Earticle

Most previous linguistic studies of web language have focused on the ‘new’ internet registers, like blogs, instant messages, and tweets. As a result, we know surprisingly little about the patterns of linguistic variation among the full range of registers found on the searchable web. The present paper provides an overview of a project that begins to fill this gap. Rather than collecting texts from only the ‘new’ web registers, the project is based on a large corpus representing a random sample of the entire searchable web. The first analytical step in the project was to analyze the types of documents found in that corpus, providing an empirical description of the composition of the searchable web. Then, Multi-Dimensional (MD) analysis was applied to describe the patterns of register variation found on the searchable web. The MD analysis first identified the sets of co-occurring linguistic features -- the ‘dimensions’ -- in this discourse domain. Then, those dimensions are used to document the similarities and differences among web registers. In conclusion, we compare our results here to previous MD studies, identifying patterns peculiar to the web versus linguistic patterns found across discourse domains.

This paper explores ways that research in corpus linguistics can be directly applied to inform English language instruction for non-native speakers of English. The primary goal of this brief paper is to highlight the need for a strong connection between research and teaching practice. This goal is achieved by using corpus research on vocabulary and lexical bundles and highlighting resources and activities that incorporate research from these two areas of corpus linguistics directly into language classes without increasing the demands on teachers.

The analyses of collocations in the existing collocation programs have often been based on the repetition of ‘N-gram’ patterns rather than a specific collocation list. In comparison, ColloGram bases its analysis on a collocation list from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (1990-2015), a 5 hundred-million-word corpus. For the development of ColloGram, the corpus compiled during the period of 1990-2009 (a 4 hundred- million-word corpus), which became available in 2014 to the public, was utilized for the program. ColloGram is a collocation analysis program named from the compound, Collocation and N-gram or Program. The functions of this program benchmarked those of the RANGE, the vocabulary analysis program, by Heatley and Nation (2002).

Using data from the 400-million-word Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the 450-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), this study investigates both diachronically and synchronically the use of the -free compound and its counterparts, the free of/from phrases. A close examination of the frequency, distribution, and structural and semantic functions of the constructions yields the following key findings. First, frequency-wise, free of has exhibited a steady slow growth, and free from has declined dramatically; in contrast -free has increased enormously, although its archaic use in the senses of ‘free to’ and ‘free with’ disappeared by the 1940s. Second, the -free compound boasts a high potential productivity index. Third, while both the compound and the phrasal constructions may be used as predicative and postnominal adjectives, objective complements, and adverbials, only the -free compound is used as a prenominal (attributive) adjective. Fourth, whereas the -free compound is used almost exclusively nonreferentially, the free of/from constructions are used significantly more referentially. Fifth, even in the contexts where the constructions may all be used, often only one is allowed or preferred due to certain internal structural and semantic factors. Finally, condensation of information along with changes in language and life styles appears to have driven the increased use of the compound over its phrasal counterparts, although the phrase free of charge has resisted the change: its high frequency likely has blocked its *charge-free compound counterpart.

In recent years, much research has been carried out on body-part terms in expressing metonymic and metaphorical notions in terms of embodiment in cognitive linguistics. Among the terms, heart-centered expressions have been widely explored in English and other languages to show the significance of our bodily experiences in expressing our emotions as well as interpersonal or social relationships. However, little research has been carried out on the metaphoric expressions of chest or breast (cf. Kövecses 2002, Lakoff & Johnson 1980). The purpose of this research is to explore literal and metaphoric meanings of kasum ‘chest/ breast’ in a Korean written corpus in terms of corpus linguistics and conceptual metaphor (Perez 2008, Berendt, et al. n.d.). This research analyzes 2,373 tokens of kasum, 114 ces-kasum ‘milk-breast’ and 355 simcang ‘heart’ from the Sejong Project Corpus. Cognitive linguistic research has shown that the head is usually related to mind/reason but the heart to emotion/feelings in many languages. However, examination of the Korean data shows that simcang is used literally in most cases as a technical term in medical contexts, and that ces-kasum is used literally in most cases to refer to a woman’s breast. Unlike these two body-part terms, kasum is used as a cover term to express not only the upper body part literally but also an entity as a locus and perceiver of emotion/ feelings metaphorically. Examination of the corpus data shows the following major findings: (i) 819 tokens (34.5%) are used to refer to the body part chest literally, 1,512 tokens (63.7%) metaphorically (Deignan 2005), (ii) 921 tokens (38.8%) are used to show physiological responses in expressing emotion/feelings, using such terms as “the chest is aching, pounding, choking/being blocked, trembling, sinking, etc.”, (iii) 412 tokens (17.4%) are used to show kasum is a locus for emotion. As these findings show, in Korean, as folk knowledge contrary to the scientific knowledge about the roles of the brain, kasum is viewed as a locus or perceiver for emotional feelings in response to physical/ physiological stimuli. The findings show that the folk knowledge forms the basis for conceptual metaphor for kasum: (i) a locus for feelings, (ii) a container of emotions, (iii) an entity/a material, (iv) a storage/hiding place, etc. Finally, this research shows that in Korean, unlike in English and some other languages, kasum plays an important role in expressing emotional feelings, displaying conceptual metaphorical meanings derived from folk knowledge.

