Lexico-grammatical Patterns Research Articles

Towards a corpus-based description of speech-gesture units of meaning

Abstract The theories and methods in corpus linguistics (CL) have had an impact on numerous areas in applied linguistics. However, the interface between CL and multimodal speech-gesture studies remains underexplored. One fundamental question is whether it is possible, and even appropriate, to apply the theories and paradigms established based on textual data to multimodal data. To explore this, we examine how CL can assist investigating lexico-grammatical patterns of speech co-occurring with a recurrent gesture (i.e. the circular gesture). Sinclair’s (1996) unit of meaning model is used to describe the co-gestural speech patterns. The study draws on a subset of the Nottingham Multimodal Corpus, in which 570 instances of circular gestures and their co-occurring speech are identified and analysed. We argue that Sinclair’s unit of meaning model can be extended to include speech-gesture patterns, and that those descriptions enable a more nuanced understanding of meaning in context.

A corpus-based study of native speakers’ and Taiwanese EFL learners’ use of the adverb just

The polysemous adverb just is frequently used by efl learners, but many learners are still unaware of how just should be used. The aim of this study is to examine how frequently different meanings of the adverb just are employed by native speakers and Taiwanese efl learners in their essays and to identify the differences in the lexico-grammatical patterns. Drawing data from one native-speaker corpus and two Taiwanese efl learner corpora, we investigated ( i) the overall frequencies of just, ( ii) the frequencies of just by meaning categories, and ( iii) the lexico-grammatical patterns of the different meanings of just, as well as their semantic and syntactic features. Results showed that the overall frequencies of just were similar in the native speaker and learner corpora, but there was a smaller variety of the use of adverbial just in the learner corpora. By examining the lexico-grammatical patterns, we found that the meanings of the adverbial just were induced in the following patterns: first, when it modified different syntactic structures; secondly, when it co-occurred with specific contextual clues; and, thirdly, when it interacted with particular tense/aspect of a verb. In addition, semantic features and lexical choices had a pivotal role in determining whether the use of a particular sense of just was acceptable in a sentence. By providing corpus-based teaching material for the uses of adverbial just, it is hoped that our study will shed light on the perplexing issue of adverb acquisition.

Obfuscating Agency in Pakistani Newspaper Reporting: A Discourse- based Perspective

This paper investigates the use of strategies to obfuscate agency such as metonymic expressions, passive structures and nominalization as a resource for constructing knowledge in media discourses. The methodological framework of the study is inspired by Halliday’s (2004) concept of grammatical metaphor. Linguistic choices play a critical role in facilitating ideological information flow, for example, nominalization structure the information in ways which allow writers’ perspective on events to be conveyed to the reader (Halliday and Martin, 1993). The data for this study come from three Pakistani daily English newspapers: Dawn, the News and the Nation, selected on the basis of their wide circulation. A sample analysis has confirmed the working hypothesis that nominalizations are useful in abstracting and classifying actions and events in order to build and organize media discourses (for a fuller account see Fairclough 2010). The study explores the lexico-grammatical patterns which have been deployed to build ideological positions, maintain power relations and relate with the literature in the field that journalists use in order to inculcate particular socio-political morals in the consumers.

Discourse analysis on the city ordinances of Tagum City

This study entitled DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ON THE CITY ORDINANCES OF TAGUM CITY describes and analyzes the stance markers, lexico-grammatical patterns of verbs, and semantics of verbs in the city ordinances. The method of analysis of this descriptive-qualitative study is based on the frameworks of the elements of stance by Hyland (2005), sub-categories of verb groups by Burton-Roberts (1994), and classification of verbal prototypes by Dixon and Aikhenvald (2004) employing Wetherell et al.'s (2001) four approaches to discourse analysis. This study analyzed five (5) randomly selected city ordinances of Tagum City from 2000 to 2017 with topics focusing on health, women, children, gender, and family. Based on the analyses of data, the findings revealed that in the city ordinances’ (a) boosters are used to express persuasion; (b) complex transitive verb groups are used to provide justification or support to the provisions; (c) affective verbs are used to express commitment and responsibility; and (d) stance markers, lexico-grammatical patterns of verbs and semantics of verbs contribute to the overall meaning and understanding in the city ordinances and helped in the easy understanding of the local law. The results of this study are found to have implications concerning the students, language teachers, government officials, and future researchers.

