Corpus Linguistic Study Research Articles

Less than one percent of words would be affected by gender-inclusive language in German press texts

Research on gender and language is tightly knitted to social debates on gender equality and non-discriminatory language use. Psycholinguistic scholars have made significant contributions in this field. However, corpus-based studies that investigate these matters within the context of language use are still rare. In our study, we address the question of how much textual material would actually have to be changed if non-gender-inclusive texts were rewritten to be gender-inclusive. This quantitative measure is an important empirical insight, as a recurring argument against the use of gender-inclusive German is that it supposedly makes written texts too long and complicated. It is also argued that gender-inclusive language has negative effects on language learners. However, such effects are only likely if gender-inclusive texts are very different from those that are not gender-inclusive. In our corpus-linguistic study, we manually annotated German press texts to identify the parts that would have to be changed. Our results show that, on average, less than 1% of all tokens would be affected by gender-inclusive language. This small proportion calls into question whether gender-inclusive German presents a substantial barrier to understanding and learning the language, particularly when we take into account the potential complexities of interpreting masculine generics.

ANALISIS VERBA ‘PUKUL’ DALAM KORPUS BAHASA INDONESIA: STUDI LINGUISTIK KORPUS

This research compares the derivatives of the word "ajar" in data in the Corpus Query Processor: LCC Indonesia 2023 and the latest edition of the Indonesian Dictionary (KBBI). The derivatives of the word "teach" that are identified are the differences and similarities in sentence patterns, sentiments and types of sentences. Corpus Query Processor: LCC Indonesia is a collection of digital texts that represent a particular language. This study is included in corpus linguistics studies, namely empirical studies of language using features such as concordance, collocations, N-grams, and word lists. The method used is a descriptive qualitative approach with in-depth analysis of lingual corpus data. The research results found 13 derivatives of the word "teach" in the verb class in the corpus, with 5 of them found in KBBI Edition VI. This difference in derivatives of the word "teach" indicates the possibility that some commonly used derivatives of the word have not been included in the KBBI. Another finding is that the sentence pattern of each derivative of the word "teach" has been clearly identified, indicating the subject, predicate, object, as well as any additional information that may be present. Actor and patient sentiments vary depending on the context of the sentence. However, generally, there is a positive sentiment towards the derivative of the word "teach", which indicates the act of learning or teaching that is considered good or useful.

Exploiting formulaic phrases to augment academic writing

A plethora of corpus linguistics studies have demonstrated that formulaic phrases are a fundamental aspect of successful academic writing. However, research also shows that pedagogical interventions building awareness of the crucial role of formulaic phrases in academic writing are limited (Davis & Morley, 2022). Drawing on the Academic Phrasebank, which is a widely known, online compendium of formulaic phrases developed by the University of Manchester, this article presents learning activities and targeted phrasebanks that highlight the importance of academic phraseology to enhance students’ academic writing performance.

A Corpus-linguistic Study on the status and issues in neologism research: Focusing on short-term diachronic studies

A Corpus-linguistic Study on the status and issues in neologism research: Focusing on short-term diachronic studies

War in law: A corpus linguistic study of the lexical item war in the laws of war

As a crucial register of modernity, the laws of war provide a discursive environment for the production and/or maintenance of key categories associated with organized violence. The register hosts the concepts which are used to refer to mass organized violence (war, armed conflict), and has both constructed and/or amplified categories of person that have been developed to legitimate war and give coherence to the international laws of war (e.g., prisoners of war, civilians). With the key texts of the international laws of war including such well-known instances as the 1949 Geneva Conventions now available in a searchable corpus format via the Sydney Corpus Lab, this paper explores the usage and meaning of war in this register where, in principle, the word war is a central part of a body of law which purports to put limits on organized violence. The method is essentially corpus driven: it takes the usages of this lexical item in this register and explores its frequency, its typical local lexical environments, and its collocates. The analysis shows that while the concept of war is essential to the laws of war, it remains ill-defined, indeed virtually undefined, at the same time that its collocational habits affirm its naturalness and legitimacy. As has been found elsewhere, in the laws of war, war and violence are treated as distinct phenomena, operating in distinct lexical environments. The paper is a contribution from corpus linguistics to the work of understanding the ideological effects of this highly significant legal register.

