27.1500, Review: Applied Ling; Lang Acq; Text/Corpus Ling: Zou, Smith, Hoey (2015)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-1500. Thu Mar 31 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.1500, Review: Applied Ling; Lang Acq; Text/Corpus Ling: Zou, Smith, Hoey (2015)

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Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2016 13:23:14
From: Chunsheng Yang [ycsgeorge at gmail.com]
Subject: Corpus Linguistics in Chinese Contexts

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-3548.html

EDITOR: Bin  Zou
EDITOR: Simon  Smith
EDITOR: Michael  Hoey
TITLE: Corpus Linguistics in Chinese Contexts
SERIES TITLE: New Language Learning and Teaching Environments
PUBLISHER: Palgrave Macmillan
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Chunsheng Yang, University of Connecticut

Reviews Editor: Robert Arthur Cote

SUMMARY          

Corpora have been widely used in linguistic and language acquisition studies.
Drawing on the large-scale annotated written and spoken linguistic data,
corpus-based studies have helped reveal linguistic patterns that traditional
linguistics may not be able to show. “Corpus Linguistics in Chinese Contexts”,
edited by Bin Zou, Simon Smith, and Michael Hoey, originated from the
International Conference on Corpus Technologies and Applied Linguistics
(CTAL-2012) held in Suzhou, China, in June, 2012, and is a welcome addition to
this body of research, especially in Chinese contexts.

The nine chapters included in this volume represent the first-of-the-art
corpus linguistic research in Chinese contexts, meaning that the papers in
this volume either focus on the application of corpus tools to the Chinese
language, corpus-based studies on English by Chinese scholars, studies on the
English as a foreign language (EFL) in China, or the comparison of English
usages by Chinese EFL learners and British native speakers. Thus, it is clear
that the chapters are only loosely connected under the umbrella “Chinese
contexts”.

The introductory chapter by Wenzhong Li and Simon Smith provides a brief
introduction to the corpus-informed research on Chinese and corpus-based EFL
research in China. 

Chapter 1, “Lexical priming: The odd case of a psycholinguistic theory that
generates corpus-linguistic hypotheses for both English and Chinese” by
Michael Hoey and Juan Shao, is the most theory-loaded chapter in this volume.
Developed by Hoey in response to the insights derived from corpus linguistics,
Lexical Priming theory is an usual corpus-driven theory “in that it builds
both upon corpus linguistics analysis and upon long-standing psycholinguistic
research” (p. 16). The theory generates hypotheses that have not been
previously explored in a systematic fashion by corpus linguists. This chapter
applies Lexical Priming theory to account for collocation, colligation, and
semantic preference in Chinese.  The applicability of the Lexical Priming
theory to Chinese shows that the psycholinguistic claims of Lexical Priming
theory are not culture- or language-specific for “two typologically different
languages [English and Chinese] share properties when looked at from both a
lexical and a psycholinguistic perspective.” (p. 31)

Richard Xiao’s Chapter 2, “Contrastive corpus linguistics: Cross-linguistic
contrast of English and Chinese”, is a contrastive corpus analysis of the
distribution of passive voice and classifiers in English and Mandarin Chinese.
Interestingly, Xiao shows that although Chinese is usually recognized as a
typical classifier language but English is not, these two languages show
striking similarities in their classifier systems in spite of the different
terms used, their quantitative differences, and some language-specific
syntactic behavior. A model of contrastive corpus linguistics is also proposed
for future studies along this line. 

Chapter 3, “Learning Chinese with the sketch engine” by Adam Kilgarriff,
Nicole Keng, and Simon Smith, introduces the key features of Sketch Engine, a
widely used tool in lexicography, the teaching and learning of English, and
its application in teaching and learning Chinese. Sketch Engine can be used
for basic concordance, character search, learning about the collocations
between measure words/classifiers and nouns, and identifying the distribution
of words with similar meaning (Thesaurus) and the difference between similar
words (Sketch Diff). 

In Chapter 4, “Patterned distribution of phraseologies within text: The case
of research articles” Maocheng Liang employs TextSmith, a corpus analysis
tool, to examine the lexico-grammatical features of different sections of
research papers published in the Journal of Applied Linguistics. The findings
confirm that the texts in the same genre are often similarly structured. This
chapter also exemplifies the integration of corpus analysis and genre
analysis.

Chapter 5, “Corpus pedagogic processing of phraseology for EFL teaching: A
case of implementation” by Anping He, is a case study that combines a corpus
study with EFL pedagogy. College students of corpus linguistics first built an
EFL textbook corpus. Then, findings in the corpus-based analysis were
incorporated in a multimedia courseware, which were then used in the EFL
middle school classes. This innovative application of corpus in teaching was
found to benefit all parties involved: the college students, the middle school
teachers, and middle school EFL learners.