Categorisations of developed and developing countries in UN news on climate change

ABSTRACT Categorisations of social groups involve interpretations of reality that include social cognition, classification of relevant concepts, worldviews and ideologies. To reveal the factors that form the basis for the commonly used terms developed countries and developing countries, this study uses corpus-assisted critical discourse studies to examine how they are represented in United Nations climate change news reports. Results show these two categorisations are constructed through lexico-grammatical patterns that serve generally as Locations specifying the characteristics of various climate change scenarios. In addition, guided by UN mandates, Agents (developed countries) are expected to provide climate funds to Patients or Goals (developing countries) to effectively solve this global problem. The ways in which these patterns are represented in UN news reporting reflect the post-World War II world order and the core value of humanitarianism endorsed by the UN. To address the ongoing problem of insufficient financial support to developing countries, it is proposed that provisions of support be included in the Nationally Developed Contributions of developed countries.

English across Borders: Exploring Register Variation in South Asian Newspaper Editorials

This paper is a multidimensional analysis of Pakistani, Indian, and Bengali newspaper editorials, and they are also compared with British newspaper editorials. The purpose of the study is to explore lexico-grammatical patterns of change in English used in the countries separated by geopolitical divisions which remained parts of the British colony. A specialised corpus developed for this study consists of 288 text files of press editorials taken from May 2020 to May 2021 which were tagged using Biber’s tagger. Z score formula was used for the computation of dimensions score. Further, ANOVA was used to find the differences and similarities between the editorials from the selected countries. The data was also compared with British press editorials. The results indicate that Pakistani press editorials are the most informational and abstract among all the countries. Indian press editorials are the most non-narrative and the least abstract. Bengali press editorials are the most explicit and argumentative and the least informational. British press editorials are the least non-narrative, explicit, and argumentative among the selected countries. The results provide substantial evidence that the newspaper editorial registers of these countries are not only different from British press editorials but, after the partition of India, each country has developed its own norms of producing discourse also.

SciE-Lex report: Building up a Collocational Database to Assist the Production of Biomedical Texts in L2 English

This paper aims to describe the building-up of SciE-Lex (http://www.ub.edu/grelic/eng/scielex2/scielex.html), a collocational database of non-specialized terms in biomedical English, which was primarily conceived as a response to the lack of reference tools accounting for the lexicogrammatical patterning associated with non-technical terms frequently used in the health science discourse. SciE-Lex thus serves the purpose of assisting L2 English writers from the health science discourse community in their production of biomedical texts in English. This collocational database is the result of a lexicographic project carried out by the GreLiC research group at the University of Barcelona, and as such it has undergone various developmental stages since its inception. In order to evaluate its adequacy as a writing tool addressed to the Spanish biomedical community and confirm the appropriateness of the combinatorial patterning and phraseological information included in each entry, a group of language experts were asked to assess the dictionary by stressing both its weaknesses and strengths. Their feedback has stressed the suitability of SciE-Lex as a lexicographic resource and yielded significant improvement of the tool. Last but not least, SciE-Lex has also been successfully tested with targeted users in a series of “Writing for publication” workshops held at the University of Barcelona, and taught by the author, the results of which have corroborated the usefulness of this lexical database to enhance Spanish users’ biomedical English published writing.

Hedged Turkish complaints and requests in the Problem-Solution text pattern

AbstractThis study investigates to what extent Turkish formal complaint letters followed the ‘Problem-Solution Pattern’ (Hoey 1983), and on how the writers expressed their wishes when they explained their problem and asked the authorities to amend a mistake. The study is based on a corpus of 134 Turkish complaint letters. It draws upon Flowerdew’s (2008,2012) approach to the problem-solution pattern and the role of clause relations in this text pattern.Results showed that age-old Turkish rhetorical norms led writers’ choice of lexico-grammatical patterns in reflecting politeness in order to maintain their own and the recipients’ faces. The speech acts (complaint and request) in the ‘Problem and Solution’ parts below were hedged and impersonalized. The Turkish traditional rhetorical formula that was used in the request does not explicitly ask the reader to do something; in this way, the writers attempt to protect both their own face and that of the reader.

