<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> Expressive speech acts are one of the five basic categories of speech acts identified by Searle (1976). Expressives remain underresearched, though select categories of expressive speech acts, especially offering thanks and compliments, have received more extensive attention. An overall classification of expressive speech acts on the basis of corpus data has not yet been carried out. The current study provides a first survey of different types of expressive speech acts on the basis of three categories of spoken Irish English of different levels of formality: broadcast discussion, classroom discussion and face-to-face interaction. The data are extracted from the pragmatically tagged SPICE-Ireland corpus, a member of the International Corpus of English-family of corpora. The aim of the current study is to offer an overview and classification of expressives in the corpus material. Eight distinct subcategories of expressive speech acts are identified in this study. These categories are agreement, disagreement, volition, offering thanks, apologies, exclamations, expressions of sorrow and greetings.</abstract>

Categorizing expressive speech acts in the pragmatically annotated SPICE Ireland corpus

Review. Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray. Grammatical complexity in academic English. Linguistic change in writing

Corpus linguistics for grammar. A guide for research

The Cambridge handbook of English corpus linguistics

Alexandra D’Arcy. <italic>Discourse-pragmatic variation in context – eight hundred years of LIKE</italic>. Amsterdam &amp; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 2017. 235 pp. DOI 10.1075/slcs.187. ISBN 978 90 272 5952 3 (HB), ISBN 978 90 272 6531 9 (EBOOK).

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>In compiling and testing the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, our project group has come across three problems which arise from the use of computer corpora in studies of syntax and vocabulary. While these problems are mainly associated with work on diachronic corpora, they may be universal enough to deserve somewhat more general consideration. They could be called “The philologist’s dilemma”, “God’s truth fallacy”, and “The mystery of vanishing reliability”. The first could be described as pedagogical, the second methodological and the third pragmatic.</abstract>

Three problems connected with the use of diachronic corpora

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The modal verbs of necessity and obligation, a testing ground of grammatical change, have been shown to exhibit change and variation in world Englishes. Previous studies have primarily concentrated on English as a native language (ENL) and English as a second language (ESL) varieties. The present study extends this line of research and explores variation in modal verbs of necessity and obligation in English use as a Lingua Franca (ELF). Descriptive statistics indicate that ELF resembles American English and also shares similarities with ESL varieties. In addition, ELF further exhibits divergence from both ENL and ESL varieties that arises in multilingual interactions. The multivariate analysis of this study employs mixed-effects logistic regression on the use of must and have to. Integrating social and linguistic factors, this analysis exploits metadata gathered from the VOICE corpus, which has thus far been underused. The results of the inferential statistics indicate that the same sociolinguistic factors that influence the variation in ENL and ESL varieties also shape ELF grammar. These findings not only bring ELF closer to other English varieties but also demonstrate the advantage of studying ELF from a variationist sociolinguistic perspective.
</abstract>

Exploring variation in English as a lingua franca: Multivariate analysis of modal verbs of obligation and necessity in the VOICE corpus

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Previous studies have identified frequent lexical bundles associated with qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research paradigms. These paradigmatic investigations of lexical bundles conducted thus far seem to have two limitations. One is that they have primarily concentrated on distinctive lexical bundles, without much analysis of the shared bundles in qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research paradigms. Another shortcoming is that they tend not to explore in which contexts lexical bundles are likely to occur. These two problems deserve attention, as shared bundles are also frequently used to facilitate fluent linguistic production and analysing lexical bundles in their surrounding contexts can help reveal their specific textual meanings. To address these two limitations, this study seeks to link shared lexical bundles with rhetorical moves based on a corpus consisting of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods nursing research articles. The findings of this study show that in certain move-steps, shared lexical bundles have distinctive discourse functions in mixed methods research. Meanwhile, the findings also show that there are move-steps where shared lexical bundles have similar discourse functions in two or three research paradigms. Revealing shared lexical bundles’ discourse functions in specific contexts may enable learners to know where to use the bundles in a text.
</abstract>

Mapping shared lexical bundles onto rhetorical moves in nursing research articles: A comparative study of paradigmatic variation

