The papers brought together in this volume illustrate how spoken corpora (be they native or learner corpora) can provide insights into various aspects of errors and disfluencies such as pauses and discourse markers. They show, among others, that such phenomena can be influenced by factors like gender, age or genre, and that they can correlate with, e.g., informativeness and syntactic complexity. Crucially, they also demonstrate that items which are often dismissed as mere disfluencies can fulfil important functions and thus play an essential role in the management of spoken discourse.
The growing availability of large collections of language texts has expanded our horizons for language analysis, enabling the swift analysis of millions of words of data, aided by computational methods. This edited collection contains examples of such contemporary research which uses corpus linguistics to carry out discourse analysis. The book takes an inclusive view of the meaning of discourse, covering different text-types or modes of language, including discourse as both social practice and as ideology or representation.
Electronic texts and text analysis tools have opened up a wealth of opportunities to higher education and language service providers, but learning to use these resources continues to pose challenges to scholars and professionals alike. Translation-Driven Corpora aims to introduce readers to corpus tools and methods which may be used in translation research and practice.
The aim of this volume is to highlight the benefits and potential of using learner corpora for the testing and assessment of L2 proficiency in both speaking and writing, reflecting the growing importance of learner corpora in applied linguistics and second language acquisition research. Identifying several desiderata for future research and practice, the volume presents a selection of original studies, covering a variety of different languages.
The Verb Phrase in English: Investigating Recent Language Change with Corpora
The chapters in this volume feature new and groundbreaking research carried out by leading scholars and promising young researchers from around the world on recent changes in the English verb phrase. Drawing on authentic corpus data, the papers consider both spoken and written English in several genres. Each contribution pays particular attention to the methodologies used for investigating short-term patterns of change in English, with detailed discussions of controversies in this area. This cutting-edge collection is essential reading for historians of the English language, syntacticians and corpus linguists.