This volume presents a snapshot of the current state of the art of research in English corpus linguistics. It contains selected papers from the 40th ICAME conference in 2019 and features contributions from experts in synchronic, diachronic, and contrastive linguistics, as well as in sociolinguistics, phonetics, discourse analysis, and learner language. The volume showcases the particular strengths of research in the ICAME tradition. The papers in this volume offer new insights from the reanalysis of new data types, methodological refinements and advancements of quantitative analysis, and from taking new perspectives on ongoing debates in their respective fields.

Do you want to gain a deeper understanding of how big tech analyses and exploits our text data, or investigate how political parties differ by analysing textual styles, associations and trends in documents? Or create a map of a text collection and write a simple QA system yourself? This book explores how to apply state-of-the-art text analytics methods to detect and visualise phenomena in text data. Solidly based on methods from corpus linguistics, natural language processing, text analytics and digital humanities, this book shows readers how to conduct experiments with their own corpora and research questions, underpin their theories, quantify the differences and pinpoint characteristics. Case studies and experiments are detailed in every chapter using real-world and open access corpora from politics, World English, history, and literature. The results are interpreted and put into perspective, pitfalls are pointed out, and necessary pre-processing steps are demonstrated. This book also demonstrates how to use the programming language R, as well as simple alternatives and additions to R, to conduct experiments and employ visualisations by example, with extensible R-code, recipes, links to corpora, and a wide range of methods. The methods introduced can be used across texts of all disciplines, from history or literature to party manifestos and patient reports.

The Routledge Handbook of Corpora and English Language Teaching and Learning provides a wide-ranging and authoritative overview of the latest developments and innovations in how corpus approaches, corpus technologies, and corpus data can inform and transform English language teaching and learning. Featuring a broad range of international experts, the Handbook presents state-of-the-art scholarship and inspires new avenues for research focusing on six key areas: English language teaching and learning informed by language corpora; corpora in syllabus and materials design; corpora and English for specific and academic purposes; learner corpora for English language teaching; data-driven learning; and corpora and corpus tools for language teaching. Unique to this pioneering volume, the authors cover key areas at the cross-roads of corpus research and English language teaching by drawing on cutting-edge corpus applications, methods, and pedagogical approaches, hence, bridging the research–practice gap in the field. This Handbook is a collection of novel contributions offering essential reading for those researching and studying English language teaching and learning through the application of corpus approaches.

This book provides a systematic, empirical account of the language typically presented in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks, based on a large corpus of EFL textbooks used in secondary schools. A modified version of the Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA) framework serves to examine linguistic variation both within textbooks and compared to corpora representing ‘real-life’ English as used outside the EFL classroom. The results highlight the characteristics of Textbook English that define it as a distinct variety of English. In light of the study's pedagogical implications, this book proposes a range of corpus-based approaches to improve the naturalness of textbook texts. It also contributes to advancing quantitative corpus linguistics methodology: its detailed online supplements aim for methodological transparency and reproducibility in line with the principles of Open Science. This book will be of interest to linguistics and language education students and researchers, as well as EFL teachers, textbook authors and editors, and those involved in curriculum development and teacher training.

The range of meanings expressed by derivatives formed by the attachment of the four principal verb-forming suffixes - ate, - en, - ify and - ize has been the subject of extensive analysis for over two decades. From a descriptive perspective, the research reported in this volume constitutes the most comprehensive usage-based analysis of verbal derivatives available to date and provides register-based and diachronic comparisons of usage and distribution patterns across corpora of spoken English. The semantic analysis adopts the seven well-established semantic categories of verbal derivatives and extends the set to twenty by including further meaning classes documented in the morphological literature and additional senses that emerged from the contextualized analysis of complex verbs in the datasets. From a theoretical standpoint, the novel approach involves the explicit linking of affix schemas to argument structure constructions, and proposes a unified model of verb-forming suffixation that accounts for the multi-functional characteristics of verbal derivatives, from a constructional perspective.

Spoken as a foreign language by around 24 million people worldwide, Spanish can be the second language (L2) of monolingually raised learners who acquire it in school. Ever more often it is also the third or a further language (L3) of learners who have previously studied another foreign language (for example Spanish after English in Germany) or who acquired more than one language during early childhood, as is the case with heritage speakers. This book explores the intersections between linguistics and language pedagogy related to the acquisition of L2 and L3 Spanish in various contexts worldwide. Fostering the interdisciplinary dialogue, it combines contributions by linguists and specialists in didactics, which not only examine the interface between basic linguistic and applied research but also develop proposals and materials for concrete teaching situations.

This Element provides a systematic overview and synthesis of corpus-based research into collocations focusing on the learning and use of collocations by second language (L2) users. Underlining the importance of collocation as a key notion within the field of corpus linguistics, the text offers a state-of-the-art account of the main findings related to the applications of corpora and corpus-based measures for defining, identifying and analysing collocations as related to second language acquisition. Emphasising the quality of L2 collocation research, the Element illustrates key methodological issues to be considered when conducting this type of corpus analysis. It also discusses examples of pertinent research questions and points to representative studies treated as models of good practice. Aiming at researchers both new and experienced, the Element also points to avenues for future work and shows the relevance of corpus-based analysis for improving the process of learning and teaching of L2 collocations.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

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.

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. On the basis of these differences, a number of pedagogical implications are derived, the integration of which then leads to a first draft of an innovative concept of teaching progressives - a concept which responds to three key criteria in pedagogical description: typicality, authenticity, and communicative utility. The analysis also demonstrates that many existing accounts of the progressive are inappropriate in several respects and that not enough attention is being paid to lexical-grammatical relations.! Winner of the "Wissenschaftspreis Hannover 2006" for outstanding research monographs !