysis) to examine how British migration to France is discursively represented within the UK media. The analysis reveals common keywords and patterns of language use that carry negative evaluation;distinctions are made between the existing British residents and a recent and more generalised phenomenon of migration, where the latter is portrayed in terms of a threatening invasion of ghetto-dwellers. Lifestyle migration is thus presented on different levels, with an overall sense that one kind of lifestyle migration is portrayed as more acceptable, or legitimate, than another. Such stereotypical positioning can be taken up as a resource by writers to self-identify against what they are not, at the same time reproducing ideologies of lifestyle migration. The study also concludes that although the British do not constitute a marginalised and vulnerable group, they are represented in the media using similar linguistic strategies to those seen in the representations of immigrants and asylum seekers.

Review: Corpus Linguistics: Method, Analysis and Interpretation (Massive Open Online Course). FutureLearn: Lancaster University

Corpus Linguistics: Method, Analysis and Interpretation is a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), offered by Lancaster University and delivered on the free-to-access FutureLearn MOOC platform. The course is an eight-week theoretical and practical introduction to corpus linguistics (CL) methodology, for aspiring and practising corpus linguists and social scientists. It builds on, and significantly expands, a previous web-based practical CL course run by Lancaster University, but one which was primarily intended for participants on the Lancaster campus. This new course, accessible for free to anyone anywhere in the world who has Internet access, was first run in early 2014 with annual re-runs planned to begin every September. This review is of the second run of the course. Two tracks of content run in parallel: a core that involves preliminary lectures, ‘how-to’ videos and readings; and a supplementary track that focusses on ‘in-conversation’ videos with leading scholars, and advancedlevel audio recordings of lectures given at Lancaster University’s CL summer schools. The topics for each week are various and inter-connected. Beginning with an overview of CL methods, the course moves on weekby-week to look at corpus-based discourse analysis, how to build a corpus, an investigation of social issues with corpora, textbook and dictionary construction, language learning and learner corpora, and corpus-based investigations of swearing. As a result of this breadth of content, the course as a whole is an intriguing and engaging exploration of how language in society can be investigated through the construction and analysis of computer-based corpora. Common threads throughout the eight weeks are introductory video lectures focussed on a specific aspect of CL; the ‘how-to’ videos immerse the participant in some of the widely available corpora and analysis software; a range of practical activities, quizzes, and

DOMESTICATION, FOREIGNIZATION, AND LEXICAL DENSITY: ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF “METAI“ (SEASONS OF THE YEAR) BY KRISTIJONAS DONELAITIS

The rural epic “Metai” (Seasons of the Year) by Kristijonas Donelaitis, a milestone of Lithuanian literature, has enjoyed the status of similar literary writings viewed as a ‘must’ for being translated into different languages. Up to now, translations of “Metai” have appeared in 13 different languages (Armenian, Byelorussian, Czech, English, Georgian, German, Hungarian, Latvian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian). As regards translations into English, the poem was not translated in full until 1967; the translation was carried out by Nadas Rastenis and published in Los Angeles. The other complete translation of “Metai” is almost 20 years apart, performed by Peter Tempest and published in 1985. The present analysis aims to find out which of the opposing strategies – foreignization or domestication – is more consistently employed in the two English translations (on the macrolevel). The specific research questions on the micro-level concern two text properties, lexical density and lexical diversity, in the source-text and the two translations. These parameters were evaluated using corpus linguistics methodology and tools. The overall evaluation of the domesticating and foreignizing strategies employed in the two translations demonstrates that each of them is applied to a certain degree. The domestication is fair, revealing respect for the original, the author and the reader, whereas foreignizing strategies are mainly seen on the discoursal, generic level. The translators tried to balance the two approaches for the target reader to be able to appreciate both, the specificity of the cultural content and the fluent domesticated narrative. As for the lexico-semantic level, the highest lexical density was found in the analyzed Lithuanian data (excerpts from the poem), reaching over 62%, while the two translations show statistically important lower density, roughly about 54% each. This means that about 8% of content words were lost in the translations. With respect to lexical diversity, N. Rastenis with a 789-word text seems to be more loquacious than P. Tempest (the total number of words – 654).

Introduction to stance language

This paper presents a brief overview of stance language and the numerous linguistic phenomena included in the notion of stance. The paper also comments on the relation of corpus linguistics (CL) methodology and the study of stance devices in discourse. Although some of the drawbacks of this methodology are identified, the view in this study is very positive because CL allows the unparalleled analysis, interrogation and indexing of large amounts of texts only achievable through computing means. This introductory paper concerning the description of stance language and CL seeks to give context for the four articles contained in this special issue of Research in Corpus Linguistics. These contributions come to demonstrate the validity of CL methodology for the study of hedging, evaluation, style, and modality in different registers and specialised domains.

