Corpora, Constructions, New Englishes

Corpora, Constructions, New Englishes PDF

Author: Samantha Laporte

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2021-06-15

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 9027260087

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book takes an integrated approach to the fields of Corpus Linguistics, Construction Grammar, and World Englishes through a thorough constructional and corpus-based examination of the patterning of the versatile high-frequency verb make in British English and New Englishes. It contributes to Construction Grammar theory by adopting a verb-based, rather than construction-based, perspective on argument structure. This allows the probing of the interface between verb-independent generalizations and item-specificity from an underexplored angle that offers new insights into the shape of the constructicon. From a variationist perspective, it seeks to (i) identify features of New Englishes and gauge whether these features exhibit traces of conventionalization, and (ii) assess whether the degree of institutionalization of the New Englishes correlates with linguistic behavior, both from a social and cognitive perspective, thereby contributing to the budding effort to integrate the cognitive and social dimensions into the modeling of linguistic variation in World Englishes.

English Corpus Linguistics: Variation in Time, Space and Genre.

English Corpus Linguistics: Variation in Time, Space and Genre. PDF

Author: Gisle Andersen

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9401209405

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

As its title suggests, this book is a selection of papers that use English corpora to study language variation along three dimensions – time, place and genre. In broad terms, the book aims to bridge the gap between corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics and to increase our knowledge of the characteristics of English language. It includes eleven papers which address a variety of research questions but with the commonality of a corpus-based methodology. Some of the contributions deal with language variation in time, either by looking into historical corpora of English or by adopting the method known as diachronic comparable corpus linguistics, thus illustrating how corpora can be used to illuminate either historical or recent developments of English. Other studies investigate variation in space by comparing different varieties of English, including some of the “New Englishes” such as the South Asian varieties of English. Finally, some of the papers deal with variation in genre, by looking into the use of language for specific purposes through the inspection of medical articles, social reports and academic writing.

English Produced by Japanese L2 Users

English Produced by Japanese L2 Users PDF

Author: Toshiko Yamaguchi

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-12-06

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13: 9811938857

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book discusses ten grammatical items, with main focus on prepositions and plural nouns, to illustrate the structure of Japanese English or the English spoken by 32 Japanese nationals who are the L2 users of English. Adopting an inductive, theory-neutral, analysis of empirical data collected from recordings of presentational talks, the author demonstrates how standard and nonstandard grammatical forms are distributed, and categorizes these based largely on functional factors. The book describes grammatical forms as a fundamental aspect of linguistic study and adopts a corpus-driven approach to qualify structural features characterizing usage data. This formalization of language usage patterns also facilitates the development of ‘locally’ relevant norms and thus presents alternatives to the normative varieties traditionally adopted. It examines the effects of multicompetence and unpacks the grammar of Japanese English. The book is of interest to researchers, educators, and students concerned with issues related to World Englishes, English as a lingua franca, English language teaching, and multilingualism, this text is vital to studies in global English language use.

Using Corpora to Explore Linguistic Variation

Using Corpora to Explore Linguistic Variation PDF

Author: Randi Reppen

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2002-11-29

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 9027296162

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Using Corpora to Explore Linguistic Variation illustrates the ways in which linguistic variation can be explored through corpus-based investigation. Two major kinds of research questions are considered: variation in the use of a particular linguistic feature, and variation across dialects or registers. Part 1: “Exploring variation in the use of linguistic features” focuses on the study of specific words, expressions, or grammatical constructions, to study variation in the use of a particular linguistic feature. Part 2: “Exploring dialect and register variation” describes salient characteristics of dialects or registers and the patterns of variation across varieties. Part 3: “Exploring Historical Variation” applies these same two major perspectives to historical variation. One recurring theme is the extent to which linguistic variation depends on register differences, reflecting the importance of register as a key methodological and thematic concern in current corpus linguistic research.

Corpus, Cognition and Causative Constructions

Corpus, Cognition and Causative Constructions PDF

Author: Gaëtanelle Gilquin

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2010-03-24

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 9027288496

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

English causative constructions with cause, get, have and make are often mistakenly presented as (quasi-)synonymous and more or less interchangeable. This book demonstrates the value of corpus linguistics in identifying the syntactic, semantic, lexical and stylistic features that are distinctive for each of these constructions. It also underlines the usefulness of providing corpus studies with a solid theoretical foundation by showing how corpus linguistics can be fruitfully combined with cognitive linguistics, which is used both as a starting point for the analysis (top-down approach) and as a framework within which to interpret the corpus results (bottom-up approach). From a methodological point of view, the study illustrates the complementarity of corpus and elicitation data, and offers tools and methods that could be used to investigate other syntactic structures. Finally, the book also has a pedagogical dimension in that it examines how the research findings can be applied to foreign language teaching.

