Earticle

A good foreign language curriculum consolidates the three important principles: sequence, continuity and integration. Since English textbooks are the incarnation of the curriculum used in foreign language classrooms, a comparative investigation of the principles in English textbook corpus enlightens differences in English education of South Korea (SK) and North Korea (NK). To this end, the current study analyzes how graded sets of vocabulary are distributed to discover the sequence in the textbooks, and what the repetition rate is by looking into Standardized Type Token Ratio (STTR) to find out the continuity in the textbooks, and what keyword list is in both positive and negative keyword list of the NK corpus against the SK corpus to elicit integration property of the curriculum. The findings are: (1) NK textbooks are structural in sequence, and no such structural sequence is found in SK textbooks. (2) SK textbooks recycle vocabulary more frequently than NK textbooks, and this leads to more rote memorization activities in NK textbooks. (3) NK textbooks are more integrated with other academic subjects such as science, geography and ideology.

While recent corpus linguistic research often focuses on the text–lexis interface, the present study aims to investigate the ways in which grammatical forms can be related to textual functions of lexical items. This question is explored through a functional analysis of the plural noun “days” in comparison with that of its singular counterpart studied in Mahlberg (2005). Results from the qualitative analysis and quantitative comparison of distribution patterns of the two nouns reveal that the functional profile of the plural form is different from that of the singular form in some aspects, as far as textual functions of time nouns are concerned. This is argued to illustrate the inseparability among text, lexis and grammar.

The purpose of this paper is to graphically represent semantic domain networks of maritime English near-synonyms as such displays can provide insights into semantic relations. A specialised corpus from international maritime communities was used. Keywords are extracted by comparing the Maritime English Corpus with the BNC Baby. Among keywords within the top 20 ranks, we focus on ship-vessel and maritime-marine. We use the MI3 score to identify collocates of the two pairs of near-synonyms and the Wmatrix web interface program to tag semantic domains. We create key semantic domain networks using the social network analysis tool NetMiner 4.0. The results show that some semantic domains are connected between the two pairs of near-synonyms, while others are not connected. The findings of the study indicate how semantic domain networks of keyword collocates and simple collocates help to distinguish near-synonyms through graphical representations of a corpus. The paper found that semantic domains with keyword collocates have a stronger tendency to connect two pairs of near-synonyms than those with simple collocates.

This paper investigates the compounding propensity in Maritime English under the theoretical framework of Synergetic Linguistics. It focuses on the dependence of compound number on the properties of length, frequency and polylexy of word stems. A maritime English corpus was used and a set of Visual Foxpro programs were specifically written for processing the corpus and obtaining the data automatically. The results confirm the respective hypotheses of dependence and show that the more frequent and polysemous a word stem is, the more compounds it produces, but the shorter a word stem is, the more frequently it occurs in compounds. The Köhler’s model y=αχb captures this propensity.