Phraseological signaling of discourse organization in academic lectures: A comparison of lexical bundles in authentic lectures and EAP listening materials

AbstractAlthough recorded lectures are frequently used in EAP listening courses, the use of formulaic language in EAP listening material has been largely overlooked. This article reports the results of a study on the frequency and use of phraseology for discourse organization in recorded English for Academic Purposes (EAP) lectures and authentic lectures. Using corpus linguistics methodology in combination with qualitative analysis, the present study identifies strings of frequently co-occurring words (lexical bundles) that are frequent in EAP listening materials and goes on to compare the frequency and use of these bundles and those identified by Biber, Conrad, and Cortes (2004) from the T2K-SWAL teaching subcorpus, in both EAP listening materials and authentic lectures. Lexical bundles used for discourse organization were more frequently occurring in EAP lectures than academic lectures, and analysis of the functions and context of these two registers provides insight into the cause.

Introduction: Corpus linguistics and the Nordic languages

Recent decades of research in linguistics have seen a shift towards empirical methods and an increased use of data from corpora as a basis for making claims about language (Sampson 2005). This trend has made its mark on research on the Nordic languages also, and the current special issue aims to show some of the breadth of research in this field. The issue is in its entirety devoted to contributions that use the methodology of corpus linguistics on Nordic language data. This includes research that investigates both historical and contemporary aspects of the languages of the Nordic region.

Affective Robotics: Modelling and Testing Cultural Prototypes.

If robots are to successfully interact with humans, they need to measure, quantify and respond to the emotions we produce. Similar to humans, the perceptual cue inputs to any modelling that allows this will be based on behavioural expression and body activity features that are prototypical of each emotion. However, the likely employment of such robots in different cultures necessitates the tuning of the emotion feature recognition system to the specific feature profiles present in these cultures. The amount of tuning depends on the relative convergence of the cross-cultural mappings between the emotion feature profiles of the cultures where the robots will be used. The GRID instrument and the cognitive corpus linguistics methodology were used in a contrastive study analysing a selection of behavioural expression and body activity features to compare the feature profiles of joy, sadness, fear and anger within and between Polish and British English. The intra-linguistic differences that were found in the profile of emotion features suggest that weightings based on this profile can be used in robotic modelling to create emotion-sensitive socially interacting robots. Our cross-cultural results further indicate that this profile of features needs to be tuned in robots to make them emotionally competent in different cultures.

Semantic Prosody of [pendidikan/education] from Khaled Nordin's Perspective: An Analysis of Speech Texts based on Corpus Linguistic Methodology

Education generally is a planned initiative related to the teaching and learning process to produce learners who are active in developing their potential to meet their own needs and society's. Synergistic process conducted ultimately aims to produce a positive output acceleration of human capital that has religious and spiritual strength, self-control, personality, intelligence, good characters and competent, dedicated to the challenges and needs of the 21st century. Armed with such commitment, Higher Education Minister, Datuk Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin in his speeches often reveals the diversity of education issues in Malaysia particularly in relation to education at the tertiary level. Therefore, this study will describe the information that can be tapped from the use of [education] lexis in his speech texts through the analysis of semantic prosody based on corpus linguistics. A total of 20 speeches are selected at random from a collection of his speeches from 2009 to 2012 to be analyzed. Semantic prosody analysis results show most often Khaled Nordin highlights four (4) text information related to the main theme education namely strengthening the quality of higher education and its academicians, strengthening research and innovation development besides quality student development, and human capital employability. This situation would highlight the evidence that lexis in a language would be able to reveal text information that could be used to understand lexical meanings and values and could also enlighten the leadership identity of its users. The situation is thus able to prove that there are explicit and implicit links between the reality of the language usage and the social reality of its users.

Methodological Flaws in Corpus-Based Studies on Malaysian ESL Textbooks

With the increasing interest among the pedagogy researchers in the use of corpus linguistics methodologies to study textbooks, there has emerged a similar enthusiasm among the materials developers to draw on empirical findings in the development of the state-of-the-art curricula and syllabi. In order for these research findings to have their impact felt in language pedagogy, the researchers should, however, follow the well-established principles of the methodology. In an attempt to investigate the extent to which the researchers abide by these standards, the current paper reviews a number of corpus-based studies carried out on the ELT textbooks in Malaysia. It was specifically intended to shed light on the possible methodological flaws committed by the researchers. The study, it is the hope of the researchers, could provide some guidelines for the researchers to carry out further corpus-based studies on EFL/ESL instructional materials as well.

Corpus linguistics and Audiovisual Translation: in search of an integrated approach

This article serves as an introduction to the special issue of Perspectives: Studies in Translatology entitled ‘Corpus linguistics and Audiovisual Translation: in search of an integrated approach’. The purpose of the volume is to illustrate and discuss the use and limits (if any) of corpus-based investigation into audiovisual dialogue and audiovisual translation. This special issue also seeks to investigate the development of corpus-based approaches to AVT that are able to take into account the multiple dimensions of audiovisual translation, the technical and professional constraints that are specific to the medium, as well as the social factors affecting the translational act (e.g. target language and culture norms, self-censorship, patronage, etc.). This is achieved through seven contributions, intended to offer a wide range of perspectives on the application of corpus linguistics methodologies to different AVT modalities. As the contributions in this volume suggest, an integrated approach is needed to account for the complex semiotic fabric of audiovisual texts, their hybrid nature and multiple codes.

