This volume presents highlights of the first ICAME conference held in the southern hemisphere, in papers on new kinds of corpora for business and communications technology, as well as those comprising computer-mediated communication and college newspapers. The latter yield lively insights into the digitized discourse of younger adults and non-professional writers -- speech communities that have been underrepresented in the standard English corpora. Other groups that are newly represented in research reported in this volume are bilingual users of English in Singapore, Hong Kong and China, as corpus data is brought to bear on second-language speech and writing. The proposed corpus of spoken Dutch profiled here will support research into its variation in different genres and contexts of use in the Netherlands and in Belgium. Research on new historical corpora from C15 to C18 is also reported, along with techniques for normalizing prestandardized English for computerized searching. Meanwhile papers on contemporary usage show some of the continual interplay between British and American English, in grammar and details of the lexicon that are important for English language teachers.

Contents: Pam PETERS, Peter COLLINS and Adam SMITH: Introduction. New corporation and new speech communities. Magnar BREKKE: TERMINEC: a clearinghouse for economics text and terminology. Neil DRAVE: Vaguely speaking: a corpus approach to vague language in intercultural conversions. He ANPING: On the discourse marker so. Tony MCENERY, Paul BAKER and Christine CHEEPEN: Lexis, indirectness and politeness in operator calls. David MINUGH: The Coll Corpus: towards a corpus of web-based college student newspapers. Vincent OOI: Aspects of computer-mediated communication for research in corpus linguistics. Nelleke OOSTDIJK: The design of the Spoken Dutch Corpus. Historical and regional studies. Maurizio GOTTI: Canting terms in the Early English Prose Fiction Corpus. Sebastian HOFFMANN: In (hot) pursuit of data: complex prepositions in late modern English. Christine JOHANSSON: Pied piping and stranding from a diachronic perspective. Hans-Martin LEHMANN: Zero subject relative constructions in American and British English. Manfred MARKUS: Towards an analysis of pragmatic and stylistic features in 15th and 17th century English letters. Peter SCHNEIDER: Computer assisted spelling normalization of 18th century English. Corpus-based language description. Pieter DE HAAN: Whom is not dead? Roberta FACCHINETTI: Can and could in contemporary British English: a study of the ICE-GB corpus. Janet HOLMES and Robert SIGLEY: What’s a word like girl doing in a place like this? Occupational labels, sexist usages and corpus research. Göran KJELLMER: On polysemy and interpretation. The case of eventual. Ilka MINDT: Functions of intonation in sentences and texts. Paul RAYSON, Andrew WILSON and Geoffrey LEECH: Grammatical word class variation within the British National Corpus Samples. Norbert SCHLÜTER: Temporal specification of the present perfect: a corpus-based study. Nicholas SMITH: Ever moving on? The progressive in recent British English.