Wangheng Peng wrote Chapter 6, “A corpus analysis of Chinese students’
(Mis-)use of nouns at XJTLU” , which analyzes Chinese EFL learners’ use and
misuse of countable and uncountable nouns in EFL academic writing and compares
them to British native speakers’ use in academic and published writing. It is
found that EFL learners tend to use uncountable nouns as countable ones. One
interesting finding is that some uncountable nouns are used as countable nouns
in the native speaker corpora (such as researchers and staffs), although with
low frequency. The finding seems to suggest that there may be no absolute
distinction between two grammatical categories.  

Bin Zou and Wangheng Peng’s Chapter 7, “A corpus-based analysis of the use of
conjunctions in an EAP teaching context at a Sino-British university in
China”, compares conjunction use in the writings of students in a Sino-British
University in China to two published corpora of English academic writing, one
by British native speakers and the other by Chinese university learners. It
was determined that the students at the Sino-British university used formal
conjunctions more frequently, showing more resemblance to native English
speakers than regular Chinese university students.

Chapter 8, “Application of corpus analysis methods to the teaching of advanced
English reading and students’ textual analysis skills” by Haiping Wang,
Yuanyuan Zheng, and Yiyan Cai, reports the effect of learners’ corpus
construction on EFL reading instruction. The chapter shows that the
investigations of language use and the construction of a textbook-related
corpus serves as an extension of language teaching textbooks, stimulates
learners’ interest in reading, and eventually helps them read more effectively
and critically. 

The last chapter, Chapter 9, “An appraisal analysis of reports about Chinese
military affairs in the New York Times” by Zhaoyang Mei, Ren Zhang, and
Baixiang Yu, applies Appraisal Theory (see Martin and Rose, 2003) to the
investigation of English reports on Chinese military affairs in New York
Times. Three subcategories of the appraisal theory (i.e., attitude,
engagement, and graduation) are included in the discussion. The analysis shows
that while news reports may appear to relate events objectively, there are
often latent evaluations which are unintentionally conveyed to readers. This
chapter shows the potential use of corpora in sociolinguistic studies. 

EVALUATION

Zou, Smith, and Hoey did a great job in compiling this volume of corpus-based
and corpus-driven research on Chinese, English, and EFL. Considering the large
number of EFL learners in China and the ever-increasing number of Chinese as
Second Language (CSL) learners around the world, this new volume in the Series
of New Language Learning and Teaching Environments will be of great interest
to corpus linguists, EFL and CSL practitioners, graduate students, and even
advanced undergraduate students. 

One major strength of this volume is its wide coverage of topics, which range
from Chinese EFL learners to native English speakers, from EFL writing to
formal English writing in American and British media, and from corpus building
to corpus tool application. The volume provides not only the state of art in
the use of corpora in applied linguistic research by top corpus linguists,
such as Michael Hoey and Richard Xiao, but it also addresses the practical
side of corpora, namely how corpora can be utilized in language teaching and
learning. Interested researchers, language practitioners, and graduate
students can all draw upon these chapters to create their research questions
and conduct independent studies. 

Another strength of the volume is the introduction of multiple corpus tools,
such as WordSmith, TextSmith, and Sketch Engine, etc. These corpus tools will
be of great value to those who are new to corpus linguistics and are
interested in exploring the use of corpora in their research and language
learning. 

This volume also opens many new venues of corpus-based research. For example,
Chapter shows that although English is not usually considered to be a language
with classifiers, corpus-based analysis of the classifiers in English and
Mandarin Chinese showed that the two languages have a lot in common. More
contrastive corpus-based studies along this line can be conducted to
understand linguistic typology and universals. In Chapter 5, HE demonstrated
the application of EFL corpora built by students of corpus linguistics. Such
innovative research, which combines the training of corpus linguistics
students and the practical application of corpora, can be conducted in many
similar contexts and will likely benefit all parties involved.

While the introductory chapter provides a historical and current perspective
of corpora and corpus-based research in China, it seems that a more thorough
discussion of corpus-driven and corpus-based research should be provided to
make the various chapters more reader-friendly, and, more importantly, situate
individual chapters in a larger context. In the current state, the different
chapters are only loosely linked by the “Chinese contexts” although this is
understandable in that all chapters hail from presentations given at a
conference.

To summarize, Corpus Linguistics in Chinese Contexts will be of great value
for corpus linguists, applied linguists, EFL and CSL practitioners, as well as
anyone interested in the theoretical and practical issues related to corpora.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr. Chunsheng Yang is an assistant professor of Chinese and applied
linguistics at the University of Connecticut.His research focuses on the
acquisition of second language (L2) phonology, especially the acquisition of
L2 prosody (i.e., tones, intonation, stress, etc), computer-assisted and
mobile-assisted language teaching and learning, and Chinese linguistics and
Chinese pedagogy in general.





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