AUTHORS: Hoey, Michael; Mahlberg, Michaela; Stubbs, Michael; Teubert, Wolfgang TITLE: Text, Discourse, and Corpora SUBTITLE: Theory and Analysis SERIES TITLE: Studies in Corpus and Discourse PUBLISHER: Continuum YEAR: 2007
Stacia Levy, Ed.D., the University of the Pacific
SUMMARY Arising out of a course on corpus linguistics, the papers in this book bring together the writings of leading experts in the field of corpus linguistics, addressing the methodology from a variety of perspectives. Lexical priming theory, parole-linguistics, or actual language use open to analysis, and local textual functions are among the topics addressed. A variety of corpora are used, such as the BNC (British National Corpus), smaller purpose-built corpora, as well as Google searches.
Introduction By leading linguist John Sinclair, the introduction addresses a number of issues of corpus linguistics covered in the book: empirical linguistics, lexical ''priming,'' or the expectations set by each encounter with a word; the way words are used within social groups; methodology for examining literary texts, and key issues of corpus linguistics, such as collocation, the local context in which words occur. Both large corpora, such as the BNC (British National Corpus) and small, such as the one of church writings designed by Teubert, are investigated. Methodological issues such as corpus design and concordance analysis of words in their context are also examined.
Chapter 1: Lexical Priming and Literary Creativity Here author Michael Hoey uses sequences from Lewis Caroll's _Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There_, a novel by Michael Moorcock, and a poem by Philip Larkin to discuss how lexical priming can account for creativity found in literary texts - that is, it is by first setting up and then overriding reader expectation on how words will be used that something creative is formed through both common and novel combinations of words.
Chapter 2 Grammatical Creativity: a Corpus Perspective In this chapter author Hooey continues the examination of lexical priming theory by addressing the relationship of lexis and grammar. According to Hooey, grammar is the result of priming: collective, community expectation of the collocation and colligation of words (Sinclair, 1991). Hooey here looks particularly at the numeral system and the expected lexical and grammatical patterns of specific numbers, focusing on the priming of children, suggesting that perhaps children's grammars are primed by the stories and rhymes they are read.
Chapter 3 Parole-linguistics and the Diachronic Dimension of the Discourse Here author Wolfgang Teubert addresses discourse as one of the important concepts to corpus linguistics, suggesting it should be approached from a sociological perspective, as discourse is created and used within a community. Examined in this section is the relationship of language and society, language and meaning, and the ''diachronic dimension'' of discourse, or view of discourse over time, as well as hermeneutics, or ''the discipline of text interpretation as it was developed over the last centuries on the Continent'' (p. 57) and what linguistics can contribute to text interpretation. The author sees text interpretation as an ultimately democratic process, involving the negotiation of meaning of a variety of participants, in which linguists have no privileged status and that ''only a relativist perspective can be the basis of a pluralistic, democratic society'' (p. 57).
Chapter 4 Natural and Human Rights, Work and Property in the Discourse of Catholic Social Doctrine In this chapter, Teubert analyzes a diachronic corpus linguistic methodology, or corpus research over time: specifically a study of the use of the words ''work'' and ''property'' in a corpus of Church texts: the social encyclicals, official Church policy on a number of fronts, and how those terms evolve over time in relation to the concepts of ''natural law'' and ''human rights.'' Teubert states that diachronic corpus linguistics is interested in ''investigating the change that socially constructed discourse objects undergo over time'' (p. 89). In this research, the author examines how the meaning of specific words change over time and what that reveals about social change, for example, that ''work and property were not always seen as related concepts'' (p. 90), that being a wealthy landowner in the past, for example, actually precluded a need to work; only in modern times have those terms become linked as property began to be seen as ''the result of work and is legitimated thereby'' (p. 94). Similarly, rights and responsibilities as dictated by the Church went a through a change of being explained and justified in terms of ''natural law'' to ''human rights.''