Recent trends in corpus design and reporting: A methodological synthesis

Methodological design is a central issue for researchers in corpus linguistics. To understand trends in the reporting of important aspects of corpus design and the type of corpora being used in corpus linguistics research articles better, this study analyzes 709 descriptions of corpora from research published in corpus journals between 2010–2019. Each article was manually coded by two trained coders for aspects of corpus design, such as the population definition, sampling method, and sample size. Additionally, the study identifies missing information in corpus reporting. Our results show trends in corpus design, such as an increased use of spoken corpora. We also observe the existence of some robust sampling methodology and slight improvements in reporting practices over time. Overall, there is great diversity in the types of corpora that are observed in the corpus data, such as size. However, our results also show widespread underreporting of generally important corpus design choices and features, such as sampling methods or the number of texts in in even newly constructed corpora. Resultantly, suggestions for ways to improve reporting practices for empirical corpus linguistics studies are provided for authors, reviewers, and editors.

Las formas modales 'must' y 'should' en el discurso académico inglés de los posgraduados españoles

This paper presents a corpus linguistic study investigating the use and functions of the modal verbs, must and should, in academic discourse. The study analyses a corpus of doctoral dissertations within two distinct fields of knowledge, written in English and submitted to Spanish universities between 2011 and 2021. By employing corpus linguistics, we could interrogate this compilation to obtain concordances that could be analysed from a horizontal perspective, ensuring that each sample was appraised appropriately within its context of occurrence. The frequency and distribution of these modals in various contexts were examined. The findings revealed that must and should are utilised with differing frequencies and in diverse ways, depending on the academic discipline and the rhetorical purpose of the discourse. The paper contends that the use of modality, particularly deontic modality, is a vital aspect of academic writing, as it signals the writer's stance and the level of necessity, recommendation or obligation in their argumentation.

Global Intellectual Trend of Corpus Linguistics Studies Among Scholars in Social Sciences from September 2013 – September 2021

Global Intellectual Trend of Corpus Linguistics Studies Among Scholars in Social Sciences from September 2013 – September 2021

A Comparative Corpus-linguistic Study of Thick Adjectives: Cases of the PRC Criminal Law and the Model Penal Code

With the promotion of law-based governance in China, laws and regulations play an ever more important role in our country whilst placing further demands on PRC law translation. Guided by previous research, this paper conducts a comparative study into the adjective phenomenon from the two selected corpus--the Model Penal Code and the PRC Criminal Law, respectively representing professional legal discourse and Chinese law translation. Concerning the research result, the author concludes the legal norms drawn from Model Penal Code and puts forward improvement proposals for the official Chinese-English law translations in terms of adjective distribution and category choices. The findings demonstrate that legal language tends to avoid adjectives and that thick concepts are more commonly used due to their evaluative intensity. By contributing to the promotion of future C-E legal translation, this paper aims to support China's legal system in its increasingly important role on the global stage.

A CORPUS-BASED LEXICAL ANALYSIS OF COVID-19 SPECIAL MESSAGES BY THE FORMER PRIME MINISTER OF MALAYSIA

Background and Purpose: The global emergence and rise of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 have a serious effect on a nation’s economic and social well-being, including Malaysia. During lockdown period, the former Prime Minister delivered Special Messages on the updates of COVID-19 issues in Malaysia on television. A specialised Malay corpus, i.e., Cov-19 Related Special Messages Corpus, consisting of 19 Special Messages texts by Muhyiddin Yasin, the former Prime Minister of Malaysia was examined to reveal its lexical profiling.
 
