Running Words Research Articles

A Proposal to Exploit Legal Term Repertoires Extracted Automatically from a Legal English Corpus

The use of specialised corpora as support material in ESP/EAP is a widespread phenomenon yet, to the best of our knowledge, the amount of corpus-based materials in the area of legal English is considerably reduced. This study presents the proposal of several corpus-based activities to foster the acquisition of legal terminology. To that end, an 8.85 million-word legal English corpus (BLaRC) was compiled and processed to identify its most relevant terms using P.Drouin's (2003) TermoStat software. A corpus comprising three legal English textbooks (LegTeXT) was created to establish a comparison between the term inventories obtained from both corpora and thus determine the usefulness of the term list obtained from the former corpus to be used as support teaching material. Several tests were carried out finding 67% overlap between the two term inventories. Furthermore, using Heatley and Nation's (1996) Range software, it was found that 12.37% of the running words in the legal English textbooks were covered by the term inventory obtained from BLaRC. After reviewing the literature on the subject, a taxonomy is also suggested for the classification of legal terms followed by the proposal of several vocabulary activities focusing on varied linguistic levels, namely, morphological, syntactic, semantic and discursive.

“Listen and Understand What I Am Saying”: Church-Listening As a Challenge for Non-Native Listeners of English in the United Kingdom

This article uses computer-assisted analysis to study the listening environment provided by Bible readings and preaching during church services. It focuses on the vocabulary size needed to comprehend 95% and 98% of the running words of the input (lexical coverage levels indicating comprehension in connection with listening) and on the place of infrequent vocabulary in liturgical discourse. The finding that 4,000 words and 7,000 words, respectively, are needed to reach the target levels for lexical coverage suggests that non-native listeners with vocabularies of just a few thousand words may be seriously challenged by church listening.

The most frequent opaque formulaic sequences in English-medium college textbooks

This paper describes an attempt to establish a pedagogically useful list of the most frequent semantically non-transparent formulaic sequences for non-English majors in an EFL context, who need to read the textbooks of their fields in English. The list was compiled from a corpus containing 20 million running words of two hundred college textbooks across forty subject areas. In consideration of opaque formulae in widespread use, we applied a set of screening criteria when using the program Collocate and manual checking. Based on frequency, range, meaningfulness, grammatical well-formedness and semantic non-compositionality, a total of 475 opaque formulaic sequences of 2–5 words were selected and they accounted for approximately 2.08% of the running words in the corpus. The formulae identified were tested against a frequency threshold in the 120 million words of academic texts in the 450-million-token Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to verify if they merit pedagogical attention. As with other wordlists, it is hoped that this phrase list may serve as a reference for EAP teaching.

Coxhead's AWL Across ESP and Asian EFL Journal Research Articles (RAs): A Corpus-based Lexical Study

In the past few years, several cross-disciplinary corpus-based studies have been carried out on the frequency and coverage of 570 word families from Coxhead's (2000) academic word list (AWL). Some reported high coverage of this word list in their corpuses while some others questioned its generality and stated that this word list is far from complete. Hence, along with these studies, the present study attempted to examine the word frequency and text coverage of AWL on 80 research articles (RAs) written in English with 320310 running words across two Asian EFL and ESP journals. Using frequency and range as the criteria for word form selection, this study identified 438 words as the academic words and 144 new added academic words to the list which was called revised academic word list (RAWL). Applying both AWL and RAWL into the entire corpus, results support high coverage and importance of academic words in both ESP and EFL RAs. However, when two word lists were examined into ESP corpus (ESPC) and EFL corpus (EFLC) separately, academic words had higher coverage in ESPC than EFLC. From these findings it is concluded that (1) academic words play an important role in academic texts; therefore, acquisition of them seems to be essential for language learners and users, (2) because of the nature of ESP articles, ESPC holds higher coverage of academic words, (3) some of the words included in the AWL are field-specific and (4) direct attention to these words from behalf of the material and syllabus designers and teachers can lead to a better understanding of these words;hence, students’ development in their writing and reading.

