Date: 23-Jun-2010
From: Lamont Antieau <lamontantieau.org>
Subject: Corpora
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Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/20/20-3806.html
EDITORS: Jucker, Andreas H.; Schreier, Daniel; Hundt, Marianne TITLE: Corpora SUBTITLE: Pragmatics and Discourse SERIES TITLE: Language and Computers: Studies in Practical Linguistics, 68 PUBLISHER: Rodopi YEAR: 2009
Lamont D. Antieau, Independent Scholar
INTRODUCTION
Corpus-based approaches have been used to study many facets of language structure, particularly in recent years; however, as editors Andreas H. Jucker, Daniel Schreier and Marianne Hundt point out in the introduction to this volume, ''the potential of corpus linguistics has not yet been fully explored for either discourse analysis or pragmatics'' (5). Only a relatively small number of scholars working in pragmatics, for instance, have used large-scale corpora for analysis, and the starting point for such studies has typically been ''either a discourse particle with a fixed form that can easily be retrieved from a large corpus, or a speech function that is generally realized in a small number of variant patterns'' (4). Thus, the editors propose that ''the time is right to encourage and promote more systematic cooperation between researchers investigating pragmatics and discourse on the one hand and those working with corpus-linguistic methods on the other'' (6). As a way of showcasing current research being done along these lines, ''Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse'' presents 22 papers from the 29th International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 29), which was held in Ascona, Switzerland, in May 2008.
SUMMARY
The first of the volume's three sections is entitled ''Pragmatics and discourse'' and comprises 10 papers on the special topic of the conference, with half taking a historical perspective and the other half focusing on present-day English. It begins with two plenary papers: the first by Thomas Kohnen, which provides an overview of research done in historical corpus pragmatics and offers suggestions for future work, particularly in the area of speech acts, and the second by Irma Taavitsainen, which examines the dissemination of knowledge and negotiation of meaning across a wide range of medical texts written in the Early Modern English period. In the next paper, Tanja Rünnen uses the Corpus of English Religious Prose to examine changes in the use and distribution of exhortations in religious texts from the 14th to the 17th century. Next, Minna Nevala investigates the Corpus of Early English Correspondence to determine how the use of the word 'friend' changed over the span of the 17th and 18th centuries in terms of its referential range and instrumental function. Minna Palander-Collin then examines variation and change in self-reference in the letters of gentlemen in 16th- and 18th-century correspondence, speculating that changes in self-reference marking might be related to changes in stance and involvement in English after 1650.
In the first of five papers on present-day English, Anita Fetzer analyzes the use of 'sort of' and 'kind of' in the political speeches and interviews of high-ranking British officials from 1990 to 2006. Next, Karin Aijmer investigates the multifunctional phrase 'I don't know' to determine differences in its use by native speakers and by learners. In the following paper, Magnus Levin and Hans Lundquist investigate how the recurrent phrases 'on the face of it', 'on its face' and 'in (the) face' serve text-organizing functions stemming from the process of grammaticalization. Karin Axelsson uses the British National Corpus to highlight problems in using corpus data for research on fictional narratives and dialogue in fiction and proposes several solutions, including the creation of annotated corpora and the use of sampling procedures. In the final paper of the section, Anna Marchi and Charlotte Taylor use the framework of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies to examine how British newspapers provide evidence of diachronic change in how the European Union is perceived.
