First published 2015
by Routledge
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2015 Christian Jones and Daniel Waller
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jones, Christian (Linguist) author.
Corpus linguistics for grammar : a guide for research / Christian Jones,
Daniel Waller.
pages cm. (Routledge corpus linguistics guides)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. English languageGrammarStudy and teaching (Higher)Foreign
speakers. 2. English languageStudy and teaching (Higher)Foreign
speakers. 3. English languageGrammarResearch. 4. Second language
acquisitionstudy and teachingForeign speakers. 5. VocabularyStudy
and teaching (Higher) 6. Corpora (Linguistics) I. Waller, Daniel
(Linguist) II. Title.
PE1128.A2J6423 2015
420.188dc23
2015006152
ISBN: 978-0-415-74640-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-74641-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-71377-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Baskerville
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
AdjP | Adjective phrase |
AdvP | Adverb phrase |
BYU-BNC | Brigham Young University and the British National Corpus |
CEFR | Common European Framework of Reference for Languages |
COBUILD | Collins Birmingham University International Language Data base |
COCA | Corpus of Contemporary American English |
DDL | Data-driven learning |
EAP | English for academic purposes |
EFL | English as a foreign language |
ESL | English as a second language |
GloWbe | Corpus of Global Web-Based English |
HKCSE | Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English |
KWIC | Key word in context |
MALU | Mobile-assisted language use |
MI score | Mutual Information score |
MICASE | Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English |
NP | Noun phrase |
PrepP | Prepositional phrase |
VOICE | Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English |
VP | Verb phrase |
WebCorp LSE | WebCorp Linguists Search Engine |
Routledge Corpus Linguistics Guides
Series consultants: Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy
University of Nottingham, UK
Routledge Corpus Linguistics Guides provide accessible and practical introductions to using corpus linguistic methods in key sub-fields within linguistics. Corpus linguistics is one of the most dynamic and rapidly developing areas in the field of language studies, and use of corpora is an important part of modern linguistic research. Books in this series provide the ideal guide for students and researchers using corpus data for research and study in a variety of subject areas.
Ronald Carter is Research Professor of Modern English Language in the School of English at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the co-series editor of the Routledge Applied Linguistics, Routledge Introductions to Applied Linguistics and Routledge English Language Introductions series.
Michael McCarthy is Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, UK, Adjunct Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Limerick, Ireland and Visiting Professor in Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University, UK. He is co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics and editor of the Routledge Domains of Discourse series.
Corpus Linguistics for Grammar
Christian Jones and Daniel Waller
Corpus Linguistics for ELT
Ivor Timmis
Corpus Linguistics for Discourse Analysis
Michael Handford
Corpus Linguistics for Sociolinguistics
Brna Murphy
Corpus Linguistics for the Social Sciences
Tony McEnery, Amanda Potts, Vaclav Brezina and Andrew Hardie
Contents
Try it yourself 1.1
Suggested answers
- You would need samples of lectures from across disciplines and in seminars/tutorials. A million words would lead to a small but probably effective sample as this would be fairly focused, although this would take a considerable amount of time to collect and transcribe. A much smaller sample could be used if the lectures were from a single subject discipline.
- You would need samples from most or all of Dickens work to make statements about this as a whole. A million words are likely to be effective.
- You would need samples of requests by email and this would need to represent colleagues across an institution. The focus is quite restricted so perhaps 50,000 words would suffice.
Try it yourself 1.2
Answers (number of occurrences per corpus shown in brackets)
These answers are from the BYU-BNC corpus (http://corpus2.byu.edu/bnc).
Occurrences of opinions and judgement patterns in four corpora
Pattern | Fiction corpus | Spoken corpus | Newspaper corpus | Academic English corpus |
|
We can assume that... | 2 (4) | 3 = (0) | 3 = (0) | 1 (13) |
Id say that... | 2 (10) | 1 (13) | 3 (3) | 4 (2) |
You can be sure that... | 2 (3) | 3 (2) | 1 (4) | 4 (1) |
Each pattern is of low frequency in each corpus but shows us that there is a clear difference in usage. We can see, for example, that there is a clear preference for the first pattern we can assume that in academic texts.
Try it yourself 1.3
Suggested answers from the BYU-BNC http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc.
Frequency of modal verbs in three BYU-BNC corpora
Question | Frequency order (14) Shown for each corpus type in turn |
General spoken | Academic English | Fiction |
|
Do I have to... ? | 2 | 4 | 2 |
Must I... ? | 4 | 2 | 3 |
Should I... ? | 1 | 1 | 1 |
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