This volume represents one of the studies carried out on material from the International Corpus of learner English (CICLE), supplemented by data from younger learners and native speakers.

This volume represents one of the first full-length studies carried out on material from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), supplemented by data from younger learners and native speakers. It addresses three main goals: a) the implementation of a developmental corpus methodology. The study explores four corpora of argumentative writing, two sampled from advanced learners of different ages and two from corresponding native speakers of English. This way, the respective linguistic maturation in native and non-native writing can be traced with more explanatory power than could be yielded by a mere learner / native speaker contrast. b) a functional account of adjective intensification in present-day written English. Intensification is a singularly dynamic and innovative lexico-grammatical class. Despite their obvious limitations, small, text-type controlled corpora, such as the ones used here, make it feasible to examine this whole functional paradigm and identify the conceptual mechanisms of its continual innovation and semantic change. c) the exploration of native vs. non-native usage and the notion of idiomaticity. The main differences between native English usage and that of advanced learners rest not so much on grammatical structure, but on the rather elusive quality of 'idiomaticity'. In the limited domain of intensification, this notion is explored both qualitatively and arithmetically, with the aim of learning more about what it takes to use English idiomatically.

The first book of its kind, Learner English on Computer is intended to provide linguists, students of linguistics and modern languages, and ELT professionals with a highly accessible and comprehensive introduction to the new and rapidly-expanding field of corpus-based research into learner language. Edited by the founder and co-ordinator of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), the book contains articles on all aspects of corpus compilation, design and analysis. The book is divided into three main sections; in Part I, the first chapter provides the reader with an overview of the field, explaining links with corpus and applied linguistics, second language acquisition and ELT. The second chapter reviews the software tools which are currently available for analysing learner language and contains useful examples of how they can be used. Part 2 contains eight case studies in which computer learner corpora are analysed for various lexical, discourse and grammatical features. The articles contain a wide range of methodologies with broad general application. The chapters in Part 3 look at how Computer Learner Corpus (CLC) based studies can help improve pedagogical tools: EFL grammars, dictionaries, writing textbooks and electronic tools. Implications for classroom methodology are also discussed. The comprehensive scope of this volume should be invaluable to applied linguists and corpus linguists as well as to would-be learner corpus builders and analysts who wish to discover more about a new, exciting and fast-growing field of research.

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Intensification plays a major role in spoken and written interaction, enabling the writer or speaker to express different levels of commitment. This book explores the patterns and meanings of intensifiers in Chinese learner English by ways of comparison with native English. The study is conducted within the theoretical framework of Firthian contextual theory of meaning, Sinclairian model of Extended Units of Meaning (EUM) and Hunston's pattern grammar. The method of contrastive inter-language analysis (CIA) is adopted and the intensifier collocations in learner English and native English are explored by means of quantitative and qualitative analyses of corpora data. This book is the first attempt to investigate the patterning and meaning features of intensifiers systematically with the corpora data in Chinese learner English. Readers will obtain a relatively complete picture of how Chinese learners use intensifiers to realize their attitudinal meanings.

This volume provides a selection of the papers which were presented at the ninth conference on Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands (Leuven, 1998). It gives an accurate and up-to-date picture of the lively scene of computational linguistics in the Netherlands and Flanders. In terms of topics the contributions can be grouped under three headings: the use of statistical methods in speech and language processing (6 papers), the analysis of syntactic and semantic phenomena in the framework of computationally oriented formalisms, such as Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (5 papers), and the development of NLP applications, such as document processing, dialogue modelling and teaching (3 papers). The volume covers the whole range from theoretical to applied research and development, and is hence of interest to both academia and industry. The target audience consists of advanced students and scholars of computational linguistics, and speech and language processing (Linguistics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering).

Saglia, a scholar of some sort whose academic affiliations are not noted, charts the various ways in which, between the 1810s and 1820s, Spain figured in British literary culture. Mainly concerned with narrative versions of Spain, specifically metrical tales and verse romances, he traces the contours of the Spanish "imaginary" in British Romanticism, offering a cultural geography of Romantic Spain as a space of war involving not only France and Britain or the Spanish and Moorish armies, but ideological conflicts between public and private; republicanism, nationalism, and imperialism; and competing models of masculinity and femininity. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR.

The papers brought together in this volume explore, through corpus data, the link between contrastive and interlanguage analysis. Learner corpora are approached from a contrastive perspective, by comparing them with native corpora or corpus data produced by learners from other mother tongue backgrounds, or by combining them with contrastive data from multilingual (translation or comparable) corpora. The integration of these two frameworks, contrastive and learner corpus research, makes it possible to highlight crucial aspects of learner production, such as features of non-nativeness (errors, over- and underuse, unidiomatic expressions), including universal features of interlanguage, or more general issues like the question of transfer. The ten papers of this volume cover topics ranging from methodology to syntax (e.g. adverb placement, postverbal subjects), through lexis (collocations) and discourse (e.g. information packaging, thematic choice). The languages examined include English, Chinese, Dutch, French and Spanish. The book will be of interest to a wide array of readers, especially researchers in second language acquisition and contrastive linguistics, but also professionals working in foreign language teaching, such as language teachers, materials writers and language testers.

The articles in this edited volume represent a broad coverage of areas. They discuss the role and effectiveness of corpora and corpus-linguistic techniques for language teaching but also deal with broader issues such as the relationship between corpora and second language teaching and how the different perspectives of foreign language teachers and applied linguists can be reconciled. A number of concrete examples are given of how authentic corpus material can be used for different learning activities in the classroom. It is also shown how specific learner problems for example in the area of phraseology can be studied on the basis of learner corpora and textbook corpora. On the basis of learner corpora of speech and writing it is further shown that even advanced learners of English are uncertain about stylistic and text type differences.