This volume showcases some of the latest research on academic writing by leading and up-and-coming corpus linguists. The studies included in the volume are based on a wide range of corpora spanning first and second language academic writing at different levels of writing expertise, containing texts from a variety of academic disciplines (and sub-disciplines) and of different academic registers. Particularly novel aspects of the collection are the inclusion of research that combines rhetorical moves with multi-dimensional analysis, studies that cover both fixed and variable phraseological items (lexical bundles, phrase-frames, constructions), and work that is based on corpora of English as an academic lingua franca. Going beyond merely summarizing their findings, the authors also discuss what their research means for academic writing practice and pedagogical settings. The volume will be of interest to researchers, students, and teachers who would like to expand their knowledge of how academic writing functions and what it looks like in a variety of contexts.

This book provides an up-to-date survey of current issues and approaches in corpus linguistics in the form of twenty-two recent research articles. The articles cover a wide range of topics illustrating the diversity of research that is characteristic of corpus linguistics today. Central themes are the relationship between theory, intuition and corpus data and the role of corpora in linguistic research. The majority of the articles are empirical studies of specific aspects of English, ranging from lexis and grammar to discourse and pragmatics. Other areas explored are language variation, language change and development, language learning, cross-linguistic comparisons of English and other languages, and the development of linguistic software tools. The contributors to the volume include some of the leading figures in the field such as M.A.K. Halliday, John Sinclair, Geoffrey Leech and Michael Hoey. The theoretical and methodological issues addressed in the volume demonstrate clearly the steady advance of an expanding discipline inspired by an empirical, usage-based approach to the study of language. The volume is essential reading for researchers and students interested in the use of computer corpora in linguistic research.

First-Year Writing describes significant language patterns in college writing today, how they are different from expert academic writing, and how to inform teaching and assessment with corpus-based linguistic and rhetorical genre analysis.

University students must cope with a bewildering array of registers, not only to learn academic content, but also to understand course expectations and requirements. While many previous studies have investigated academic writing, we know comparatively little about academic speech; and no linguistic study to date has investigated the range of academic and advising/management registers that students encounter. This book is a first step towards filling this gap. Based on analysis of the T2K-SWAL Corpus, the book describes university registers from several different perspectives, including: vocabularly patterns; the use of lexico-grammatical and syntactic features; the expression of stance; the use of extended collocations ('lexical bundles'); and a Multi-Dimensional analysis of the overall patterns of register variation. All linguistic patterns are interpreted in functional terms, resulting in an overall characterization of the typical kinds of language that students encounter in university registers: academic and non-academic; spoken and written.

The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (CHECL) surveys the breadth of corpus-based linguistic research on English, including chapters on collocations, phraseology, grammatical variation, historical change, and the description of registers and dialects. The most innovative aspects of the CHECL are its emphasis on critical discussion, its explicit evaluation of the state of the art in each sub-discipline, and the inclusion of empirical case studies. While each chapter includes a broad survey of previous research, the primary focus is on a detailed description of the most important corpus-based studies in this area, with discussion of what those studies found, and why they are important. Each chapter also includes a critical discussion of the corpus-based methods employed for research in this area, as well as an explicit summary of new findings and discoveries.

Corpora are used widely in linguistics, but not always wisely. This book attempts to frame corpus linguistics systematically as a variant of the observational method. The first part introduces the reader to the general methodological discussions surrounding corpus data as well as the practice of doing corpus linguistics, including issues such as the scientific research cycle, research design, extraction of corpus data and statistical evaluation. The second part consists of a number of case studies from the main areas of corpus linguistics (lexical associations, morphology, grammar, text and metaphor), surveying the range of issues studied in corpus linguistics while at the same time showing how they fit into the methodology outlined in the first part.

Academic Writing with Corpora offers a step-by-step accessible guide to using concordancers and aims to help introduce data-driven learning into the academic English classroom. Addressing the challenges faced by EAP teachers when explaining to their students how to write 'naturally', this book provides a solution to the problem by placing an emphasis on learning from expert and proficient writing. In doing so, it: takes a highly practical approach; uses Lextutor, an easy-to-use, open access concordancer, whilst introducing students to tools, such as SkELL, MICUSP and BNC-English Corpora; fosters autonomous learning by demonstrating how to solve everyday difficulties in word choice and grammar; helps teachers to use corpora in teaching proficient writing and helps students to improve their academic writing by learning from the best examples in their field; guides students towards better awareness of the communicative side of academic writing. This book forms essential reading for all students on academic writing and EAP courses or who wish to improve their writing.

UBLI has conducted field surveys since 2002 and built spoken language corpora for French, Spanish, Italian (Salentino dialect), Russian, Malaysian, Turkish, Japanese, and Canadian multilinguals. This volume features new research presented at the UBLI second workshop on Corpus Linguistics – Research Domain, which was held on September 14, 2006. The first part consisting of eleven presentations to this workshop shows a wide range of subjects within the area of corpus-based research, such as dictionary, linguistic atlas, dialect, translation, ancient texts, non-standard texts, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, and natural language processing. The second part of this volume comprises ten additional contributions to both written and spoken corpora by the members and research assistants of UBLI.

This volume provides a state-of-the-art overview of current research and developments on the use of learner corpora perceived from developmental and crosslinguistic perspectives. The book is divided into two parts. The eleven contributions of Part I investigate the development of English language skills of young learners across seven countries/regions on the basis of a new corpus resource called the International Corpus of Crosslinguistic Interlanguage (ICCI). Part II contains seven papers devoted to other varieties of learner corpora, especially spoken learner corpora and learner corpora of languages other than English. Presenting original research in corpus linguistics, this book will be of interest to researchers and postgraduates in the fields of learner corpus research and second language acquisition and those who wish to apply corpus methodology in teaching and learning. For sale in all countries except Japan. For customers in Japan: please contact Yushodo Co.