Corpus Linguistics Software Research Articles

Exploring phraseological variations by concgramming: The realisation of complete patterns of variations

Cheng, Winnie and Maggie Leung. 2012. Exploring phraseological variations by concgramming: The realization of complete patterns of variations. Linguistic Research 29(3), 617-638. The significance of studying the co-selection of words has long been recognized. More traditional corpus linguistic approaches or tools help to find co-selections in the form of contiguous words (i.e. n-gram, or lexical bundles and clusters) or non-contiguous patterns. However, phraseologies in the form of non-contiguous co-occurrence with positional variations are rarely examined. Here it is argued that they are worth examining and have significance for better understanding language use and meaning. One reason for the rare discussion of these phraseologies is that they are not easily discovered with more traditional approaches and tools. This paper describes the realisation of different patterns of phraseological variations, exemplified with five concgrams (i.e. co-occurrence of words) extracted from two profession-specific corpora. With the use of an innovative corpus linguistic software, ConcGram 1.0 (Greaves, 2009), the frequencies and patterns of all of the possible phraseological variations (constituency and positional variations) of the concgrams are analysed. The illustration and analysis have implications on the application values of studying phraseological variations using concgramming. (The Hong Kong

Western Perceptions of Hong Kong Ten Years On: A Corpus-driven Critical Discourse Study

This article studies the Western perceptions of and relations with Hong Kong a decade after the reversion of the sovereignty from Britain to China in 1997. Previous studies have demonstrated that the West had a significantly negative view on the future of Hong Kong with respect to the handover. According to recent observations, however, the perceptions of the West have undergone a noticeable change. This article aims at investigating the West's understanding, opinions and positions regarding Hong Kong today compared with those in 1997. The possible reasons for any changes are also investigated. Through the integration of the theories and methods of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis and the use of two corpus linguistic software, ConcGram and Wmatrix, the present article examines a range of Western public discourse of Hong Kong concerning the handover. The purpose of the article is to yield insights into the New Hong Kong in the eyes of the West, which in turn contributes to a re-examination of the relations and power balance between the West and China.

Experiments in 17th century English: manual versus automatic conceptual history

Previous research in conceptual history, the study of change over time of key terms and value systems, has been carried out manually using a restricted number of pre-identified texts. We propose that a method combining techniques from corpus and computational linguistics can be exploited to support conceptual history with semantic searches on a vast sample of texts. To exemplify this method, we focus on a fundamental concept in modern science, the experimental method, in order to trace how the pre-existing and primarily religious concept of experiment (or experience) took on its modern, scientific meaning. We contrast a manual approach using the existing Early English Books Online search interface with an automatic method using corpus linguistics software and methods to turn the transcribed portion of the same dataset into a corpus. Both approaches allow us to separate the religious and scientific senses and plot their change over time. We observe a rapid change in the meaning of experimental from overwhelmingly religious to largely scientific within the 1660s. However, the automatic corpus method is much more efficient and will support future scholars in carrying out iterative studies in a matter of minutes rather than through weeks of painstaking work. Such methodological innovation has the potential to support the formation of new research questions which could not have been considered previously.

Probabilities and Surprises: A Realist Approach to Identifying Linguistic and Social Patterns, with Reference to an Oral History Corpus

The relationship between language and identity has been explored in a number of ways in applied linguistics, and this article focuses on a particular aspect of it: self-representation in the oral history interview. People from a wide range of backgrounds, currently resident in one large city in England, were asked to reflect on their lives as part of a project to celebrate the millennium, resulting in a corpus of 144 transcribed interviews. The article considers the utility of realist social theory and complexity theory in the analysis of patterns—and deviations from those patterns—in both the linguistic features of these interviews and the social categories to which people are routinely ascribed. Corpus linguistic software was used to identify discourse features of the corpus as a whole, and to compare and contrast features produced by different speakers with reference to the conventional social categories used in quantitative research. These categories, with their homogenizing limitations, are challenged with reference to complex causation. The article uses the category of gender to exemplify the multi-method approach advocated.

The discourse of lending aid on small-scale development project websites: Dutch depreciatory diminutives

This article offers an analysis of the use of language on the websites of Dutch and Flemish small-scale development organisations active in The Gambia. The scope of this research is the websites of 66 organisations found through the hyperlink page http://gambia-hulporganisaties.startpagina.nl. The texts on the websites form a small corpus of around 375 000 words. Methodologically, a discourse-analytical perspective is assumed, heuristically assisted by corpus linguistic software. Thus, the texts are analysed simultaneously from a macro and micro-level: large-scale lexical patterns are combined with smaller-scale, contextualised, individual chunks of text. After a brief outline of the projects’ roots in tourism through self-reported histories of involvement and a cursory review of the literature on meanings and functions of diminutives in Dutch and other languages, the role of diminutives in the representation of the Third- World Other is explored. It is argued that diminutives in this context are used in an ambivalent way: diminutives express a sense of sympathy and at the same time reveal a derogative tone in descriptions of the Gambian side of the projects.

The language of social entrepreneurs

This paper questions the application of the entrepreneurship discourse to social entrepreneurship in the UK and looks at how people ‘doing’ social enterprise appropriate or re-write the discourse to articulate their own realities. Drawing on phenomenological enquiry and discourse analysis, the study analyses the micro discourses of social entrepreneurs, as opposed to the meta rhetorics of (social) entrepreneurship. Analysis using both corpus linguistics software and Critical Discourse Analysis showed a preoccupation among interviewees with local issues, collective action, geographical community and local power struggles. Echoes of the enterprise discourse are evident but couched in linguistic devices that suggest a modified social construction of entrepreneurship, in which interviewees draw their legitimacy from a local or social morality. These findings are at odds ideologically with the discursive shifts of UK social enterprise policy over the last decade, in which a managerially defined rhetoric of enterprise is used to promote efficiency, business discipline and financial independence. The paper raises critical awareness of the tension in meanings appropriated to the enterprise discourse by social enterprise policy and practice and illustrates the value of discourse analysis for entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship research.