This volume offers a state-of-the-art picture of work undertaken in the field of computer-aided corpus linguistics. While the focus is on English, central insights can be generalised to other languages, as well.
As a work intended to mark the Silver Jubilee of ICAME, the
International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English, the book combines surveys of the discipline by some of its major pioneers, including founders of ICAME itself, with cutting-edge work by younger scholars. It is divided into three sections: “Overviewing years of corpus linguistic studies”, “Descriptive studies in English syntax and semantics”, and “Second Language Acquisition, parallel corpora and specialist corpora”.
The book bears witness to the impressive advances that have characterised the development of corpus linguistics over the past few decades – from terminological issues to practical applications, from theoretical and descriptive research to applied approaches, from monolingual to multilingual and specialist corpora, from corpus design to corpus exploitation tools.
Roberta Facchinetti is Professor of English at the University of Verona, Italy. Her research field and publications are mainly concerned with language description textual analysis and pragmatics. This is done mostly by means of computerized corpora of both synchronic and diachronic English.
”gives an excellent outline of the state of the art in English corpus linguistics… presents readers with a wealth of possible applications and uses of English computer corpora in the field of synchronic corpus linguistics…. It clearly shows what kinds of research results can be achieved by making use of corpus linguistic methods and it also outlines what insights can be gained from the study of the English language through the help of corpora. This volume also opens up many issues and research questions for the coming years.” in:
ICAME Journal 32, April 2008
Roberta FACCHINETTI: Introduction
1. Overviewing 25 years of corpus linguistic studies Jan SVARTVIK: Corpus linguistics 25+ years on
Antoinette RENOUF: Corpus development 25 years on: from super-corpus to cyber-corpus
Stig JOHANSSON: Seeing through multilingual corpora
Anne WICHMANN: Corpora and spoken discourse
2. Descriptive studies in English syntax and semantics Michael STUBBS: An example of frequent English phraseology: distributions, structures and functions
Ylva BERGLUND and Christopher WILLIAMS: The semantic properties of
going to: distribution patterns in four subcorpora of the
British National Corpus Claudia CLARIDGE: The superlative in spoken English
Mark DAVIES: Semantically-based queries with a joint
BNC/WordNet database
Solveig GRANATH: Size matters – or
thus can meaningful structures be revealed in large corpora Rolf KREYER: Inversion in modern written English: syntactic complexity, information status and the creative writer
David C. MINUGH: The filling in the sandwich: internal modification of idioms
Liesbeth De SMEDT, Lieselotte BREMS and Kristin DAVIDSE: NP-internal functions and extended uses of the ‘type’ nouns
kind, sort, and
type: towards a comprehensive, corpus-based description
3. Second Language Acquisition, parallel corpora and specialist corpora Francesca BIANCHI and Roberto PAZZAGLIA: Student writing of research articles in a foreign language: metacognition and corpora
Ron COWAN and Michael LEESER: The structure of corpora in SLA research
Nadja NESSELHAUF: The path from learner corpus analysis to language pedagogy: some neglected issues
Josef SCHMIED: Exploiting the
Corpus of East-African English Makoto SHIMIZU and Masaki MURATA: Transitive verb plus reflexive pronoun/personal pronoun patterns in English and Japanese: using a Japanese-English parallel corpus
Cristiano FURIASSI and Knut HOFLAND: The retrieval of false anglicisms in newspaper texts
Kerstin LINDMARK, Johan NATT OCH DAG, Caroline WILLNERS: Lexical semantics for software requirements engineering – a corpus-based approach