Use Of Corpus Data Research Articles

Grammar, Text, and Ideology: Computer-assisted Methods in the Linguistics of Representation

This article analyses the use of language in: – two school textbooks of 80,000 and 30,000 words; – a corpus of written English of 1 million words. Two main linguistic features are analysed: – the expression of causativity in ergative constructions; – the expression of modality in ‘projecting’ that-clauses. These concern, respectively, whether events and knowledge are attributed to agents. The analyses show large (statistically significant) differences in the distribution of syntactic patterns in the two books, and these differences are discussed as evidence of the different ideological stances expressed in the books. But the use of corpus data for the stylistic analysis of long texts is shown to require more detailed semantic analyses of verb classes than are currently available. The main argument concerns the relationship between syntactic, textual, and ideological analysis, and the descriptive methods required in text analysis.

The English Language and the Gulf War: corpus linguistics, variation, and word‐formation

ABSTRACT: Television and print media during the 1991 Gulf War exposed the English‐speaking world to word‐formation patterns that produced neologisms and analogical forms. The language of the military briefing room became the language of media reportage. Established patterns were employed to create new forms with new meanings. The data are taken from the television and print media in the USA. This paper analyzes a corpus of data from television and radio broadcasts for purposes of assessing the open‐ended corpus as a source of variation, the productivity of forms, the extension of meaning, and the implications for the use of corpus data for teaching patterns of word‐formation in English.