 Methodology: The specialised corpus was analysed using Sketch Engine tool, fully utilising the Wordlist, Keyword, and Concordance functions for the purpose of lexical analysis. The list of lexical items was then compared with the same list of items in the Malaysian Web (MalaysianWaC), a default Malay Reference Corpus set in Sketch Engine.
 
 Findings: Through wordlist analysis, the most frequently used words in the analysed corpus are generally linked to political or government entity (e.g., kerajaan, menteri, and perdana) and the welfare of the Malaysians (e.g., rakyat, kesihatan, and epidemik). The keyword analysis indicates that words related to the containment of the pandemic and reference to the Malaysians (e.g., saudara-saudari, pelitup, and penjarakan) show high keyness values. Finally, through concordance analysis some words with high keyness scores are used differently in both specialised Malay corpus and Reference Corpus. From the analyses, the most used words in the specialised corpus are related to the issue of COVID-19.
 
 Contributions: It is hoped that this study would contribute to the corpus linguistic studies on COVID-19 to comprehend the use of COVID-19 related lexical items.
 
 Keywords: Corpus analysis, specialised corpus, COVID-19, WordSmith Tool, lexical analysis.
 
 Cite as: Abdullah, S., Malik, N. A., Shak, M. S., & Anuar, N. (2023). A corpus-based lexical analysis of Covid-19 special messages by the former prime minister of Malaysia. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 8(2), 44-72. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol8iss2pp44-72

Distinguishing Semantic Preference Of Hurry And Rush Via Collocational Patterns: A Corpus-Based Study

Verbs are the action words that describe what the subject is doing. Many verbs are synonymous, namely, they could convey very similar meanings, such as the verbs hurry and rush, which roughly convey ‘speeded actions’. This paper presents a corpus linguistic study of the semantic preferences of hurry and rush in terms of the nouns that co-occur (i.e., collocate) with them. The noun collocations data, and their degree of association with the verbs, were extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English focusing on collocates appearing within a two-words window to the right (i.e., after) and to the left of (i.e., before) hurry and rush. These collocates were further analyzed semantically for (i) their semantic fields using the Concepticon catalogue (List et al. 2023) and (ii) their broader noun types (Wren 2021). Overall, we found that hurry and rush exhibit distinct collocational patterns and semantic preferences, particularly in terms of the preferred semantic fields (e.g., KINSHIP, RELIGION AND BELIEF, EMOTION AND VALUE are semantic fields preferred for the left-side collocates of hurry while rush is associated with THE BODY and SOCIAL AND POLITICAL RELATIONS). This study shows that synonymous verbs can have distinct semantic patterns.

Traduzindo as agressões experienciadas durante a crise pandêmica de covid-19: uma análise do corpus de violência em jornais de línguas inglesa, francesa, portuguesa e espanhola de 2020

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze how the words violência, "violence," violencia and violence are used in four comparable corpora based on articles from Folha de São Paulo, CNN, El País and Le Monde webpages gathered from January to July 2020. We followed Lexicology, Corpus Linguistics and Corpus-Based Translation Studies to extract the most frequently used words in each corpora and verify the contexts in which they are used, relating them to the concept of "violence" based on collocations, clusters and concordances extracted with AntConc software (2020). Additionally, we employed Discourse Analysis (DA) in Translation to verify how aggressive actions are linguistically expressed and to highlight the importance of understanding context in the translation process. As a result, we noticed that despite being considered translational equivalents, the words are used in contexts with different semantic meanings, depending on the culture to which they belong.

