24.2556, Review: Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics; English: Yamazaki & Sigley (2012)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-24-2556. Mon Jun 24 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.2556, Review: Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics; English: Yamazaki & Sigley (2012)

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Date: Mon, 24 Jun 2013 11:51:07
From: Annis Shepherd [als306 at soton.ac.uk]
Subject: Approaching Language Variation through Corpora

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EDITOR: Shunji  Yamazaki
EDITOR: Robert  Sigley
TITLE: Approaching Language Variation through Corpora
SUBTITLE: A Festschrift in Honour of Toshio Saito
SERIES TITLE: Linguistic Insights - Volume 167
PUBLISHER: Peter Lang AG
YEAR: 2012

REVIEWER: Annis Shepherd, University of Southampton

SUMMARY

This collection of works (produced in honour of Toshio Saito) is aimed at
providing practical solutions for the interpretational and methodological
problems that are inherently part of corpus-based research, whilst continuing
Saito’s mission of integrating Japanese work on corpus research into that of
the global linguistic community.

The preface contains an overview of the advantages of corpus studies with
regard to studying variation, describes the overall aim of the collection and
gives basic details of each paper.  The volume is divided into four sections:
the first discusses and proposes solutions to methodological issues when using
real language samples; section two consists of case studies describing
language use in different linguistic environments; the third section considers
the investigation of diachronic language change through corpora; and the final
section looks at variation in language usage for different purposes or by
different groups/individuals.

“Interpreting Textual Distribution: Social and Situational Factors” (Stig
Johansson) discusses the use of computerised corpora to study sociolinguistic
variation. Johansson begins by providing an overview of two of the “earliest
and most influential” corpora: Brown and the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus
(LOB).  He then moves on to discuss other corpora that have been modelled on
these two, giving details of how they differ from each other. All the examples
given from these corpora involve cross-dialectal comparisons (e.g. American
English with British English, etc.). Johansson then moves on to discuss how
corpora can also be used to investigate variation between spoken and written
language, variation involving more than one linguistic feature, and the
possibility of developing a corpus-based grammar. He concludes that
computerised corpora are a valuable tool for studying sociolinguistic
variation, but that caution is required when choosing which is to be used, as
not all are suitable for studying some types of variation.

In “Assessing Corpus Comparability Using a Formality Index: The Case of the
Brown/LOB Clones”, Robert Sigley considers the comparison of data from
different corpora and how to determine if any apparent variation is genuine
and not the result of differences in the way in which the corpora are
compiled. The author uses a formality index to investigate variation between
five corpora (i.e. Brown, LOB, WWC, Frown and FLOB), giving details of all
five.  He provides an in-depth discussion of how this formality index was
created, before considering how the different corpora compare in levels of
formality. He also draws comparisons between the corpora on a finer level,
considering the differences between text categories (e.g. academic, fictitious
and religious writing) in the different corpora. He concludes that factor
analysis is of use in sociolinguistic studies of corpora, as it facilitates
the study of both general stylistic comparisons and of individual linguistic
variables.

“Approaching a Linguistic Variable: ‘That’-Omission in Mandative Sentences”
(Sebastian Hoffmann and Robert Sigley) discusses how best to describe and
explain linguistic variables through a case-study of ‘that’-omission in
mandative subjunctive sentences. Hoffmann and Sigley begin by considering the
different types of research objectives that are common to such an
investigation (i.e. comparative description, confirmatory analysis, and
exploratory analysis) and the steps involved in undertaking such an analysis.
They then provide a detailed case-study, including details of the methodology
used, an overview of their results and how they were interpreted, and a
discussion of the application of a variable rules model to subsets of their
data. The paper concludes with some ideas for future research on mandative
sentences.

“Semantic Preference of High-Frequency Mental Verbs in the British National
Corpus” (Graeme Kennedy) explores the idea that words that appear to be
semantically related are nonetheless distinguished by the collocates that they
adopt; for example, ‘stop’ is frequently used with verbs referring to
irritating or unpleasant behaviours (e.g. complaining, moaning etc.), whereas
‘finish’ is often associated with small-scale activities or processes (e.g.
washing, unpacking, etc.). Kennedy’s paper is a discussion of variation in the
semantic preferences linked with ten frequently used lexical verbs in the
British National Corpus (BNC), with the aim of identifying whether the
collocates of these words have any underlying semantic characteristics. The
paper includes a description of the rationale behind the selection of the
verbs used in the study and the methodology adopted in capturing the data.
Kennedy proceeds by discussing each of the verbs and their most frequent
collocates individually, highlighting the semantic patterns that can be seen
within the collocates for each verb, and concludes that the use of a
large-scale corpus such as the BNC in studies of variation facilitates such
analyses. He ends his paper with some further suggestions on how this type of
research could be used in other areas of linguistics, such as second language
acquisition theory.