The second section is entitled ''Lexis, grammar and semantics'' and comprises case studies on specific lexical, syntactic and semantic issues by integrating corpus-based research with the approaches of pragmatics and discourse. In the first paper of the section, Stephen Coffey uses the British National Corpus to investigate the lexico-grammatical frame exemplified by the phrase 'a nightmare of a trip' from various perspectives. Next, Magali Paquot and Yves Bestgen compare the use of three statistical tests for extracting keywords from corpora by using the log-likelihood ratio, the t-test and the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test to find significant differences between the frequency and distribution of words in two different subcorpora of the British National Corpus: one comprising academic texts and the other literary texts. Naixing Wei focuses on a wide variety of phraseological features found in Chinese learner spoken English, with implications for both second language acquisition and pedagogy. Jukka Tyrkkö and Turo Hiltunen then examine the distribution of nominalizations in the Early Modern English Medical Texts corpus to determine their use increased between 1500 and 1700. Arja Nurmi uses the Corpus of Early English Correspondence to examine the social history of 'may' by tracking its use by members of various social groups between 1400 and 1800. Sara Gesuato uses an approach integrating both corpus-based approaches and acceptability judgments from native speakers to investigate the semantics of 'go' followed by infinitival verbs. Next, Carolin Biewer uses the International Corpus of English to compare the distribution of get-passive and be-passive constructions in Fijian English to that of other varieties of English in an effort to reveal major influences behind Fijian English. The paper by Ingvilt Marcoe presents a contrastive analysis of subordinating conjunctions used in religious treatises and prayers of the Middle English and Early Modern English periods found in the Corpus of English Religious Prose. In the last paper of the section, Daniël Van Olmen uses the Great Britain component of the International Corpus of English and a Northern Dutch corpus compiled from the Spoken Dutch Corpus to conduct a contrastive analysis of imperatives in English and Dutch and also analyzes the linguistic alternatives to imperatives that are available to speakers of both languages.
The final section is ''Corpus compilation, fieldwork and parsing'' and focuses specifically on methodological problems associated with integrating the study of pragmatics and discourse with corpus-based approaches. Dagman Deuber discusses fieldwork being conducted toward a Caribbean component of the International Corpus of English and describes linguistic and sociolinguistic approaches for analyzing grammatical variation in the corpus. Alpo Honkapohja, Samuli Kaislaniemi, and Ville Marttila present the Digital Editions for Corpus Linguistic project, the aim of which is to make historical manuscripts available online to facilitate their use by linguistic and historical researchers. In the last paper of the volume, Hans Martin Lehmann and Gerald Schneider use a syntactic parser on the British National Corpus to compile a database of syntax-lexis interactions, detailing the methodological problems presented by such an approach.
EVALUATION
This book is an excellent resource for anyone interested in how corpus-based research can contribute to the study of higher-level linguistic phenomena. The breadth of the collected papers is impressive, both in terms of their linguistic objects of study, which vary from high-level categories, such as exhortations, to specific constructions and words, as well as in the range of methodological approaches that are adopted by the authors of the studies. Although its main focus is on English, the book goes beyond the investigation of British and American English to touch on Fijian English, Caribbean English and English as a second language. It also strikes a nice balance between diachronic and synchronic studies, and its coverage of the Early Modern English period in particular should be engaging to scholars of that time period while also being of interest to those students with questions about how English arrived at its current state or how languages change in general. With respect to the latter, articles in the book discuss diachronic change both in the meaning and use of individual lexical items as well as in the overall structures of canonical texts in specific domains.
The volume is also broad in its interdisciplinary coverage, discussing linguistic issues in such fields as medicine, religion and politics, and as such, it should appeal to a wider range of readers than many books on linguistics. Given that the language of law is such a rich area of pragmatics and discourse, and is well represented in written and spoken texts, it was surprising to find that the book includes no studies of legal language and that, moreover, the language of law is rarely addressed in the volume at all. This lack, however, is made up for by the variety of subjects the volume does encompass and the quality of the papers it comprises.
''Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse'' is a remarkable volume, presenting studies that should appeal to newcomers to corpus-based research in pragmatics and discourse as well as those who have already conducted this kind of research and want to stay informed of current approaches.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Lamont Antieau is an independent scholar investigating sociolinguistic variation in the biomedical and legal domains in an effort to improve information retrieval and automatic question answering in these areas. His primary research interests are in dialectology, typology and computer-mediated interaction.
Page Updated: 23-Jun-2010
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