ASSESSING LEARNERS’ ACADEMIC PHRASEOLOGY IN THE DIGITAL AGE: A CORPUS-INFORMED APPROACH TO ESP TEXTS

In the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), as in any other type of interlanguage, phraseology contributes significantly to successful academic writing (Biber and Barbieri 2007). For particular learner varieties, such as Romanian English, few studies have examined formulaic sequences (Hyland 2008), mainly focusing on lexico-grammatical patterns (Chitez 2012, 2014). The proposed paper investigates the use of phraseology in Romanian students’ academic papers, written during their ESP courses, by adopting a double contrastive perspective: first, we contrast texts produced in two different disciplines (Literature Studies and Information Technology), and, second, we compare the academic phraseology in learner language with native speaker phraseology. For the analysis, we have compiled two corpora (ESP-LIT and ESP-IT), each consisting of 40 texts representing a discipline specific didactic genre, e.g. essay. As reference, we used the Academic Phrasebank (Davis and Morley 2018). The aim is to find out whether the use of academic formulaic expressions differs according to the discipline and the extent to which students integrate expert academic phrases into their writing. The methodology can be replicated for different language learning settings.

Automated annotation of learner English

Abstract This paper explores the use of natural language processing (NLP) tools and their utility for learner language analyses through a comparison of automatic linguistic annotation against a gold standard produced by humans. While there are a number of automated annotation tools for English currently available, little research is available on the accuracy of these tools when annotating learner data. We compare the performance of three linguistic annotation tools (a tagger and two parsers) on academic writing in English produced by learners (both L1 and L2 English speakers). We focus on lexico-grammatical patterns, including both phrasal and clausal features, since these are frequently investigated in applied linguistics studies. Our results report both precision and recall of annotation output for argumentative texts in English across four L1s: Arabic, Chinese, English, and Korean. We close with a discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of using automatic tools to annotate learner language.

Teaching the concept of Typified Situation to promote foreign language interaction in classroom instruction and study abroad

This multiple case study reports on how Marie and Yuan, both novice students of Italian, used the concept of the Typified Situation (TS) in target language interactions in a pre-departure classroom course and later during a study abroad trip to Florence, Italy. A TS is a pragmatically motivated interaction that reoccurs with a specific genre and register in a culture. Using concept-based language instruction (CBLI) to teach the TS, students were introduced to the semantic and lexico-grammatical patterns of what was happening (field), how participants interact (tenor), and through which means (mode), and the purposeful and sequential order in which these actions usually happen (genre) in the TS in Italian culture. A qualitative analysis of data from classroom instruction and study abroad revealed that the learners showed awareness of the TS concept in classroom tasks and study abroad interactions, recognized register variations, and interacted by making language choices depending on the context of the situation.

That's Cool. Computational Sociolinguistic Methods for Investigating Individual Lexico-grammatical Variation.

The present study deals with variation in the use of lexico-grammatical patterns and emphasizes the need to embrace individual variation. Targeting the pattern that’s adj (as in that’s right, that’s nice or that’s okay) as a case study, we use a tailor-made Python script to systematically retrieve grammatical and semantic information about all instances of this construction in BNC2014 as well as sociolinguistic information enabling us to study social and individual lexico-grammatical variation among speakers who have used this pattern. The dataset amounts to 4,394 tokens produced by 445 speakers using 159 adjective types in 931 conversations. Using detailed descriptive statistics and mixed-effects regression models, we show that while the choice of some adjectives is partly determined by social variables, situational and especially individual variation is rampant overall. Adopting a cognitive-linguistic perspective and relying on the notion of entrenchment, we interpret these findings as reflecting individual speakers' routines. We argue that computational sociolinguistics is in an ideal position to contribute to the data-driven investigation of individual lexico-grammatical variation and encourage computational sociolinguists to grab this opportunity. For the routines of individual speakers ultimately both underlie and compromise systematic social variation and trigger and steer well-known types of language change including grammaticalization, pragmaticalization and change by invited inference.

The hierarchisation of operatic signs through the lens of audio description A corpus study

In opera, a multimodal art form by nature, meaning is constructed by the synthesis of its musical, verbal, visual and dramatic components. Audio description (AD) is an audiovisual translation modality that provides blind and visually impaired patrons with access to the visual elements of the play. The first aim of this pilot study is to conduct a corpus analysis to define the lexico-grammatical patterns of opera AD in the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona and the Teatro Real in Madrid. The second aim is to perform a semiotic analysis to elucidate the hierarchisation of the action, the parole and the visual aesthetics of the production in the AD scripts. The conclusions suggest a number of linguistic and semiotic idiosyncrasies that are shared with other AD modalities, as well as some key divergences.