Trialling corpus search techniques for identifying person-first and identity-first language

This short ‘methods’ article compares results for six different corpus search techniques for identifying person-first language (e.g. person/people with obesity, person/people with mental illness) and identity-first language (e.g. obese person/people, mentally ill person/people) in a corpus. This distinction is relevant across a range of health contexts, including but not limited to obesity, diabetes, or mental illness. Consequently, there is considerable interest in corpus linguistics and beyond in identifying the frequency of such language in large corpora. However, there is no consensus regarding the specific corpus search techniques to be used for this purpose. This article therefore offers a relevant methodological contribution, based on a trial of six different search techniques. Results from each technique are compared with respect to four different parameters: raw frequency, proportional usage, number of types identified (a proxy for ‘recall’) and false positives (a proxy for ‘precision’). This comparison in turn provides a basis for recommendations for future corpus linguistic studies of person- and identity-first language. The corpus that we use for this trial is a 16.4 million word corpus with newspaper articles containing the word obesity or obese. However, the findings should be relevant to other kinds of identity where similar syntactic structures are at play for expressing identity-first and person-first language.

Chinese Address Terms “Shifu” (师傅) vs. “Shifu” (师父): A Comparative and Diachronic Study Based on the BCC Corpus

This paper compares the usage of the address terms “shifu”(师傅) and “shifu”(师父) in Chinese in a diachronic manner. The study investigates the evolution and different usage of the two address terms and analyzes the possible reasons for the different choices to use these address terms. The data for this study comes from the BCC corpus (BLCU Corpus Center), a corpus with tens of billions of words built by Xun Endong et al. (2015, 2016) from Beijing Language and Culture University. The findings show that the highest frequency used for “shifu” (师傅) occured in 1963, while “shifu” (师父) appeared in 2001. The address term “shifu” (师父) is more often used in ancient Chinese, while “shifu” (师傅) is relatively more frequent than “shifu” (师父) in modern and contemporary Chinese. The original meanings between the two address terms are different: “shifu” (师傅) is used as official title to indicate a teacher, while “shifu” (师父) is more related to religions through giving non-evil life and knowledge to others. The research findings will surely benefit the corpus linguistic studies, translation studies and the study of address terms. By resorting to the abundant corpus data, this study could offer a relatively more comprehensive and systematic comparison of the two Chinese address terms by far. Furthermore, i t will help further distinguish the two address terms based on the empirical data and detailed case analysis . Keywords: address term, BCC corpus, comparative study, diachronic study. DOI: https://doi.org/10.55463/hkjss.issn.1021-3619.60.12

A corpus linguistic study of constructional equivalence for the Indonesian translation of ROB and STEAL based on the OpenSubtitles Parallel Corpus

Catford’s (1965) classic idea in translation theory indicates the measurability of translation equivalence. Following up on this idea, this paper offers a case study to measure the translation equivalence of English verbal near-synonyms ROB and STEAL (R&S), especially the equivalence at the constructional level. Adopting a quantitative corpus linguistic method and the Construction Grammar approach, we analyse random usage samples of R&S from English-Indonesian parallel corpus for the degree of constructional equivalence along two dimensions: (i) the profiled participant roles and (ii) the grammatical construction types of these verbs. We discover that the Indonesian translations maintain a high degree of equivalences along these dimensions, albeit with few variations. This suggests that the translators attempt to be as faithful as possible to the source texts. Furthermore, our study reveals the translation norms/typicality in how the constructional profiles of the near-synonyms R&S are translated into Indonesian. The paper generally seeks to demonstrate how such a central notion as equivalence in translation studies can be investigated using parallel corpora and the quantitative corpus linguistic method.

A corpus linguistic study of constructional equivalence for the Indonesian translation of ROB and STEAL based on the OpenSubtitles Parallel Corpus

Catford’s (1965) classic idea in translation theory indicates the measurability of translation equivalence. Following up on this idea, this paper offers a case study to measure the translation equivalence of English verbal near-synonyms ROB and STEAL (R&S), especially the equivalence at the constructional level. Adopting a quantitative corpus linguistic method and the Construction Grammar approach, we analyse random usage samples of R&S from English-Indonesian parallel corpus for the degree of constructional equivalence along two dimensions: (i) the profiled participant roles and (ii) the grammatical construction types of these verbs. We discover that the Indonesian translations maintain a high degree of equivalences along these dimensions, albeit with few variations. This suggests that the translators attempt to be as faithful as possible to the source texts. Furthermore, our study reveals the translation norms/typicality in how the constructional profiles of the near-synonyms R&S are translated into Indonesian. The paper generally seeks to demonstrate how such a central notion as equivalence in translation studies can be investigated using parallel corpora and the quantitative corpus linguistic method.

Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson: Voices past and present – Studies of involved, speech-related and spoken texts. In honor of Merja Kytö. (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 97)

Article Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson: Voices past and present – Studies of involved, speech-related and spoken texts. In honor of Merja Kytö. (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 97) was published on October 1, 2022 in the journal Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics (volume 8, issue 2).

Register variation across text lengths

AbstractThis paper explores variation in lexico-grammatical register features across text lengths in a large-scale sample of Reddit comments. Very short texts are known to be problematic for many statistical methods, so understanding their nature is important for the corpus-linguistic study of social media, where most contributions are short. I show that the frequencies of linguistic features change with comment length, even between longer comments, although longer texts are often considered similar in statistical terms. Moreover, I classify the variation found between short comments of different lengths into two main patterns, although other patterns can also be found, and there is variation even within these patterns. Furthermore, I interpret the observed differences in terms of register variation. For example, shorter comments appear to be more casual and less edited in terms of their feature makeup, whereas narrative and informational registers seem to favor longer comments.

The Saudi Novel Corpus: Design and Compilation

Arabic has recently received significant attention from corpus compilers. This situation has led to the creation of many Arabic corpora that cover various genres, most notably the newswire genre. Yet, Arabic novels, and specifically those authored by Saudi writers, lack the sufficient digital datasets that would enhance corpus linguistic and stylistic studies of these works. Thus, Arabic lags behind English and other European languages in this context. In this paper, we present the Saudi Novels Corpus, built to be a valuable resource for linguistic and stylistic research communities. We specifically present the procedures we followed and the decisions we made in creating the corpus. We describe and clarify the design criteria, data collection methods, process of annotation, and encoding. In addition, we present preliminary results that emerged from the analysis of the corpus content. We consider the work described in this paper as initial steps to bridge the existing gap between corpus linguistics and Arabic literary texts. Further work is planned to improve the quality of the corpus by adding advanced features.

The Use and Development of Lexical Bundles in Arab EFL Writing: A Corpus-driven Study

Background. Lexical Bundles (LBs) have become the focus of many recent corpus linguistics studies. Research has found variable use of LBs in terms of quality and quantity pertaining to different linguistic groups or registers. Still, there is a paucity of research investigating Arab EFL writers’ use and development of such a feature.
 Purpose. This study investigates the 4-word LBs use and development by Arab EFL learners and expert writers in a corpus of 250000 words regarding their frequency, functions, and structure.
 Methods. Two corpora were compiled for Arab learners and scholars. The LB use of both groups was compared to investigate the development of LB use. Further, the Arab corpus was analysed against a native reference corpus extracted from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus to compare LB use across the two corpora.
 Results and Implications. The results imply that there is no noticeable effect of postgraduate education or professional practice on using LBs. The other results, however, are in-line with the previous literature in that native speakers’ use of LBs varies in quantity and quality from non-natives’. The findings reveal that stance LBs are more frequent in the native corpus and that they tend to use more VP-based clausal LBs than their non-native counterparts. These findings offer empirical evidence that EFL writing quality is lower despite the current academic writing instruction they receive. They, therefore, indicate the need to foster academic writing instruction programs to include training on using LBs in learners’ writing at both Bachelor and postgraduate levels. Also, the results are expected to raise teachers’ awareness of how EFL learners use LBs to develop their writing quality and thus to adapt their teaching strategies accordingly. Moreover, Arab scholars are called to reconsider their use of effective writing techniques including LBs for more effective writing.