Chapter 5 On Texts, Corpora, and Models of Language In this chapter, author Stubbs addresses using corpora to develop a model of language use and resolving differences between the theoretical language system and actual use. One of the major contributions of corpora is their ability to reveal large quantities of data of actual language use rather than using native speaker intuition and introspection, which is often unreliable, namely because native speakers are often, through their reflections, unaware of what is ''expected, predictable, usual, normal, and typical'' (p. 155) in language. It is these typical patterns, however, that corpus studies, especially through the use of concordancers, can reveal. Stubbs uses the example of the word ''tolerate'' to show what corpora can reveal about language use through showing the different usage patterns of ''tolerates'' and the context in which it typically occurs. Corpus studies, in its concern with such patterns of use by actual speakers of the language, is therefore inherently ''empirical'' and ''sociolinguistic,'' concerned with actual behavior of speakers from specific language communities.
Chapter 6 Quantitative Data on Multi-Word Sequences in English: the Case of the Word World In chapter 6, Stubbs continues the discussion of the contributions of corpus studies toward revealing language patterns in a study of the specific word ''world'' and its usage. This is done by first forming the corpus, using software to search for patterns, and then making generalizations about those patterns. Stubbs uses the BNC (British National Corpus), a well-known and large corpus to study one of its top ten nouns, ''world'' and shows how this word occurs in many fixed and semi-fixed phrases, such as ''World War'' and ''in the world,'' which accounts for its being one of the most common nouns. Such phrases are a combination of lexis and grammar: that is, they have both semantic and syntactic functions. They function together, as in ''most natural thing in the world,'' containing ''obligatory grammar lexis…and grammar'' (p. 165). These phrases also have pragmatic function, Stubbs points out: in this case, the use is positive evaluation. Stubbs also discusses at length the use of the PIE (Phrases in English) database (Fletcher, 2003-2006) to find and analyze such frequently used phrases, again using the example of phrases with ''world'' in them. Stubbs also addresses problems in such analyses, such as determining cut-off point for frequent use and the similarity of many phrases. He also addresses what he believes to be one of the most important contributions of corpus linguistics: Sinclair's model of extended language units, that meaning lies in the patterns in which words occur more than the individual words themselves. He ends with discussing important previous research in this area of case studies of individual words.
Chapter 7 Lexical Items in Discourse: Identifying Local Textual Functions of Sustainable Development In this chapter, the first of the final two chapters written by her, Mahlberg studies the use of a specific phrase ''sustainable development'' in a corpus on news articles, a phrase ''increasingly important in our society'' (p. 197). She looks at the patterns in which it typically occurs
Chapter 8 Corpus Stylistics: Bridging the Gap between Linguistic and Literary Studies In this last chapter, Mahlberg shows corpus studies as a ''way of bringing the study of language and literature closer together'' (p. 219), using a corpus of Dickens texts, looking specifically at long clusters of language, eight-word phrases, such as ''not to put too fine a point upon'' (p. 227) that reoccur in Dickens, the characters the phrases are associated with, and the phrases' functions within the text.
EVALUATION This is valuable reading for anyone planning to design a research study based on corpus methodology; it is very detailed, with concrete examples of types of research that can be done through corpus methodology and concerns researchers typically encounter. The editor does a good job including different perspectives and a variety of methodology; it is comprehensive. In some chapters, such as the Stubbs' chapter on the word ''world,'' the reader is walked through designing a small study using corpora. Most chapters include both an introduction and conclusion, making the main ideas of that chapter more accessible.
However, this text is not, for the most part, written for the layperson but for scholars with some familiarity with corpus linguistics: it assumes reader familiarity with terms like ''discourse,'' ''priming,'' and ''collocation,'' terms familiar to linguists, particularly corpus linguists, but not to a general audience. The book would benefit from a glossary defining such terms.
Indeed, the book seems at times to plunge into specialized fields outside of linguists, albeit related to it, such as philosophy: for example, in chapter 3 on parole linguistics, the author notes, ''We can understand society as a structure of and for the interactions between people, human beings with autonomous minds, with a sense of self-awareness and intentionality. This implies that the people themselves and their consciousness are not a part of the society as defined here'' (p. 58). This observation is eventually connected to the topic, but this is dense, specialized text. For those specialists, however, especially those planning to develop a research project using corpus methodology, this is a useful book.
REFERENCES Fletcher, (2003-2006). _PIE: Phrases in English_ [Database]. http://pie.usna.edu.
Sinclair, J. (1991). _Corpus, concordance, collocation_. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER Stacia Levy, Ed.D., teaches writing at the University of the Pacific, where she earned her doctorate. Her areas of expertise and research are academic writing and corpus studies.
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