Languaging as Emergent Constraint-satisfying Self-organizing Activity

Languaging is a manifestation of intelligent human action that enables selves to seek and to co-articulate functional fits between self and selected aspects of the self's social and cultural environments. Selves have open-ended endogenous tendencies that strive for articulation in social situations. The final products of these tendencies -- specific utterances -- have functional capacities to enter into co-articulated relations with the other functioning components of larger-scale socio-affective-cognitive assemblages. Internal processes of microgenetic construction that have their origins in the pre-linguistic infra-structure of the self are corporeally schematized and entrained to and shaped by global order parameters, e.g., lexicogrammatical pattern. Intrinsic functional constraints on languaging activity are the work of a complex non-optimized system (the self) that draws on available resources in context-sensitive ways in order to yield social and cognitive outcomes. Infant proto-language is a guide to the emergence of these constraints.

The Effect of Genre-Oriented Translation-Based Instruction on EFL Writing

This study investigated the effect of genre-oriented translation-based instruction on EFL writing. Many Korean university students are interested in learning English, enhanced by translating drama, cartoons, and children’s storybooks. However, when they engage in these activities, they feel difficulty even if the texts seem simple. This is because the translation process requires not just language competence but also different textual, rhetorical, and social aspects involved in particular genres. In this study, a genre-oriented translation-based writing workshop held for 23 university students is analyzed. A combination of research methods including a pre-test, a workshop, a post-test, survey, and interviews was utilized. This paper discusses first, how genre-oriented noticing helps to raise learners’ awareness of discourse conventions; second, how a translation-based workshop affects the use of learners’ lexico-grammatical patterns, rhetorical patterns, and formality patterns in writing; and third, how an analysis of qualitative data showed there are two categories of genre knowledge that the participants can perceive as easy or difficult. Further implications for the use of text genre knowledge are also discussed.

Towards a systemic functional model for characterizing Chinese loanwords in English: The case of kowtow

Previous studies on loanwords have tended to be langue-based, focusing on lexicographical documentation and on establishing formal criteria for integration of loanwords into the recipient language in terms of experiential meaning. The recent pragmatic turn in loanword studies signals a parole-oriented approach which shifts attention to the use and functions of loanwords in the recipient language beyond denotative meanings alone. However, there has not been a consistent systematic linguistic framework that could characterize loanwords in the recipient language and that could explore the interaction of langue and parole concerning loanwords. This paper intends to fill this gap by proposing a corpus-informed systemic functional linguistic (SFL) model to account for the characterology of loanwords. Based on the proposed multi-stratal model, kowtow, a Chinese loanword into the English language, is examined for its behaviours at the strata of phonology, lexicogrammar, and discourse semantics as well as how it is embedded in context. Attention at these various levels shows that kowtow demonstrates rich lexicogrammatical productivity in the recipient language and displays strikingly different lexicogrammatical patterns from its Chinese counterpart, indicating that its meaning potentials are activated and extended in the cross-cultural contexts. In fact, by crossing cultures, it actually inverts its connotative meaning.

THE INFLUENCE OF SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS ON TEACHING FUNCTIONAL TEXTS IN A WRITING CLASS

This article analyzed the functional text and register in Systemic-Functional theoretical framework. It explored how both register and genre realized in pedagogic models especially in English business writing course. In English as a foreign-language, writing for functional texts is considered important in teaching learning activities. The register and genre were considered in composing the application letter. It was used the teaching cycle of Genre Based Approach (henceforth GBA) to connect between register and genre in the writing functional text especially in writing application letter activities. There were the models of functional writing provided and the students followed the teaching cycle of GBA the students compose the letter of application. The most noticeable qualities of generic structures and tenor awareness tended to be emphasized by lecturer over less-evident lexico-grammatical patterns. It is also important of how the students’ recognize stages of formal letters. This was suggested that choice of genre and more systematic attention to details of register (especially tenor) awareness are truly important in writing formal letter for learners English for Business Writing class.