Corpora and Interpretation: A Study of Coffee Field Terminology

This paper aims at presenting the results of a research based on the work of professional consecutive interpreters in the coffee field. When working with specialized areas, interpreters are frequently faced with variation in terminology, especially due to the spoken language in use. By using Corpus Linguistics methodology, we have produced a vocabulary (Portuguese – English) of coffee terms and their variants, showing the importance of including oral data as input to terminology work for interpreters.

The Frequency and Function of Just in British and New Zealand Engineering Lectures

Research problem: This corpus comparison study examines the occurrences of <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> as used in British and New Zealand engineering lectures in order to discover its frequency and functions and to consider its role in professional communication. Research questions: Is <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> as frequent in the academic genre of university lectures as in other genres of spoken English? (1) Does <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> have the same functions in British and New Zealand engineering lectures as found in a previous study at an American university? (2) Does a better understanding of the different ways that <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> is used in lectures have pedagogical implications for professional communication, especially for English as an additional language learners? Literature review: Previous studies show <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> mainly functions as a ‘”minimizer’” (merely, only, simply) in university lectures in America, and functions the same in British and New Zealand university lectures on engineering. <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog Just}$</tex></formula> also functions as part of a metadiscursive frame (let me <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> explain), and stance (the speaker's attitude toward the content communicated: don't <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> copy down what I've done). In response, English as an additional language learners can learn to recognize and distinguish the different functions of <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> and use them appropriately. Methodology: The researcher used a corpus linguistics methodology to determine the frequency of <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> and a discourse analysis method to see if the functions of <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> identified in a previous study of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English applied to the corpus of British and New Zealand engineering lectures. These lectures are all part of the Engineering Lecture Corpus, which was started at Coventry University and includes AUT University in New Zealand. Results and discussion: The frequency of <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> in British and New Zealand engineering lectures was high: it occurred in the top 50 words in the wordlists of both sets of lectures. <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog Just}$</tex></formula> was used in British and New Zealand engineering lectures the same way as in the American university, functioning mostly as a “minimizer,” often to reduce the imposition of what was being said or asked. It occurred much more frequently in the British engineering lectures than the New Zealand ones, often in short stretches of discourse. Its “locative” meaning, used when indicating a precise location, occurred more often in the New Zealand Electrical Engineering lectures and in the British Civil Engineering lectures. A study of the different ways that <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> functions, and the frequency with which it is used in spoken academic English should lead to a better understanding of its function in professional communication. The limitation of the study was the sample size, and the fact that it was an opportunistic sample taken from a limited number of lecturers in a limited number of universities. While adopting the functions used in the American study was a limitation, the additional category of <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> used in multiword units was uncovered. Limitations of the unavailablilty of recordings to determine pronunciation differences was also noted, with examples provided to show possible misunderstandings. Future research would examine an expanded data sample, providing better representation of the language of lectures in the UK and New Zealand within and outside the subdisciplines of engineering, and investigating the ways that the pronunciation of <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> affects its meaning. Other spoken academic and general corpora, such as the British Academic Spoken English corpus and the spoken components of the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English could be studied for comparison purposes of the frequency and functions of <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> .

Formulaicity in an agglutinating language: the case of Turkish

AbstractThis study examines the extent to which complex inflectional patterns found in Turkish, a language with a rich agglutinating morphology, can be described as formulaic. It is found that many prototypically formulaic phenomena previously attested at the multi-word level in English – frequent co-occurrence of specific elements, fixed ‘bundles’ of elements, and associations between lexis and grammar – also play an important role at the morphological level in Turkish. It is argued that current psycholinguistic models of agglutinative morphology need to be complexified to incorporate such patterns. Conclusions are also drawn for the practice of Turkish as a Foreign Language teaching and for the methodology of Turkish corpus linguistics.

Quantifying lexical usage: vocabulary pertaining to ecosystems and the environment

A recent development in corpus linguistics has been the integration of critical discourse methodologies, which allow in-depth contextual and qualitative analyses, with corpus linguistic methodologies, which allow broader quantitative analyses. Our study is a contribution to this approach. We present the methods used in a study of vocabulary pertaining to the environment, undertaken as part of the UK National Ecosystem Assessment. A clear and replicable methodology was developed and applied to three custom-built specialised web corpora and a reference web corpus; automatic analysis of collocations found using the Sketch Engine was complemented by manual analysis; and a small-scale replicability check was carried out to ensure that investigator divergence was minimal. We outline the approach and some of the key findings, and we also suggest areas for further refinement/investigation.