Current Trends In Corpus Linguistics

This book shows how corpus linguistics and discourse analysis can benefit from the cooperation with a variety of other language-related disciplines, such as cognitive linguistics, appraisal theory, corpus stylistics and cultural studies. From different perspectives, each chapter will contribute to the understanding of the importance of corpus linguistics as an outstanding tool for the study of language, both alone and in combination with other academic and scientific disciplines.

This book provides an up-to-date snapshot of recent research and developments in the use of corpora for language learning and teaching. It is divided into three parts. Part I focusses on innovative uses of corpora by language teachers and learners. These cover the world's first corpus-based TV program for the teaching of English conversation, as well as corpus-based approaches to the teaching of EAP, cultural studies and translation. Part II focuses on new corpus-based tools for LSP learning. Part III illustrates research findings from corpora consisting of language learner data and discusses their implications for language teaching and learning. It will appeal to scholars in both language teaching and learning and corpus and computational linguistics.

This book examines the contribution of various recent developments in linguistics to contrastive analysis. The articles range across a broad gamut of languages, with most attention going to the languages of Europe. They show how advances in theory and computer technology are together impacting the field of contrastive linguistics. Part I focuses, from a broadly functional-cognitive viewpoint, on the close link with typology, stressing the importance of embedding the treatment of grammatical categories in their contexts of use. Part II turns to methodological issues, exploring the enormous potential offered by parallel, computer-accessible corpora to contrastive linguistics and to enhancing the testability, authenticity and empirical adequacy of cross-linguistic studies. Part III is concerned with contrastive semantics, ranging from individual items to entire grammatical constructions, and shows how meanings are coupled to language-specific cognitive strategies and even to cultural differences in subjective awareness and the fashioning of personal identity.

This volume brings together a selection of contributions presented at the 15th European Symposium on Languages for Special Purposes, held at the University of Bergamo (Italy) from 29 August to 2 September 2005. The conference title, «New Trends in Specialized Discourse», reflects the emphasis given to recent orientations in research, coming from established as well as new authors in the field. As suggested by the title of this volume, the analysis of specialized discourse calls for a specialized discourse analysis. When applied linguists deal with vocational discourses, they are faced with a double challenge: on the one hand, an understanding of textualisations often alien to the general language; on the other hand, the use of analytical tools designed specifically for their investigation. The studies presented in this volume position themselves somewhere along this continuum, focusing alternatively on converging/diverging features of texts and discourses.

Current Trends in Greek Linguistics is a collection of fifteen papers written by junior researchers of Greek linguistics, aiming to highlight the ongoing linguistic research on Greek. The collected papers present original research from a fresh perspective, and bring to the fore aspects of the Greek language that have not been extensively examined so far. The authors provide a concise overview of their field and address problems in a variety of theoretical frameworks, including cognitive linguistics, formal linguistics, corpus linguistics, variational sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis. The volume comprises four sections: Aspects of Meaning, Textual and Sociolinguistic Approaches, Phonetics and Phonology, and Clinical Linguistics and Language Teaching. The first section includes chapters exploring lexical temporal expressions, the conceptualisation of time and the semantic properties of the subjunctive mood. The second section discusses issues relating to adjective evaluation, strategies of verbal humour, the role of social variables, media and political discourse. The section on phonetics and phonology includes three experimental studies that explore segmental and supra-segmental phenomena. The last section of the volume combines papers from two different fields, dealing with aphasic speech and the teaching of idioms. This collection of papers will appeal to researchers, students of linguistics and educators who are interested in Greek and/or the implications of its study for other languages and linguistic theory.

The aim of this book is to present a comprehensive picture of the current state of Spanish learner corpus research (SLCR), which makes it unique, since no other monograph has focused on collecting research dealing with learner corpora of any language other than English. In addition to an introductory appraisal of current SLCR, as well as a wake-up call reminding us that learner corpus design still needs to be improved, this volume features a selection of original studies ranging from general issues concerning learner corpora compilation to more specific aspects such as phonetic, lexical, grammatical and pragmatic features of the interlanguage of learners of Spanish, as reflected in corpus data. This volume will undoubtedly be of significant interest to researchers involved in corpus linguistics, second language acquisition research, as well as to professionals in the field of Spanish as a second language, including teachers, and creators and publishers of teaching materials.

This book brings together a number of empirical studies that use corpora to study discourse patterns in speech and writing. It explores new trends in the area of text and discourse characterized by the alliance between text linguistics and areas such as corpus linguistics, genre analysis, literary stylistics and cross-linguistic studies. The contributions to the volume show how established corpora can be used to ask a number of new questions about the interface between speech and writing, the relation between grammar and discourse, academic discourse, cohesive markers, stylistic devices such as metaphor, deixis and non-verbal communication. The corpora used for text-analysis can also be tailor-made for the study of particular genres such as journal article abstracts, lectures, e-mailing list messages, headlines and titles. A recent development is to bring in contrastive data from bilingual corpora to show what is language-specific in the organization of the text.

The volume collects original studies highlighting contemporary trends in historical sociolinguistics, as well as current research on the relationship between sociolinguistics and historical linguistics, social motivations of language variation and change, and corpus-based studies. Distinctive features of the book, which make it appealing to a wider audience, are the interdisciplinary nature of the chapters and the range of languages addressed.

Acts as a one-volume resource, providing an introduction to every aspect of corpus linguistics as it is being used at the moment.

The papers published in this volume were originally presented at the Third North American Symposium on Corpus Linguistics and Language Teaching held on 23-25 March 2001 at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. Each paper analyses some aspect of language use or structure in one or more of the many linguistic corpora now available. The number of different corpora investigated in the book is a real testament to the progress that has been made in recent years in developing new corpora, particularly spoken corpora, as over half of the papers deal either wholly or partially with the analysis of spoken data. This book will be of particular interest to undergraduate and graduate students and scholars interested in corpus, socio and applied linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, and language teaching.