This book presents a large-scale corpus-driven study of progressives in 'real' English and 'school' English, combining an analysis of general linguistic interest with a pedagogically motivated one. A systematic comparative analysis of more than 10,000 progressive forms taken from the largest existing corpora of spoken British English and from a small corpus of EFL textbook texts highlights numerous differences between actual language use and textbook language concerning the distribution of progressives, their preferred contexts, favoured functions, and typical lexical-grammatical patterns.
Winner of the "Wissenschaftspreis Hannover 2006" for outstanding research monographs
In spite of the vast literature on modality in English, very little research has been done on modal adverbs as a group. While there are studies of individual adverbs, the semantic and pragmatic relations between them have been left largely unexplored. This book takes a close look at the whole field of modal certainty as expressed by adverbs in English. On the basis of corpus data the most frequent adverbs of certainty, including certainly, indeed, and no doubt, are examined from the point of view of their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics.
The contributions to this volume offer a broad range of novel insights about data-based or data-driven approaches to the study of both structure and function of language, reflecting the increasing shift towards corpus-based methods of analysis in a wide range of areas in linguistics. Corpora can be used as models of human linguistic experience, and the contributors demonstrate that there is ample scope for integrating such models into the descriptions of discourse, grammar, and meaning. Continually improving technological development facilitates the design of larger and more comprehensive corpora documenting language use in a multitude of genres, styles and modes, even starting to include visual aspects. Software to investigate these data also becomes increasingly powerful and more refined.
This book represents a new direction at the interface between the fields of stylistics and corpus linguistics, namely the use of a corpus methodology to investigate the ways in which people's words and thoughts are presented in written narratives. A 260,000 word electronic corpus of late 20th century written texts, including fiction, news reports and (auto)biographies is analysed by the authors, providing a detailed account of new theoretical insights, comparisons between different text types and detailed accounts of individual texts.
Antonymy is the technical name used to describe 'opposites', pairs of words such as rich / poor, love / hate and male / female. Antonyms are a ubiquitous part of everyday language, and this book provides a detailed, comprehensive account of the phenomenon. As well as re-appraising traditional semantic theory and re-evaluating existing categories of antonymy, the book raises wider issues, including questions such as: Where do new atonyms come from? Which pairs can be regarded as 'good opposites'? Why do atonyms tend to favour a particular sequence in text?