CHURCH SLAVONIC BORROWINGS IN THE LEXICAL SYSTEM OF UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE OF 16–17 CENTURIES

The article describes Church Slavonic loanwords' functioning and use in the lexical-semantic system of the Ukrainian written literary language of the XVI – first half of the XVII century. It discloses the concepts of «Church Slavonic language», «Church Slavonic loanwords». The composition and semantics of Slavonic loanwords in the language of various genres of Ukrainian memos (certificates, court documents, wills, diplomas, descriptions of castles, rounders Hetman of offices, documents of the Church and school fraternities, annals, works of religious polemic and imaginative literature, memos of scientific and educational literature, liturgical books etc.), walked to the source base of «Dictionary of the Ukrainian language of 16 – the first half 17 centuries» and its unique lexical card index are clarified. The study highlights specific features of the investigated borrowings in the Ukrainian language, specified time, set them apart from other words (Latinisms, Grecisms, Polonisms, and the like). These features are most active at the phonetic, word formation, and semantic levels of language. It is established that in the course of the historical development of the Church Slavonic language, some Church Slavonic loanwords, under the influence of the phonetic features of the Ukrainian language (the pronunciation of ancient etymological ы and и as a single sound in the front row and high raise [и]; use e in place of the stressed or unstressed ѣ; pronunciation of ѣ as i «new» ѣ at the place of the etymological e; writing e in place of Proto-Slavic ę; the alternation у/в; sound transformation in the individual prefixes and suffix; the softening of the ц; the transition in unstressed position у – о; loss of primary і; simplification in groups of consonants, etc.), changes in the sound structure of the word. Part of the Church Slavonic words, adapting to the semantic system of the Ukrainian language of 16 – the first half 17 centuries, changed to lexico-semantic level, particularly the expansion or narrowing semantics. Other old Church Slavonic lexemes are components of the diverse lexico-grammatical patterns of collocations and idioms connected with the Church ritual sphere. Keywords: adaptation, written memos, semantics, phrases, phonetic changes, Church Slavonicism.

The Effect of Study-Abroad Experiences on Korean Returnees’ Use of Shell Nouns in Persuasive Writing

With a growing number of returnees from abroad, there has been a steady interest on how their study abroad experiences had an influence on their L2 writing development. However, it is also undeniable that depending on when and how long they stayed in the host country, final attainment varies. Taking the onset age and length of residence into consideration, we designed our study to investigate returnees’ written products, particularly focusing on a cohesive feature called shell noun. The participants were 24 returnees currently residing in Korea at age between 22 and 30. All the participants received over 100 scores on TOEFL. They were grouped into two onset ages (the ages of 9-11 and 12-18) based on the sensitive period hypothesis. The results revealed that onset age was a decisive factor on shell noun frequency; however, length of residence did not predict use of shell nouns, when separated from age. There is not any difference in the use of lexico-grammatical patterns for shell nouns between the two groups of returnees, with the use of the shell noun view being the most frequent.

'The mythological marauding violent schizophrenic': Using the word sketch tool to examine representations of schizophrenic people as violent in the British press

Combining theories and methods from Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, this article examined grammatical collocates of the lemma SCHIZOPHRENIC (n.) relating to violence in a 15 million word corpus of U.K. national newspaper texts. Using the Word Sketch tool via the online toolbox SketchEngine, it isolated several relatively formulaic lexico-grammatical patterns. SCHIZOPHRENIC co-occurred unusually frequently with modifiers relating to perceived dangerousness and, when grammatical subject, with verbs referring to violent actions. The analysis noted incidentally that, when predicated by the intransitive verb DIE, some examples referred to stories where schizophrenics were killed by police or medical staff, and grammatical agency was obscured.). Other modifiers of SCHIZOPRENIC referred to examples of ‘lay diagnoses’ which were based solely on evidence of violent behaviour. Almost all instances of reported speech ascribed to SCHIZOPHRENIC referred to the admission of violent crime or the lurid and inaccurate representation of psychotic symptoms. Lastly, SCHIZOPHRENIC was grammatically co-ordinated unusually frequently with social groups defined by their violent behaviour. The article concluded by arguing that while the label SCHIZOPHRENIC (n.) is problematic owing to its evident negative semantic prosody, charities and medical professionals should work towards changing the negative misconceptions revealed by identified patterns rather than simply discouraging use of the label.