In “Functional Variation in Use of ‘Though’ and ‘When’ Clauses”, Teruhiko
Fukaya considers the divide between coordinating and subordinating
conjunctions, with the aim of showing that it is gradient rather than
categorical. Fukaya considers two conjunctions (typically considered to be
subordinating), ‘when’ and ‘though’, and examines the extent to which they act
as coordinators in the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) and the BNC.
After providing an overview of existing descriptions of the use of these two
words, he highlights weak points of these descriptions, and then gives details
of the results of the study, where he considers the syntactic position of
‘when’/‘though’ clauses, the existence of non-finite ‘when’/‘though’ clauses
and the lexical patterns seen in the collocates of such clauses.  The paper
concludes by providing a functional explanation of ‘when’ and ‘though’ in
terms of the semantic relationship they create between the two clauses and how
they can create both paratactic and hypotactic enhancement effects.

“Comparing Adjective Comparison across Genre and Time in Standard Varieties of
Modern English” (Shunki Yamazaki) discusses how corpus studies can add to the
debate about adjective use in English by reviewing some of the conclusions
made about the use of inflectional and periphrastic comparative and
superlative adjectives through a new study of four corpora (i.e. Brown, LOB,
Frown and FLOB). Existing studies have identified a number of factors that
appear to influence whether an inflectional or a periphrastic adjective is
used; each factor is tested in the four corpora used in the study, and the
data are discussed with the aim of determining whether every factor still
appears to be valid.

In his paper, “On the Occurrence and Variation of the Adverbial Subordination
Markers ‘Þe’ and ‘Þœt’ in Old English texts”, Matti Rissanen explores the
changes in use of adverbial subordinators in Old English through the Helsinki
Corpus and the Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic Form. Rissanen
discusses the use of fifteen adverbial subordinators and whether they appear
with a null marker, with ‘Þe’, or with ‘Þœt’, and concludes that the
diachronic development of overt subordination markers in Old English is a
complicated matter which requires attention to the semantic relationships
between the main and subordinate clauses and the form of the adverbial
subordinator, among other factors.

“The Syntactic Development of the Gerund in Early Modern English: A Survey
Based on the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English” (Toshio
Saito) makes use of the Penn-Helsinki Corpus to re-examine the conclusions
reached in Saito (1993), which was a study into variant constructions of the
gerund in Early Modern English using the smaller Helsinki Corpus of English
Texts. The aim of the new study is to determine whether a larger corpus
produces more reliable and useful results than a smaller one. After giving an
overview of the structure of the corpus and background details about the
development of the gerund, Saito discusses his results, and concludes that,
whilst the Helsinki Corpus produced results that can be verified through the
use of the Penn-Helsinki Corpus, the latter produced results of greater
statistical significance.

In “The Verb ‘Pray’ in Chaucer and Caxton”, Yoko Iyeiri investigates how the
use of the verb ‘pray’ changed from a marker introducing imperatives to  a
discourse marker meaning ‘please’ in the Middle English Period using selected
works of Chaucer and Caxton as a corpus. Iyeiri focuses on ‘that’-clauses
dominated by ‘pray’, showing that there are differences in the use of ‘that’
depending on the subject of ‘pray’. The paper concludes with a detailed
discussion of ‘The Canterbury Tales’, showing that this work displays some
interesting developments with regard to the subject matter of the paper that
appear to be unique.

“Defining Periods of Middle English by Measuring Rates of Language Change”
(Satoru Tsukamoto) discusses the lack of clarity in what should be classified
as ‘Middle English’, and aims to provide boundaries based on computable
morphological and syntactic data. Tsukamoto’s data is drawn from the
Penn-Helsinki Corpus of Middle English, Second Edition. He gives details of
the methodology adopted for analysing the data and discusses the rates of
change that can be observed in the 14 variables under investigation. The
author concludes that an examination of syntactic change (in comparison to
existing examinations of phonological change) enables a division to be made
between early and late Middle English around the date 1300.

Pam Peters, in “Style and Politeness: The Case of the Personal Pronoun”,
considers a number of questions surrounding variation in the case forms of
personal pronouns, such as whether different media (e.g. speech vs. writing)
show different levels of variation and whether there are regional differences.
Peters uses the International Corpus of English to investigate pronominal
variability in Australian, New Zealand and British English when following
‘than’ (e.g. “he is stronger than I/me”), in coordinated phrases (e.g. “him
and me/he and I are best friends”) and when preceding a gerund-participle
(e.g. “I wasn’t thinking about him/his not being there”). She concludes that,
whilst there are some indications that case distinctions are being eroded in
English, there are also others signs that dispute this conclusion.
Additionally, there appear to be some stylistic differences between spoken and
written language, but all three regional varieties show similar overall
trends.

