28.2256, Review: Text/Corpus Linguistics: López-Couso, Núñez-Pertejo, Palacios-Martínez, Méndez-Naya (2016)

Fri May 19 15:49:29 UTC 2017

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-2256. Fri May 19 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.2256, Review: Text/Corpus Linguistics: López-Couso, Núñez-Pertejo, Palacios-Martínez, Méndez-Naya (2016)

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Date: Fri, 19 May 2017 11:49:17
From: Sibo Chen [siboc at sfu.ca]
Subject: Corpus linguistics on the move

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-2907.html

EDITOR: María José  López-Couso
EDITOR: Belén  Méndez-Naya
EDITOR: Paloma  Núñez-Pertejo
EDITOR: Ignacio M.  Palacios-Martínez
TITLE: Corpus linguistics on the move
SUBTITLE: Exploring and understanding English through corpora
SERIES TITLE: Language and Computers: Studies in Digital Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Brill
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Sibo Chen, Simon Fraser University

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

As a relatively young sub-discipline of linguistics, corpus linguistics has
experienced exponential growth since the 1960s, with more and more studies
being conducted by scholars across the globe. Founded in Oslo on 12th February
1977, the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English
(ICAME) has been a leading organization in this field, mainly focusing on
compiling and distributing English language corpora for computer processing
and linguistic research (ICAME, n.d.). Each year, ICAME hosts a symposium for
its members. The current volume, “Corpus Linguistics on the Move”, provides a
representative sample of the papers presented at the 34th ICAME conference,
held in Santiago de Compostela in May 2013. This volume offers a succinct
reflection of the ICAME community’s major areas of interest, as well as
current trends in corpus linguistics in general.

The volume is divided into four parts. Part I discusses the various challenges
associated with corpus compilation. The three chapters in this section
introduce, respectively, a corpus focusing on the standardization of English
during the medieval and post-medieval period (Chapter 2, “English Urban
Vernaculars, 1400–1700”), an English for Academic Purposes corpus based on
student writings at the Hanken School of Economics (Chapter 3, “Creating a
Corpus of Student Writing in Economics”), and two multi-genre corpora
representing advanced English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners from Sweden
and Finland (Chapter 4, “Ongoing Changes and Advanced L2 Use of English”). The
discussions throughout these chapters highlight two notable challenges in
corpus compilation. First, the development of historical sociolinguistics
calls for the digitization of historical archives. While many historical
archives have been made available online, it remains difficult and time
consuming to further transcribe them into machine-readable texts. Second, the
globalization of English has led to remarkable growth in advanced ESL learners
and expanding varieties within World English. Yet, both trends have not been
well represented in existing corpora, and accordingly, ongoing efforts are
needed for compiling specialized corpora for both research and applied
purposes. 

The four chapters in Part II are concerned with register variations found in
academic and professional texts. Chapter 5 (“Verbs and Verbs Phrases in
Advanced Dutch EFL Writing”) considers the syntactic development of advanced
English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing. By examining the acquisition of
verb phrase complexity by four advanced EFL students in the Netherlands, the
chapter shows that it is difficult to associate any specific feature of verb
phrases with mature EFL writing, due to the enormous variation in verb phrase
usage found among the EFL students’ writings. The chapter subsequently
concludes that for advanced EFL learners, there remains a notable gap between
passive knowledge and active control. Chapter 6 (“Discourse-Organizing
Metadiscourse in Novice Academic English) explores how native and non-native
English writers use meta-discursive expressions to organize their academic
texts. By comparing three different groups of writers (Norwegian learners of
English, novice native English writers, and expert English writers) in
linguistics and business, the chapter shows some interesting variations across
writer groups and disciplines. First, linguistics tends to use more
meta-discursive expressions than business. Second, compared with native
English writers, non-native English writers tend to use more explicit
meta-discursive expressions, probably with  the purpose of compensating for
their possible weakness in English proficiency. Third, as the level of
expertise of the writer and of the reader increase, the need for
meta-discursive expressions tend to be reduced. The focus on academic writing
across disciplines is continued in Chapter 7 (“Passives in Academic Writing”),
in which the use of the passive voice by novice and expert writers in both
hard (medicine and physics) and soft sciences (law and literary criticism) is
investigated. Overall, the chapter shows that passives are more frequent in
the hard than in the soft disciplines. While such tendency is replicated in
student essays by novice writers, these essays have a lower rate of bare
passives than published articles. The chapter argues that such difference is
mainly caused by novice writers’ inadequate register awareness. Chapter 8
(“Adverbial Hapax Legomena in News Text”) shifts the analytical focus to
adverbial formations in journalistic texts. Based on articles published in
“The Independent” and “The Guardian” between 1984 and 2012, the chapter seeks
to reveal factors conditioning the appearance of adverbial hapaxes in the
journalistic register. Overall, the chapter argues that adverbial hapaxes are
less likely to be formulated if their base elements are rare, grammatically
irregular, and context sensitive. Adverbial hapaxes formulated from creative
wordplay and non-standard dialects can be blocked by formal coinages.