Academic Words in Education Research Articles: A Corpus Study

Since the publication of Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List, attempts have been made to investigate the importance and relevance of this general academic vocabulary list in a range of different disciplines. The current paper is a corpus-based research to explore the word frequency and text coverage of Coxhead's AWL in research articles of education. To this end, 1.7 million-word corpus was compiled consisting of 239 research articles published by Educational Research Review, International Journal of Educational Development, International Journal of Educational Research, Linguistics and Education, Teaching and Teacher Education during the period of 2002 to 2010.Using WordSmith program, computer analysis showed that the AWL words accounted for 4.94% (84115 of the running words). The qualitative analysis also indicated huge differences in frequency of first two subsets in comparison to the rest (accounting for almost 50% of the whole occurrences). An attempt was also made to identify the most frequent word families of AWL in the Education Research Articles Corpus as well as to obtain a list of non-AWL words (not included in Coxhead's list nor West's General Service List) but still have the criteria to be included in the general academic vocabulary of education. A word to be included in the list must occur at least 50 times in the corpus and appear over 5 times in all journals. This study concluded that attempts must be made to create discipline-specific word lists. Further pedagogical implications are discussed in detail.

Is There a Core General Vocabulary? Introducing the New General Service List

The current study presents a New General Service List (new-GSL), which is a result of robust comparison of four language corpora (LOB, BNC, BE06, and EnTenTen12) of the total size of over 12 billion running words. The four corpora were selected to represent a variety of corpus sizes and approaches to representativeness and sampling. In particular, the study investigates the lexical overlap among the corpora in the top 3,000 words based on the average reduced frequency (ARF), which is a measure that takes into consideration both frequency and dispersion of lexical items. The results show that there exists a stable vocabulary core of 2,122 items (70.7%) among the four corpora. Moreover, these vocabulary items occur with comparable ranks in the individual wordlists. In producing the new-GSL, the core vocabulary items were combined with new items frequently occurring in the corpora representing current language use (BE06 and EnTenTen12). The final product of the study, the new-GSL, consists of 2,494 lemmas and covers between 80.1 and 81.7 per cent of the text in the source corpora.

Measuring the vocabulary load of engineering textbooks for EFL undergraduates

The purpose of this research was twofold: to examine the vocabulary demands of English-medium engineering textbooks and to create an Engineering English Word List (EEWL) to cover EFL students’ lexical shortage. The researcher compiled a corpus containing 4.57million running words of 100 college textbooks across 20 engineering subject areas from e-book databases as the source of analysis. The results demonstrate that knowing the most frequent 5000 word families plus proper nouns, apparent compounds and abbreviations would command 95% lexical coverage of an engineering textbook to ensure adequate comprehension. Civil engineering and mechanical engineering, involving 3500 word families necessary for minimally acceptable comprehension, were the least lexically demanding, while marine engineering and biochemical engineering were the most demanding in lexis, stretching to a threshold of 8500 word families. Beyond the first 2000 words, 729 of the most frequently-occurring word families in the corpus were ultimately chosen, and these covered 14.3% of the total words in the engineering textbooks. The present EEWL may provide a window to the engineering register for matriculating engineering students and may be helpful for English for science and technology teachers when preparing Engineering English teaching materials for reading and vocabulary development.

Bridging the vocabulary gap for EFL medical undergraduates: The establishment of a medical word list

This study created a medical word list (MWL) to bridge the gap between non-technical and technical vocabulary. The researcher compiled a corpus containing 155 textbooks across 31 medical subject areas from e-book databases (totaling 15 million running words) and examined the range and frequency of words outside the most frequent 3,000-word families along the British National Corpus scale. To reach 98% lexical coverage for adequate comprehension of medical texts, 595 of the most frequently-occurring word families in the corpus were ultimately chosen and formed the MWL, and these accounted for 10.72% of the tokens in the medical textbooks under study. Excluding highly-specialized medical terms of Greek/Latin sources, the MWL encompasses various sub-technical and lay-technical vocabularies. It is suggested that with the help of free online concordancers, medical teachers can raise their students’ awareness of the commonly-used medical words reported in this study by incorporating concordance data into teaching materials, thereby consolidating the vocabulary knowledge acquired from the MWL. For medical novices, the present MWL provides a window to the medical register.

