<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> 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 xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> 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

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> This paper outlines a modest approach to XPath and XQuery, tools allowing the navigation and exploitation of XML-encoded texts. The paper starts off from where Andrew Hardie’s paper “Modest XML for corpora: Not a standard, but a suggestion” (Hardie 2014) left the reader, namely wondering how one’s corpus can be usefully analyzed once its XML-encoding is finished, a question the paper did not address. Hardie argued persuasively that “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” (Hardie 2014: 73). In a similar vein this paper argues that even a basic understanding of XPath and XQuery can bring great benefits to corpus linguists. To make this point, we present not only a modest introduction to basic structures underlying the XPath and XQuery syntax but demonstrate their analytical potential using Obama’s 2009 Inaugural Address as a test bed. The speech was encoded in XML, automatically PoS-tagged and manually annotated on additional layers that target two rhetorical figures, anaphora and isocola. We refer to this resource as the Inaugural Rhetorical Corpus (IRC). Further, we created a companion website hosting not only the Inaugural Rhetorical Corpus, but also the Inaugural Training Corpus) (a training corpus in the form of an abbreviated version of the IRC to allow manual checks of query results) as well as an extensive list of tried and tested queries for use with either corpus. All of the queries presented in this paper are at beginners to lower-intermediate levels of XPath/XQuery expertise. Nonetheless, they yield fruitful results: they show how Obama uses the inclusive pronouns we and our as a discursive strategy to advance his political strategy to re-focus American politics on economic and domestic matters. Further, they demonstrate how sentence length contributes to the build-up of climactic tension. Finally, they suggest that Obama’s signature rhetorical figure is the isocolon and that the overwhelming majority of isocola in the speech instantiate the crescens type, where the cola gradually increase in length over the sequence.</abstract>

Modest XPath and XQuery for corpora: Exploiting deep XML annotation

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> This study involved the creation of a corpus of children’s literature spanning 5.5 million words. Using concordance software, the corpus was able to show the most frequent words and collocations. These will be of interest both to literary researchers in the genre of children’s literature and also teachers and applied linguists working with adult students of English.</abstract>

Word frequency and collocation: Using children’s literature in adult learning

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> This article investigates the relationship between certain pronoun uses and identity in a 1930s working class community. It is based on a corpus of informal conversations drawn from the Mass-Observation archive, a sociological and anthropological study of the Bolton (UK) working class at this time. The article argues that certain pronoun uses in the corpus can only be explained as homophoric reference, a kind of reference which depends on implicit agreement about the intended referent of the pronoun. The article then discusses the basis on which this implicit agreement could operate: shared culture and knowledge and a tight network of social relations. In the conclusion, two particular questions are raised: 1) How far can the homophoric reference described be related to social class? 2) When does (dialect) grammar become pragmatics?</abstract>

Pronouns and identity: A case study from a 1930s working-class community

Tony Berber Sardinha and Marcia Veirano Pinto (eds.). Multi-Dimensional analysis, 25 years on – a tribute to Douglas Biber

Claudia Claridge. Hyperbole in English: A corpus-based study of exaggeration

Maristella Gatto. Web as corpus: Theory and practice

David L. Hoover, Jonathan Culpeper and Kieran O’Halloran. Digital literary studies

Susan Nacey. Metaphors in learner English

Christoph Rühlemann. Narrative in English conversation

Lieven Vandelanotte, Kristin Davidse, Caroline Gentens and Ditte Kimps (eds.). Recent advances in corpus linguistics. Developing and exploiting corpora

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 48 (2024): Issue 1 (May 2024)

Volume 47 (2023): Issue 1 (May 2023)

Volume 46 (2022): Issue 1 (August 2022)

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Volume 44 (2020): Issue 1 (March 2020)

Volume 43 (2019): Issue 1 (March 2019)

Volume 42 (2018): Issue 1 (March 2018)

Volume 41 (2017): Issue 1 (March 2017)

Volume 40 (2016): Issue 1 (March 2016)

Volume 39 (2015): Issue 1 (March 2015)

Volume 38 (2014): Issue 1 (April 2014)

ICAME Journal

 An annual publication containing articles and reviews on research carried out related to English language corpora.  Why subscribe and read?  The ICAME Journal provides an up-to-date international forum for research on English corpus linguistics. It features original studies on recent advances in the exploitation of corpora, corpus compilation and software applications. It also features a large number of reviews of scholarly work in the discipline.  Why submit?  The ICAME Journal reaches a broad audience interested in English corpus linguistics. A varied range of submissions is considered for publication: studies based on the use of language corpora or other electronic resources, reports on corpus compilation projects or software applications, shorter notices on recent events and projects, and reviews of recent work in English corpus linguistics.  The ICAME Journal is an annual blind peer-reviewed publication containing articles and reviews on research carried out related to English language corpora  Rejection Rate   22%   Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 