This study examines collocates of two near-synonyms safety and security, drawing data from two general corpora (BNC Written and COCA Written) and one self-built specialized corpus (IMO Corpus). Collocates are extracted by Wordsmith 6.0; then a network analysis is given on some interesting collocates. Firstly, diachronic analysis exhibits a stable usage of safety whereas two big leaps of security in 1920-1930 and in 2000. In addition, it has been discovered that some generalizations made by industrial and information fields cannot be applied to the maritime-related words in a specialized corpus. Specifically, non-maritime-related general collocates tend to show very clear preference on safety and security in IMO corpus whereas maritime-related words have various behaviors when collocating with safety and security. Thirdly, network analysis by Netminer 4.0 is given on some shared interesting collocates such as maritime and ship, providing the brokerage role analysis for the differences between safety and security. At last, a semantic domain network analysis is displayed to explain how near-synonyms are different and similar based on their common and exclusive semantic domains.

Song lyrics reflect the society linguistically and ideologically and in turn have a social and linguistic power to influence the society. Thus, lyrics can be used to gain insights into social beliefs, namely gender representations and stereotypes. This study sets out to investigate the representations of male and female in lyrics using a corpus-based approach. Focusing on the lemmas GIRL, WOMAN, BOY, and MAN, it examines what these gender-marked items refer to and the way males and females are portrayed in hip-hop and country music. The results show that the lemmas refer to a number of different things that are not limited to their literal meanings. In fact, some of them may not even be easily found in the definitions provided in the dictionary. Although they frequently refer to adult males and females in the lyrics of both types of music, it was revealed that some uses of the lemmas were unique to a particular music genre. Additionally, stereotypical representations of gender seem to prevail in song lyrics; although some differences can be found across music genres, females are often sexually objectified and are associated with beauty and emotional intemperance whereas males are portrayed as active, aggressive, and confident. This suggests that, as a type of text that reflects social beliefs, lyrics can be useful for raising awareness of the aspects of society, such as prevalent gender stereotypes. Therefore, lyrics may be used as an authentic material that contains rich sociolinguistic information on gender representations for linguistic and cultural lessons.

This article examines the relationship between sentential subjectival position and sentential syntactic complexity using the written section of the ICE-GB as the data source. The information the subject bears is generally regarded as given, with new information provided by other functional classes after it. This means that generally the part of the sentence after the verb would more elaborate, hence longer, than the one before it, manifesting the principle of end weight. Since the English language is basically an SVO language, this seems to suggest that the position of the subject in the sentence would have a certain relationship with sentence length, hence sentence complexity. The result shows the relationship between sentential syntactic complexity and sentential structural variation in number of sentences with different structures is bell-shaped, which can be described with Nemcová and Serdelová’s synonyms and word length model. The sentential subjects appear in 46 different positions in the sentence, but the predominant position is sentence initial. Generally, the sentential subjectival position is an indicator of sentential syntactic complexity; the larger the sentential subjectival position, the more syntactically complex the sentence. This phenomenon, apart from rhetorical and stylistic reasons, is due to the principle of end weight and communication dynamism in the sentence.

This paper investigated English modal auxiliary verbs can and may in three East Asian EFL learners’ writings (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). For the investigation, two different types of corpora were adopted. One is the ICE-USA corpus which included the writings of the English as a Native Language (ENL) speakers and the TOEFL11 corpus which contained the writings of the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Among the eleven sections of the TOEFL11 corpus, three components were selected in the analysis. This paper was theoretically based on Bates and MacWhinney’s Competition Model (1982, 1989), and four language models were statistically constructed. These models were constructed as follows. From the four different corpora, all the sentences with can and may were extracted, and twenty linguistic factors were manually encoded. Then, the statistical models were constructed based on the encoded corpus data, and similarities and differences were analyzed in the statistical models. Two different types of statistical analyses were adopted. One was a logistic regression, and the other was a Behavioural Profiles analysis. Through the analysis, the following facts were observed: (i) six linguistic factors were involved in the choice of alternation, (ii) eight linguistic factors were interact with L1 which made three East Asian EFL learners’ writings non-native, and (iii) the uses of can and may by the three East Asian EFL learners were different from those of the ENL speakers.