A Corpus-based Analysis of Collocations in Tenth Grade High School English Textbooks

Increased corpus-based language studies have resulted in research on individual words in textbooks, but these teaching materials have not been extensively analyzed on the type and frequency of collocations. Previous research has been limited to studying certain parts of textbooks or specific types of collocations. By analyzing 16 Common English I High School textbooks of English (1,441,402 running words), 852 lexical collocations were extracted with the 41 most frequent content words used as nodes. For detailed analysis, 50 high-frequency lexical collocations were compared to collocations in the 2k Graded Reader native-speaker corpus for their frequencies and usages. Collocations that are closely related to learners` real life and interest (e.g., volunteer work, good grade, fast food) were found while the number of collocations combined with adverbs was relatively small comprising only 41 out of 852 collocations (less than 5%). The comparison of the fifty most frequent collocations in the textbook with the 2k Graded Reader native-speaker corpus produced considerable differences. The results suggest that a variety of high-frequency collocations from native-speaker corpus need to be given thought in the process of materials development. The study suggests contrastive instruction for teaching collocations to L2 learners.

Līdzsvarots mūsdienu latviešu valodas tekstu korpuss un tā tekstu atlases kritēriji

THE BALANCED CORPUS OF MODERN LATVIAN AND THE TEXT SELECTION CRITERIA Summary Recently The Balanced Corpus of Modern Latvian (~3.5 million running words) has been created in the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science (IMCS) (see http://www.korpuss.lv ). The Corpus has been compiled from printed and electronic materials created after 1990. The Corpus is automatically morphologically tagged: for each token all the syntactically valid interpretations are stored. Texts for the Corpus were chosen according to different text selection criteria: for instance, time, media, domain, etc. This article discusses the text selection criteria chosen for this Corpus, problems related to Corpus design and text selection criteria, solutions found for these problems and future plans regarding the Corpus.

Narrow Viewing: The Vocabulary in Related Television Programs

In this study, the scripts of 288 television episodes were analyzed to determine the extent to which vocabulary reoccurs in related and unrelated television programs, and the potential for incidental vocabulary learning through watching one season (approximately 24 episodes) of television programs. The scripts consisted of 1,330,268 running words and had a total running time of 203 hours and 49 minutes with a mean running time of 42 minutes. The vocabulary from a single season of six individual television programs (142 episodes) was compared with six sets of random television programs (146 episodes). The results indicated that, when there are an equivalent number of running words, related television programs are likely to contain fewer word families than unrelated programs. The findings also indicated that word families from the 4,000–14,000 levels were more likely to reoccur in a complete season of a television program than in random television programs. The percentage of low‐frequency word families encountered 10 or more times was higher, and the percentage of word families encountered once was fewer in all six programs than in the random television programs.

The vocabulary thresholds of business textbooks and business research articles for EFL learners

This research compiled two corpora, one for English-medium textbooks for business core courses (totaling 7.2 million running words) and the other for business research articles (7.62 million tokens), to form a basis of analysis. The results show that knowledge of the most frequent 3500 word families and 5000 word families plus proper nouns would provide 95% lexical coverage of a business textbook and a business research article respectively. Business textbooks reached 98% coverage at the 5000 word level while business research articles reached 98% coverage at the 8000 word level. Among the textbooks across 12 business subject areas, production & operation (involving the 3000 word level necessary for minimal comprehension at 95% lexical coverage and the 4000 word level necessary for adequate comprehension at 98% coverage) was the least vocabulary-demanding, while business policy & strategy (covering 95% at the 5000 word level and 98% at the 7000 word level) was the most vocabulary-demanding. Excluding business policy & strategy and management information systems which showed the greatest variation, the vocabulary levels of research papers entailing different specialist knowledge were mostly within the range of 5000 word families (at 95% coverage) and 8000 word families (at 98%).