“Approaching Literature as a Corpus: Gender-Based Conversational Styles in
Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” (Masahiro Hori) covers some of the
advantages and limitations of using a corpus to study literature through an
examination of the stylistic differences between a male and female protagonist
in Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’. Hori suggests that, whilst a
corpus study may not initially seem like a particularly effective way of
studying style in literature, it can (when used appropriately) make a valuable
contribution.  After giving details about the methodology adopted, the author
provides both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of the stylistic
differences of the protagonists. The paper concludes that the language of the
two characters are different even in the use of function words, and that a
corpus analysis of this type is only of use when gathering both quantitative
and qualitative data.

“Active Listening in Conversation: Gender and the Use of Verbal Feedback”
(Maria Stubbe) again focuses on how corpora can assist in studies of gender
differences, concentrating on the use of supportive verbal feedback in
conversations. Giving details of both how previous studies influenced the
current one, and the methodology adopted, Stubbe develops an analytical
framework to enable analysing gender-based variation. She concludes with a
discussion of some methodological issues involved in using corpora to
investigate complex discourse phenomena and outlines how she approached them.

EVALUATION

Put together with the main aim of making the use of corpora accessible to all,
especially students undertaking their first independent research projects,
this collection of papers covers a range of issues (methodological and
interpretational) inherent in using corpora to study variation. Some of the
papers focus on an explicit discussion of the merits of corpus-based studies
of variation, whilst others use case studies to exemplify how corpora can be
used.

The majority of papers should be accessible for all postgraduate students.
They cover a wide range of linguistic disciplines (e.g. sociolinguistics,
syntax, semantics and discourse analysis, to name but a few), showing the
potential use of corpora for those studying variation in all of these
disciplines. Whilst no explicit instructions are given on how to undertake a
corpus study, there are many clear examples of how such a study could be used
to enhance linguistic research. The papers by Sigley and Johansson, in
particular, give an extremely clear overview of the merits of some of the
major computerised corpora in existence, whilst others (e.g. Peters) give
explanations of why they have chosen the corpus that they have.

Considering that this volume covers such diverse areas of linguistics as
semantics and discourse analysis, the editors were perhaps wise not to order
the papers based on this criterion, having instead one section on
methodological issues and solutions, another on variation between linguistic
environments, a third on language change, and a final one devoted to variation
in usage. In many ways, this division works, as it highlights the range of
research areas in which corpora can be utilised. However, the student wishing
to determine, for example, how a corpus study could be used to study syntactic
or semantic variation, would find this layout less useful, as there are papers
related to these areas throughout the book. Nevertheless, the volume flows
well, with the links between the papers in each section being coherent.

I feel that this volume is a valuable addition to existing literature on both
linguistic methodology and variation. Given the number of directions from
which variation can be studied, it is perhaps unsurprising that there is no
universal consensus on the best data collection technique: the debate over
methodology has been ongoing for many years (see, for example, Cornips and
Corrigan 2005 and Maguire and McMahon 2011). It is, to my knowledge,
relatively rare for pre-existing corpora to be used in studies of variation;
researchers (e.g. Adger 2006, Quinn 2005) have a tendency to create their own,
highly specific corpora. It is, therefore, interesting to see the results that
can be achieved using existing corpora, especially considering that, for many
students, the idea of creating their own corpus would be intimidating (if not
impossible). This volume shows that, with care, it is possible to undertake a
detailed analysis of a wide range of linguistic phenomena without needing to
devote time to creating a corpus.

REFERENCES

Adger, D. (2006). Combinatorial variability. Journal of Linguistics 42,
503-530.

Cornips, L. and K. Corrigan (2005). Syntax and variation: reconciling the
biological and the social. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Maguire, W. and A. McMahon (2011). Analysing Variation in English. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Quinn, H. (2005). Distribution of Pronoun Case Forms in English. Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.

Saito, Toshio 1993. The Development of the Gerund in Early Modern English:
Exploring the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (in Japanese). In Modern
English Association Editorial Board (ed.), Aspects of Modern English. Tokyo:
Eichosha, 353-375.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Annis Shepherd is a Ph.D. student at the University of Southampton.  Her
research interests include the division of labour between syntax and
morphology, intra-speaker variation and non-standard varieties of English.
Her thesis focuses on case variation in English conjoined phrases.








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