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
In the last few decades, much work in corpus linguistics has attempted to discover, and then interpret, differences in the frequencies of use of linguistic elements (words, patterns, constructions, discourse features, etc.). It is probably fair to say that such studies were particularly frequent in (i) learner corpus research, (ii) corpus-based varieties research, and (iii) sociolinguistically motivated studies. For instance, many studies have discussed the differences in how often certain elements are used (i) in corpus data from native speakers vs. corpus data from learner from different L1 backgrounds, (ii) in corpora representing different inner- and outer-circle varieties, or (iii) by speakers in corpora representing people of different gender or sexual identities.
This paper will make the admittedly bold claim that any such study can in fact by definition unable to ‘prove’ what is often their main points, namely that the distributional differences found are in fact due to the one hypothesized explanatory variable(s) of L1, VARIETY, or, e.g., GENDER even when the distributional differences are significant and come with a decent effect size. To substantiate this claim, I will discuss some terminology from the family of methods known as multi-level modeling, namely the distinction between level-1, level-2, ... level-<italic>n</italic> variables and its relevance for many corpus studies. Second, I will then demonstrate how studies using only the above kinds of variables cannot distinguish the effect of their favored predictors from the effect of local/contextual level-1 variables. Third, in discussing this, I will exemplify how such effects need to be explored quantitatively instead.
</abstract>

Against level-3-only analyses in corpus linguistics

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Statistical approaches in linguistics seem to have gained in importance in recent times, especially in the field of Corpus Linguistics. In particular, the last ten years have seen an upsurge of linguists being dedicated to statistical methods and the improvement of statistical knowledge. This has repeatedly been described as ‘the quantitative turn’ in linguistics. In the present paper, we assess how real this quantitative turn actually is and whether statistics can be considered the ‘new normal’ in (corpus) linguistics. To this end, we have analyzed the contributions to six high-impact journals (<italic>Corpora, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, ICAME Journal, English World-Wide, Journal of English Linguistics</italic>, and <italic>Language Variation and Change</italic>) for a period of eleven years (January 2011 until December 2021). Our results suggest that, indeed, statistical methods seem to be on the rise in linguistic studies. However, their frequency strongly varies between the journals, and, in general, we have identified some room for improvement in the use of advanced statistical methods, in particular the discussion of true prediction.
</abstract>

How real is the quantitative turn? Investigating statistics as the new normal in linguistics

Review: Agnieszka Leńko-Szymańska and Sandra Götz (eds.). <italic>Complexity, accuracy and fluency in learner corpus research</italic>. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2022. vi. 327 pp. ISBN 9789027212580 (HB)

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This article investigates semantic prosody in a diachronic perspective. Although prosodies have been shown to change over time, there is no consensus regarding the source of such changes. The present study explores this further through a corpus study of the development of the lemmas <sc>fabric</sc>, <sc>fabricate</sc> and <sc>fabrication</sc> from the late 15th century to the late 20th century, drawing on material from Early English Books Online, the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts and the British National Corpus. The results of the study show that prosodic changes coincide with the emergence of new senses and indicate that these processes are related to and possibly caused by semantic transfer induced by persistent prosodies over time.
</abstract>

Semantic prosody, semantic transfer and semantic change

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> The present study seeks to contribute to two sparsely examined areas of World Englishes research by (i) quantitatively evaluating two potential linguistic epicenters in Asia (Indian and Singapore English) while (ii) investigating the English genitive alternation in a cross-varietal perspective. In a corpus-based bottom-up approach, we evaluate 4,200 interchangeable genitive cases of written English from Great Britain, Hong Kong, India, the Philippines, Singapore and Sri Lanka, as represented in the International Corpus of English. We use a new method called MuPDARF, a multifactorial deviation analysis based on random forest classifications, to evaluate to what extent and with which factors the Asian varieties differ from British English in their genitive choices. Results show conspicuous differences between British English and the Asian varieties and validate the potential epicenter status of Indian English for South Asia, but not unanimously that of Singapore English for Southeast Asia.</abstract>

Empirical perspectives on two potential epicenters: The genitive alternation in Asian Englishes