Variation in noun and pronoun frequencies in a sociohistorical corpus of English

Many corpus linguists make the tacit assumption that part-of-speech frequencies remain constant during the period of observation. In this article, we will consider two related issues: (1) the reliability of part-of-speech tagging in a diachronic corpus, and (2) shifts in tag ratios over time. The purpose is both to serve the users of the corpus by making them aware of potential problems, and to obtain linguistically interesting results. We use noun and pronoun ratios as diagnostics indicative of opposing stylistic tendencies, but we are also interested in testing whether any observed variation in the ratios could be accounted for in sociolinguistic terms. The material for our study is provided by the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (PCEEC), which consists of 2.2 million running words covering the period 1415–1681. The part-of-speech tagging of the PCEEC has its problems, which we test by reannotating the corpus according to our own principles and comparing the two annotations. While there are quite a few changes, the mean percentage of change is very small for both nouns and pronouns. As for variation over time, the mean frequency of nouns declines somewhat, while the mean frequency of pronouns fluctuates with no clear diachronic trend. However, women consistently use more pronouns than men, while men use more nouns than women. More fine-grained distinctions are needed to uncover further regularities and possible reasons for this variation.

A Corpus-based Analysis of Curriculum-based Elementary and Secondary English Textbooks

Current research on curriculum-based textbooks indicates that there is a lack of comprehensive corpus-based studies of textbooks in the Korean EFL context. This recognition prompted us to investigate the vocabulary levels of elementary and secondary curriculum-based English textbooks. A corpus of 5,628,795 running words from a total of 140 different textbooks with the inclusion of the activity books was compiled for analysis. The operational measures for comparison involved the 2,000 General Service List(GSL), the 570 Academic Word List(AWL), the British National Corpus, the Freiburg-Brown Corpus of American English, and the Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English. Our results indicated that 68% of the textbook words were beyond the 2,570 word level (i.e., total of word families of the GSL & AWL). Further corpus-based analysis indicated that textbooks of secondary schools presented word lists as large as 7,430 words compared to the 3,000 words that are permitted at the high school level by the National Curriculum. In the second part of the study, views and opinions of 600 stakeholders (i.e., learners, teachers, and experts) on a revision of the Basic Word List of the National Curriculum are presented. The results provide implications for the development of a revised Basic Word List.

Assessing a culture of religious devotion in Cameroon: Comparing word frequencies inthe corpus of Cameroon English with referenceto the London/Oslo-Bergen (LOB) corpus

This contribution assesses the degree of religious (Christian) devotion within the Cameroonian evangelical community, based on word frequencies from the Religious component (96,380 running words) of the Corpus of Cameroon English (CCE), and similar data from Category D (Religion) of the LOB (London/Oslo-Bergen) corpus. Overall, the study analyses 21 religious related words and notions such as faith, worship, prayer, fasting and the Christian life in Cameroon. Analysis consistently refers to similar occurrences in the LOB corpus, considered as a “representative” database of religious discourse in a typical Western society. Results reveal that an ascetic religious culture is on the rise among Christian evangelical movements in Cameroon, and that this trend provides evidence for the depth of spiritual quest within that subculture. Key words: Culture, religious devotion, corpus linguistics, Cameroon English.

A corpus driven study of the potential for vocabulary learning through watching movies

In this corpus driven study, the scripts of 143 movies consisting of 1,267,236 running words were analyzed using the RANGE program (Heatley et al. 2002) to determine the number of encounters with low frequency words. Low frequency words were operationalized as items from Nation’s (2004) 4th to 14th 1,000-word BNC lists. The results showed that in a single movie, few words were encountered 10 or more times indicating that only a small number of words may be learned through watching one movie. However, as the number of movies analyzed increased, the number of words encountered 10 or more times increased. Twenty-three percent of the word families from Nation’s (2004) 4th 1,000-word list were encountered 10 or more times in a set of 70 movies. This indicates that if learners watch movies regularly over a long period of time, there is the potential for significant incidental learning to occur

Considerations for Providing Etymological Information in the "Advanced Ndebele Dictionary" *