In line with Part II, Part III explores grammatical features of English
varieties. In Chapter 9, “English in South Africa: The Case of Past Referring
Forms”, the preterite-present perfect alternation in South African English is
examined. The chapter discusses the preterite in the context of South Africa’s
unique linguistic ecology, showing that Black South African English privileges
the preterite to align with the American English norm, whereas White South
African English tends to use traditional present perfect to align with the
British English norm. Chapter 10 (“A Look at Participial Constructions with
Get in Hong Kong English”) compares “get + past participle” constructions in
Hong Kong English with British English and Indian English. The chapter
proposes a taxonomy of the “get + past participle” constructions based on
their levels of passiveness (central passives, pseudo, adjectival, idiomatic,
and resultative constructions). According to the chapter’s analysis, the “get
+ past participle” constructions are less common in Hong Kong English than in
the other two English varieties. Among the studied English varieties, the “get
+ past participle” constructions are predominantly agentless and they are
often triggered when their syntactic subjects convey given information (e.g.
“these commuters are getting ripped off by the public transit system”).
Another commonality shared by the studied English varieties is that in terms
of semantic prosody, the “get + past participle” constructions tend to convey
neutral meanings. In turn, Chapters 11 and 12 (“Who is the/a/Ø Professor at
Your University” and “Clause Fragments in English Dialogue”) consider
different ways of making reference in British and American English. In Chapter
11, the use of articles with role predicate in historical American English is
examined, based on twentieth-century data from the Corpus of Historical
American English. The chapter’s analysis focuses on five single role nouns
(professor, president, governor, manager, and director) and the analysis shows
that bare noun phrases are generally on the decrease with the selected nouns.
By comparison, Chapter 12 investigates the different types of clause fragments
(non-sentential units of discourse typically conveying propositional meaning)
in spoken dialogues of British English. The chapter’s analysis of the British
component of the International Corpus of English suggests that clause
fragments are predominantly used for matching and extending the preceding
conversations, thereby functioning as an important cohesive device in spoken
British English. 

Part IV contains three chapters that provide new insights into the pragmatics
of spoken English. Chapter 13 (“the Expression of Directive Meaning”)
discusses the variation between insubordinate if-clauses and other canonical
constructions of directive expressions. The chapter’s investigation into the
Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English reveals that overall,
let-imperatives are more frequently used to make directive expressions,
compared with ordinary imperatives and insubordinate if-clauses. Although
insubordinate if-clauses are not the most frequent type of directive
expressions, their uniqueness lies in the fact that they are more indirect and
less intrusive than ordinary imperatives. Chapter 14 (“Taboo Language and
Wearing in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century English”) examines bad language
in the Late Modern English, based on data from the Old Bailey Corpus
1720–1913. The chapter traces diachronic changes in swearing in three domains:
the frequency of swearing, its types and functions, and its representation in
print. The analysis shows an increasing disapproval of bad language over the
examined period, which, the chapter argues, is due to crucial socio-cultural
changes in late modern England. While a higher proportion of swearing
expressions in the data are used by speakers from the lower social classes, it
is somewhat surprising to find that much higher rates of these expressions are
used by females than by males. Finally, Chapter 15 (“the ‘Humor’ Element in
Engineering Lectures across Cultures) considers one of the most challenging
aspects of pragmatics: humor. The chapter seeks to account for how humor
functions as a pragmatic device in three different cultural settings: the UK,
Malaysia, and New Zealand. The chapter’s analysis discovers that the
frequencies and functions of humor vary from culture to culture, which sheds
light upon the importance of recognizing inter-cultural differences in the
context of the internationalization of higher education.

EVALUATION

The volume’s major strength lies in the diversified topics presented in the
chapters, which offer an impressive glance at the current research trends in
corpus linguistics. Many chapters (especially those in Part I) include
detailed descriptions of how their target corpora are compiled, parsed, and
annotated, and these valuable pieces of information make the volume an ideal
reference for researchers considering incorporating corpus-driven approaches
into their own research. Another strength of the volume is its recognition of
two important trends in World English: the exponential growth of advanced ESL
learners and the proliferation of English varieties. The insightful
discussions on both topics throughout the volume can be particularly
illuminating for scholars working on language change and variation. 

Admittedly, the volume contains two notable shortcomings, which constrain the
scope of its readership. First and foremost, there has been a steady growth in
corpus-driven research in the field of discourse analysis (cf. Baker, 2006)
and it is disappointing to see that this trend has been largely neglected in
the current volume. In addition, for scholars seeking for extended discussions
and interpretations, the volume’s overall descriptive writing style can be
somewhat boring. 

That being said, however, the volume remains an enjoyable and valuable reading
if you are looking for a volume showing corpus-based ways of investigating
linguistic features in historical and contemporary English. 

References

Baker, P. (2006). Using corpora in discourse analysis. New York, NY:
Continumm.
ICAME (n.d.). Retrieved from http://clu.uni.no/

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Sibo Chen is SSHRC Vanier Doctoral Fellow in the School of Communication,
Simon Fraser University. His major research interests are language and
communication, critical discourse analysis, and genre theories.

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