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> This paper argues for, and presents, a modest approach to XML encoding for use by the majority of contemporary linguists who need to engage in corpus construction. While extensive standards for corpus encoding exist - most notably, the Text Encoding Initiative’s Guidelines and the Corpus Encoding Standard based on them - these are rather heavyweight approaches, implicitly intended for major corpus-building projects, which are rather different from the increasingly common efforts in corpus construction undertaken by individual researchers in support of their personal research goals. Therefore, there is a clear benefit to be had from a set of recommendations (not a standard) that outlines general best practices in the use of XML in corpora without going into any of the more technical aspects of XML or the full weight of TEI encoding. This paper presents such a set of suggestions, dubbed Modest XML for Corpora, and posits that such a set of pointers to a limited level of XML knowledge could work as part of the normal, general training of corpus linguists. The Modest XML recommendations cover the following set of things, which, according to the foregoing argument, are sufficient knowledge about XML for most corpus linguists’ day-to-day needs: use of tags; adding attribute value pairs; recommended use of attributes; nesting of tags; encoding of special characters; XML well-formedness; a collection of de facto standard tags and attributes; going beyond the basic de facto standard tags; and text headers.</abstract>

Modest XML for Corpora: Not a standard, but a suggestion

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> This paper combines data from learner corpora and psycholinguistic experiments in an attempt to find out what advanced learners of English (first language backgrounds German and Spanish) know about a range of common verbargument constructions (VACs), such as the ‘V about n’ construction (e.g. she thinks about chocolate a lot). Learners’ dominant verb-VAC associations are examined based on evidence retrieved from the German and Spanish subcomponents of ICLE and LINDSEI and collected in lexical production tasks in which participants complete VAC frames (e.g. ‘he ___ about the...’) with verbs that may fill the blank (e.g. talked, thought, wondered). The paper compares findings from the different data sets and highlights the value of linking corpus and experimental evidence in studying linguistic phenomena</abstract>

Linking learner corpus and experimental data in studying second language learners’ knowledge of verb-argument constructions

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> Corpora of Early Modern English have been collected and released for research for a number of years. With large scale digitisation activities gathering pace in the last decade, much more historical textual data is now available for research on numerous topics including historical linguistics and conceptual history. We summarise previous research which has shown that it is necessary to map historical spelling variants to modern equivalents in order to successfully apply natural language processing and corpus linguistics methods. Manual and semiautomatic methods have been devised to support this normalisation and standardisation process. We argue that it is important to develop a linguistically meaningful rationale to achieve good results from this process. In order to do so, we propose a number of guidelines for normalising corpora and show how these guidelines have been applied in the Corpus of English Dialogues.</abstract>

Guidelines for normalising Early Modern English corpora: Decisions and justifications

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>The present article provides a detailed description of the corpus of Early Modern Multiloquent Authors (EMMA), as well as two small case studies that illustrate its benefits. As a large-scale specialized corpus, EMMA tries to strike the right balance between big data and sociolinguistic coverage. It comprises the writings of 50 carefully selected authors across five generations, mostly taken from the 17th-century London society. EMMA enables the study of language as both a social and cognitive phenomenon and allows us to explore the interaction between the individual and aggregate levels.The first part of the article is a detailed description of EMMA’s first release as well as the sociolinguistic and methodological principles that underlie its design and compilation. We cover the conceptual decisions and practical implementations at various stages of the compilation process: from text-markup, encoding and data preprocessing to metadata enrichment and verification.In the second part, we present two small case studies to illustrate how rich contextualization can guide the interpretation of quantitative corpus-linguistic findings. The first case study compares the past tense formation of strong verbs in writers without access to higher education to that of writers with an extensive training in Latin. The second case study relates s/th-variation in the language of a single writer, Margaret Cavendish, to major shifts in her personal life.</abstract>

Early Modern Multiloquent Authors (EMMA): Designing a large-scale corpus of individuals’ languages

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ICAME Journal

 An annual publication containing articles and reviews on research carried out related to English language corpora.  Why subscribe and read?  The...

 An annual publication containing articles and reviews on research carried out related to English language corpora.  Why...

ICAME Journal

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