Getting at GET in World Englishes

Getting at GET in World Englishes PDF

Author: Elisabeth Bruckmaier

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2017-02-20

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 3110493578

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Despite its exceptional frequency and versatility, GET has never been a focus of research in its entire variability, which goes from lexical to grammatical uses, nor in large amounts of data from different varieties of English. The present corpus-based study deals with over 11,600 tokens of GET in written and spoken language from three varieties of English and thus provides new insights for variationist linguistics. Firstly, it offers a comprehensive semasiological-syntactic analysis of GET, i.e. an analysis of all its meanings and all the constructions into which it enters, suggesting ten categories as being necessary for its complete description. Secondly, it contributes to the understanding of factors that are at work in variation in World Englishes and lead to quantitative differences between regional standard varieties. Thus, the present study demonstrates that the use of GET in the New Englishes analysed is less affected by substrate effects than by the effects of Second Language Acquisition and the varying influence of British and American English norms. Moreover, it can be shown that the New Englishes display more grammatical uses of GET than does British English.

Corpus Linguistics and African Englishes

Corpus Linguistics and African Englishes PDF

Author: Alexandra U. Esimaje

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2019-02-15

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 9027262934

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Corpus linguistics has become one of the most widely used methodologies across the different linguistic subdisciplines; especially the study of world-wide varieties of English uses corpus-based investigations as one of the chief methodologies. This volume comprises descriptions of the many new corpus initiatives both within and outside Africa that aim to compile various corpora of African Englishes. Moreover, it contains cutting-edge corpus-based research on African Englishes and the use of corpora in pedagogic contexts within African institutions. This volume thus serves both as a practical introduction to corpus compilation (Part I of the book), corpus-based research (Part II) and the application of corpora in language teaching (Part III), and is intended both for those researchers not yet familiar with corpus linguistics and as a reference work for all international researchers investigating the linguistic properties of African Englishes.

Corpus-based Research in Applied Linguistics

Corpus-based Research in Applied Linguistics PDF

Author: Viviana Cortes

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2015-01-14

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 902726905X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This volume comprises nine contributions that were written by up-and-coming corpus-based researchers with varied areas of expertise, who were all disciples of Douglas Biber sometime in the past two decades. These papers cover a wide variety of linguistic analyses and describe the principles of the Flagstaff school: a careful procedure for language corpora collection with special consideration for corpus size, representativeness, sampling and systematic analysis; the use of computer programming abilities that allow the posing of corpus-based research questions never asked before; and a strong emphasis on the combination of quantitative methods based on sound and innovative statistical procedures complemented with comprehensive qualitative functional analyses of the language. This volume has been edited in honor of Douglas Biber, a pioneer of the American school of corpus-based research.

Mapping Unity and Diversity World-Wide

Mapping Unity and Diversity World-Wide PDF

Author: Marianne Hundt

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2012-03-07

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 9027274940

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This volume presents a collection of in-depth cross-varietal studies on a broad spectrum of grammatical features in English varieties spoken all over the world. The contributions explore the structural unity and diversity of New Englishes and thus investigate central aspects of dialect evolution and language change. Moreover, this volume offers new insights into the question as to what constrains new dialect formation, and examines universal trends across a wide range of contact situations. The contributions in this volume further study the possibilities and limitations of quantitative and qualitative corpus analyses in comparative studies of New Englishes and exemplify novel approaches, e.g. the contribution of syntactic corpus annotation (tagging and parsing) to the description of New English structures; the use (and limitations) of web-derived data as an additional source of information; and the possibility to complement corpus data with evidence from sociolinguistic fieldwork.

Corpus Design and Construction in Minoritised Language Contexts - Cynllunio a Chreu Corpws mewn Cyd-destunau Ieithoedd Lleiafrifoledig

Corpus Design and Construction in Minoritised Language Contexts - Cynllunio a Chreu Corpws mewn Cyd-destunau Ieithoedd Lleiafrifoledig PDF

Author: Dawn Knight

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-07-05

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 3030724840

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This bilingual book provides a detailed overview of the project to construct a National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh (CorCenCC), addressing the conceptual and methodological challenges faced when developing language corpora for minoritised languages. A conceptual framework is presented for the user-driven design that underpinned the CorCenCC project, along with a detailed blueprint that can function as a scaffold for other researchers embarking on projects of this nature. This book will be of value to those working in language teaching, learning and assessment, language policy and planning, translation, corpus linguistics and language technology, and to anyone with an interest in Welsh and other minoritised languages. Mae'r llyfr dwyieithog hwn yn rhoi trosolwg manwl o'r prosiect i greu Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes (CorCenCC), ac yn mynd i'r afael â'r heriau cysyniadol a methodolegol a wynebir wrth ddatblygu corpora iaith ar gyfer ieithoedd lleiafrifoledig. Cyflwynir fframwaith cysyniadol ar gyfer y cynllun wedi'i yrru gan ddefnyddwyr sy'n greiddiol i brosiect CorCenCC, ynghyd â glasbrint manwl a all weithredu fel sgaffald i ymchwilwyr eraill sy'n dechrau ar brosiectau o'r fath. Bydd y llyfr hwn o werth i'r rhai sy'n gweithio ym meysydd addysgu, dysgu ac asesu ieithoedd, polisi iaith a chynllunio ieithyddol, cyfieithu, ieithyddiaeth gorpws a thechnoleg iaith, ac unrhyw un â diddordeb yn y Gymraeg ac ieithoedd lleiafrifoledig eraill.