Recent years have witnessed increasing attention to L2 creative writing not only in language classrooms but also in various disciplinary settings, in this case, an English scriptwriting module for Chinese university students doing Communication Studies. This text-based L2 writing study investigates the stylistic characteristics emerging from 54 pieces of film scripts written in English submitted by the students upon completion of the module. The above investigation is done through comparison of the student scripts to 16 selected professional English film scripts representing different genres. The particular pedagogical approaches for this scriptwriting module are briefly explained. Nevertheless, the study is corpus-driven. It utilises Keyword analysis (Scott, 2015) and Key Semantic Domain analysis (Rayson, 2008) to locate noticeable ideological and discoursal features of the student scripts particularly concerning: the attempts at dramatic tension; effort at visual details; and deviation from conventions of scriptwriting in English. Two focal students were selected to see the trajectories of changes regarding individual writers’ textual features throughout the workshops to the final film script. The above is facilitated by Cluster analysis which reveals ‘local textual functions’ (Mahlberg, 2007). In addition, qualitative interpretation of the focal students’ writing and their reflective comments was also performed. The results hold pedagogical implications particularly regarding: the modelling of certain stylistic aspects of English scriptwriting; and the design of more targeted future ESL/EFL scriptwriting course in China.

The purpose of this presentation is to examine the use of connectors in English writing of Korean undergraduate students. Compared with intermediate or advanced level English writers in EFL contexts, not much has been explored in what beginning EFL writers tend to do in their writing. In this study, the authors aim to find out what types of connectors are most widely used (i.e., additive, causal/ resultative and sequential) by the beginning Korean writers of English and whether or not they are influenced by their L1 use. The participants will be 40 sophomores who are taking the pre-intermediate English writing course during the spring semester of 2016. As for the instruments, the questionnaire survey and the pre- and the post-tests on the use of the connectives by the students will be conducted. The participants are going to write 5 different kinds of paragraphs (i.e., definition, process, description, opinion, and narration) consisting of approximately 120 words in length respectively during the 15-week semester. Because the kinds of writing the beginning participants will produce are paragraphs not essays, it is expected that the use of connectors will be somewhat limited to certain kinds. The students’ works will be analyzed in terms of the frequency of the connective use using AntCon. The results will shed light on pedagogical implications and suggestions for how to teach beginning writers the use of connectors more effectively.

The current study explores the characteristics of frequently-used multi-word expressions (i.e., lexical bundles) in spoken and written Russian. Lexical bundles are retrieved from a one million word Russian National Corpus (RNC) sample. The lexical bundles in spoken and written sub-corpora of the RNC are analyzed quantitatively regarding discourse functions of reference expressions, stance bundles, and discourse organizers. The analysis confirms that the spoken and written Russian corpora exhibit significantly different lexical bundle distribution patterns: there are more referential expressions in written Russian; while there are more stance bundles in spoken Russian. The study also suggests future study calling more in-depth investigation for developing language-specific discourse functions.

SOLAS Convention, as the most important international maritime treaty regulating ship safety, sets up the minimum safety levels for construction, equipment and operation. Due to the development of technology, safety understanding and management, all three safety standards are undergoing revision over time. This paper aims to explore and explain the trend of these changing standards by employing a keyword analysis on SOLAS Convention based on the idea that keywords are indicative of changes in writing style, which can ultimately be linked back to social change. To achieve this objective, five consolidated versions of SOLAS Convention covering the period from 1974 to 2015 were targeted to collect data. Keywords of three safety standards in each version were extracted respectively using WordSmith tools. For discovering the degree of diachronic changes in each safety standard, statistical measures like frequency count and type-token ratio were adopted to compare the lexical distribution and density of each keyword list. The findings suggest that all three safety standards have been revised over time and the changes vary in terms of degree and content. This study is believed to be useful for understanding the safety concerns in maritime industry and to contribute to the literature in the diachronic research conducted by keyword-based approach.