This article discusses the presentation of etymological information in the prospective Advanced Ndebele Dictionary (henceforth the AND) which is still in its planning stage. The AND will be a successor to Isichazamazwi SesiNdebele (henceforth the ISN), a medium-sized, general-purpose, monolingual Ndebele dictionary published in 2001. The AND will not just be larger than the ISN, but will be more advanced with regard to the depth and scope of its lexical items and definitions. Whereas the ISN was based on a corpus size of about a million running words, the AND is envis-aged to have as basis a corpus size of about five million. To this end, corpus expansion is an ongo-ing process. Again, unlike its forerunner, the AND will provide additional grammatical informa-tion for each lexical item, including phonetic transcription, tone marking and etymology. It is the inclusion of etymological information in the AND that is critically examined in this article. There is a long tradition of providing etymological information in modern dictionaries from Oxford's New English Dictionary to ALRI's Duramazwi Guru reChiShona. Keywords: etymology, advanced ndebele dictionary, culture, heritage, language contact

The Newspaper Word List: A Specialised Vocabulary for Reading Newspapers

The primary purpose of this study is to identify words that are of special importance for reading newspapers. In the Newspaper Corpus of 579,849 running words, 588 word families are identified as Newspaper Words. These words account for 6.8% of the running words in the corpus. When combined, proper names and 2,521 families of the General Service List of English Words (GSL) and the NWL make up 92.5% of the running words in the corpus. This is lower than the 98% ideal coverage required for understanding a text successfully, but very high given the small vocabulary size. Thus, the NWL will give the best return for vocabulary learning to learners of English as a foreign language who wish to read newspapers as soon as possible. 本研究の目的は新聞を読むのに必要な語彙を特定することである。Newspaperコーパスに記載された579,849語の中から6.8％に上る588語をNewspaper Wordsとして選び出した。固有名詞、General Service List of English Wordsの2,521語、NWLの語彙を総計するとコーパスの92.5％になる。テキストを理解するのに必要とされている98％よりはやや低い数値であるが、NWL全体の総語数を考慮すれば非常に高い値であるということができる。したがってNWLは新聞英語を早く読めるようになりたいと望む英語学習者にとっては最も効率のよいものであるということができる。

Critical and corpus approaches to English academic text revision

Portuguese academic discourse of the humanities is notoriously difficult to render into English, given the prevalence of rhetorical and discourse features that are largely alien to English academic style. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that some of those features might find their way into the English texts produced by Portuguese scholars through a process of pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic transfer. If so, this would have important practical and ideological implications, not only for the academics concerned, but also for editors, revisers, teachers of EAP, translators, writers of academic style manuals and all the other gatekeepers of the globalized culture. The study involved a corpus of some 113,000 running words of English academic prose written by established Portuguese academics in the Humanities, which had been presented to a native speaker of English (professional translator and specialist in academic discourse) for revision prior to submission for publication. After correction of superficial grammatical and spelling errors, the texts were made into a corpus, which was tagged for Part of Speech (CLAWS7) and discourse markers (USAS) using WMatrix2 (Rayson 2003). The annotated corpus was then interrogated for the presence of certain discourse features using Wmatrix2 and Wordsmith 5 (Scott 1999), and the findings compared with those of a control corpus, Controlit, of published articles written by L1 academics in the same or comparable journals. The results reveal significant overuse of certain features by Portuguese academics, and a corresponding underuse of others, suggesting marked differences in the value attributed to those features by the two cultures.

Korpusbasierte Wörterbucharbeit mit den Daten des Projekts Deutscher Wortschatz

The corpus project Deutscher Wortschatz (German Vocabulary) at Leipzig University is collecting and processing textual data for 15 years. It now consists of approx. 2 billion running words in 160 million sentences. The dictionary is online available at www.wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de and, moreover, contains word co-occurrence data. The pre-processing of the data used mainly language independent methods and were used for corpora in other languages, too. The paper describes the production process for three dictionaries for which these corpus data were used: a thesaurus, a dictionary of neologisms, and a collocation dictionary. In all cases, the raw data for the dictionary entries were produced automatically, and the final entries were written only using these pre-selections. In the case of the thesaurus, the preprocessing consisted in a corpus based detection of semantically similar words. For the neologism dictionary the yearly frequency information were used and for the collocation dictionary, word co-occurrences and part of speech information were combined.