Vocabulary is one of the crucial factors for students’ academic comprehension (Anderson, 2008; Grabe, 2009; Laufer, 1992; Nation, 2001; Qian, 2002). Thus, academic vocabulary lists have been created for research and materials of English as a foreign language (EFL) and English for specific purpose (ESP). Although the academic vocabulary lists have been widely used, few studies have probed into the reliability of the lists. Miller and Biber (2015) pointed out this gap and suggested that the reliability of word lists would be investigated by simply dividing a corpus into random smaller sub-corpora. A thirty-million-word corpus was created with 900 academic articles across nine disciplines of humanity, social sciences and sciences. Then the corpus was divided into two sub-corpora and sixteen criteria sets of register frequency, range, discipline measurement and dispersion were applied to each sub-corpus for vocabulary list creation. The replicability of the vocabulary lists was examined to find a set of criteria extracting the most reliable vocabulary list. The results showed that the combination of the lenient register frequency and discipline measurement, and the strict dispersion was the most desirable condition to create a reliable academic vocabulary list. This result was similar to Gardner and Davies (2012)’ methodology to create their vocabulary list called Academic Vocabulary List, but does not show the impact of range on the replicability of an academic vocabulary list. The implications and limitations were also addressed.

Compared to conversations and other written genres, written academic prose favours heavy nominal groups, in which the head noun is typically accompanied by premodifiers such as adjectives or nouns, and/or by postmodifiers such as prepositional phrases (Parkinson & Musgrave, 2014). In particular, a Noun Complement structure, a relatively neglected means of stance expression has been underresearched in the study of stance and the way writers to convey an attitude to their compositions and readers. The current study examines this structure as a nominal stance construction related to students’ advanced academic literacy (Jiang, 2015). By means of corpus-based contrastive analysis, this study compares the uses of this stance construction in problem-solution essays of 70 Korean university students (L2) with those of English native students (L1) of similar age (20s) and educational level (undergraduate students). The findings observe that EFL students employ fewer examples of nominal stance constructions compared to native English ones and that they showed the use of limited types of this construction. It might be caused by lack of the EFL learners’ L1 proficiency and the inherent difficulty of noun phrase constructions in the acquisition of syntactic structures. This research can also make suggestions for EAP (English for Academic Purposes) writings and instructions.

Adopting an audience-centred approach in business writing is considered fundamental to successful business communication and is widely advocated by leading textbooks of the field targeted at both university students and professionals. Thill and Bovee (2013) explain this approach embraces a ‘you’ attitude whereby the emphasis of the message is placed on the reader rather than the writer. Although a large pool of literature on writer-reader interaction has developed under concepts such as metadiscourse, appraisal, stance, and evaluation; these generally place a focus on writer as opposed to reader-orientated aspects of language. Moreover, the attention from linguists have overwhelmingly been directed towards academic writing. This study uses corpus analysis to explore features of audience involvement in the letter to shareholders of Chinese and U.S. companies. Utilising the engagement framework (Hyland, 2005), I examine how corporate leaders attempt to explicitly recognise the presence of their readers and construct relationships with this complex and diverse set of stakeholders. The results reveal engagement features are an integral element of both Chinese and U.S letter to shareholders; however the density was noticeably lower in the Chinese sample. While this does not necessarily render the Chinese discourse less audience-centred, it does represent a cultural divergence that has implications for the learning and teaching of business communication and ESP. Currently, U.S.-centric textbooks and guides dominate but with China’s prominent commercial position entrenched there is a need to develop a greater understanding of Chinese business communication styles so that students and professionals globally can benefit from such insights.

English dictionaries usually provides only the senses of each word without explicitly showing the subtle nuances of the synonymous words. The great challenge in English language teaching is to distinguish the similarities and differences of near synonyms for EFL learners so that they will be able to understand and use the words correctly. This paper is intended to explore comprehensively the similarities and differences in meaning and usage of two near-synonyms, entire and whole through Wmatrix. This paper consists of 4 steps; administrating questionnaire to college students, analyzing BNC and COHA, applying the dictionary definitions to corpus data, and analyzing and sorting 200 noun collocates (MI>3) using Wmatrix web tool. The findings show that there are clear differences between two near-synonyms and that utilizing the semantic categories through Wmatrix can contribute to distinguishing and learning near-synonyms.

In this paper, we present anew approach to automatic alignment of multi-word terms based on contextual information. With the English-Chinese Parallel Corpus of Maritime Conventions (ECPCMC) as a basis, we first extract the candidate terms from the corpus of each language separately using a hybrid approach which combines a list of user-adjustable morphosyntactic patterns and a term weighting measure. Then the extracted terms are aligned based on the contextual information with the assumption that translation equivalents are often used in similar contexts. For this purpose, we extract the collocates of each candidate term in either side of the languages in the corpus and comparethem for the degree of similarity at the semantic attribute level. Since the collocation extraction is restricted to the concordance lines containing the candidate term, this method not only overcomes the limitations of conventional statistical methods requiring large corpora to be effective but also improves the accuracy of automatic alignment. Experiments based on a section of ECPCMC, which is annotated with terms manually, indicate that the proposed approach is promising, giving an encouraging 85.3% precision and 60.6% recall on average.

Research in English for Academic Purposes has often analyzedlearner language discourse to provide evidence on learner language development (Biber & Gray, 2013; Staples, Egbert, Biber, & McClair, 2013). From the lexical perspective of a second language, previous analyses of learner discourse have focused more on vocabulary frequency measures; however, single word based analyses have been found to be insufficient in capturing learner language development (Read & Nation, 2006). Therefore, together with the measure of single word distributions, analysis of lexical bundles is also called for(Read & Nation, 2006). This study explored the use of lexicon and lexical bundles in written performances across three proficiency levels in an English Placement Test (EPT) corpus (N = 1,388) from a large Midwestern university in the US. The results showed that higher proficiency learners used a higher number of types and tokens and word families, a higher percentage of the second most frequent 1,000 words of English (K2 tokens) and Academic Word List (AWL) tokens, and a higher level of type-token ratio and lexical density than lower proficiency learners. Regarding the use of lexical bundles, although lexical bundles were used more often by lower level learners, most of those bundles were prompt dependent. Prepositional phrase-based lexical bundles with a discourse function were common in higher level responses while noun phrase-based and verb phrase-based bundles with referential and stance functions were frequent in lower level responses. This study has implications for teaching practice, second language acquisition research on learner language development, and second language writing assessment.

Pawley and Syder (1983) propose the concept of lexicalized sentence stems as “a unit of clause length or longer whose grammatical form and lexical content is wholly or largely fixed”(ibid: 191-192), and they conclude that native speakers rely much on stringing lexicalized sentence stems together for their fluent communication (ibid: 202). The concept of lexicalized sentence stems has values in phraseology; however, ‘lexicalization’ is not particularly operationalizable in empirical research, as corpus studies have shown that most phrasal units are only partially lexicalized (see Moon 1998: 37, etc.). Granger and Paquot(2008: 44) develop further the notion of lexicalized sentence stems and propose textual sentence stems. According to them (ibid: 44), textual sentence stems are routinized fragments ofsentences that serve textual functions, and a textual sentence stem typically involves a subject and a verb. Examples of textual sentence stems are the final point is, another thing is,it will be shown that andI will discuss. The concept of textual sentence stems lends itself more easily to empirical research than the lexicalized sentence stem in that it attaches more importance to functions of the sentence stem rather than its lexicalization. However, Granger and Paquot did not propose the practical methods and procedures for identifying textual sentence stems so defined, particularly in corpus-based studies. In addition, sentence stems, as the clause-level phraseological units, may perform such functions as the research-oriented function or participant-oriented function in Hylland’s term (2008:13-14), other than the textual or text-oriented function. And in some cases a sentence stems may perform multiple functions simultaneously. For these reasons, in the present research, we propose to opt for the term ‘functional sentence stem’ (henceforward FSS). This paper aims to explore common functional sentence stems in academic English texts, with a view to uncovering their typical forms and specific functions in context, in order to better inform ESP students of language resources with higher pedagogic utility. Functional sentence stems are temporarily defined as “An FSS is a recurrent contiguous lexico-grammatical sequence which contains a subject-predicate structure and which is associated with a particular function pertaining to a particular textual environment. The FSS may have a range of variations. ” The definition spells out several important defining features of the linguistic entity. Firstly a FSS consists of a subject-predicate structure, which makes it more compete in grammatical structure than the lexical bundle. For example, previous studies show that, data indicate that and it is not surprising that are all FSSs dealt with in the present study. Second, statistically, an FSS has to be significantly recurrent to ensure that it is a common means for meanings and functions. In the present study, only those FSSs whose frequencies have reached a frequency threshold of 10 or above and whose new-MI scores have reached 3.0 or above will be counted as a FSS. Thirdly, an FSS performs particular functions in association with co-occurring lexical and grammatical features in the local textual environment. And the functions can be of different types and nature, but most often a FSS is typically used to help organize textual information or to express the writer’s attitudinal or evaluative meanings. Fourthly, a FSS is usually not a fixed expression and it may have a range of varied forms. For instance, this paper describes may be varied to this paper discusses, the present paper examines, etc. We then use the new-MI measure (Wei & Li 2013) to extract from an academic English corpus a large number of FSSs, structural and functional characteristics of which are carefully examined and described in association with their co-selection patterns. Results indicate that FSSs are important means for a wide variety of specific discourse acts pertaining to characteristic local textual environments. The findings have potentially valuable implications for ESP pedagogy, offering, in particular, insights for improving non-native novice writers’ academic writing performance.