LEXical studies Resources
Lexical stuff | Steve Mann | January 15, 2004
Hi
For those of you investigating the arcane world of lexical studies, in particular through corpus analysis, there's a very good special edition last year in TESOL Quarterley. Here are the details of the key articles:
SUBJECT AREA: applied linguistics
KEYWORDS: academic writing, corpus, functional
grammar, genre, discourse analysis,
Simpson, R. & Mendis, D. (University of Michigan) A Corpus-Based Study of Idioms in Academic Speech TESOL Quarterly (Alexandria, VA, USA), 37 3(2003),419 - 441
This study addresses the issue of which idioms should be taught, given the vast inventory of idioms in a native speaker's repertoire. The article sets out to assess the advantages and limitations of a corpus-based approach to researching and teaching idioms in specific academic sub-genres. It also seeks to establish whether there are more idioms used in interactive language than in monologic language. The study draws on a specialized corpus of 1.7 million words of academic discourse (The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English). It uses Wordsmith Tools to produce frequency counts for each selected idiom. The authors identify the pragmatic function of idioms for evaluation, description, emphasis, collaboration and metalanguage. The study finds that sub-genres of academic language do not significantly vary in the proportion of idiomatic use but that differences are noticeable in individual writings. Consequently the authors suggest that variation is more likely to be a factor of individual ideolect. Pedagogical applications are suggested and the paper finishes with a plea for more context and corpus based approaches to teaching idioms.
SUBJECT AREA: Language teaching
KEYWORDS: idiom, corpus, academic language,
genre, writing skills
Frazier, S. (University of California) A Corpus Analysis of Would-Clauses Without Adjacent If-Clauses. TESOL Quarterly (Alexandria, VA, USA), 37 3(2003), 443 - 466
This article sets out to demonstrate empirically the quantitative prevalence of counterfactual and hypothetical conditions. The author claims that these are very often contextually implied rather than explicitly stated. The study uses corpus analysis of clauses that contain the modal 'would' to signify hypothetical and counterfactual meaning. The paper also examines 'would' in EFL/ESL textbooks and conducts a close analysis of spoken and written texts. The study employs both quantitative and qualitative methodology to categorizes the conditional and hypothetical uses of would-clauses in spoken and written corpora. It uses Using MonoConc software and the author analyses a corpora drawn from three American English sources. The paper claims that although hypothetical and counterfactual clauses are quite fixed in their use of the modal 'would', features of 'marking' are much more variable. The author suggests that there may be benefits in achieving a balance between qualitative and quantitative accounting of corpus data, in particular that qualitative analysis can reveal diversity of environments in which a structure may appear.
SUBJECT AREA: Language teaching
KEYWORDS: grammar teaching, corpus, collocation,
cognitive strategies, context
Kennedy, G. (Victoria University of Wellington) Amplifier Collocations
in the British National Corpus: Implications for English Language Teaching, TESOL
Quarterly
(Alexandria, VA, USA), 37 3(2003) 467 - 487
This study sets out to examine how adverbs of degree collocate with particular words in the 100-million-word British National Corpus. The article suggests that a mutual information measure can be used to show the strength of the bond between amplifiers (such as 'extremely' or 'greatly') and other words (typically adjectives or participles such as 'rare' or 'appreciated'). Using corpus analysis, the author investigates the collocations associated with 24 amplifiers. The author claims that some amplifiers do not fit comfortably with certain adjectives and are not as interchangeable or synonymous as previously thought. He provides collocational data for both boosters and mazimisers. The paper offers pedagogical suggestions based on these findings and claims that this kind of data can reveal something of the cognitive processes that lie behind language learning and language use and so is particularly valuable to language teachers.
SUBJECT AREA: language teaching
KEYWORDS: corpus, collocation, grammar, cognitive
processes, writing skills
Flowerdew, L. (Hong Kong University of Science and Techology) A Combined Corpus and Systemic-Functional Analysis of the Problem-Solution Pattern in a Student and Professional Corpus of Technical Writing, TESOL Quarterly.
The author aims to describe similarities and differences between expert and novice writing in the problem-solution pattern, a frequent rhetorical pattern of technical academic writing. The paper draws on two analytic perspectives, corpus analysis and systemic-functional analysis. The study compares a corpus of undergraduate student writing and one containing professional writing. Each corpus totalled approximately 250,000 words. Wordsmith Tools software was used to compare these two corpora with a 1 million core-written British National Corpora. The research includes searches for key words that provided linguistic evidence for the problem-solution pattern. Along with many similarities between the expert and the novice writing, the study's findings indicate important differences in the use of problem within the causal relation patterns. The student corpus displayed a restricted use of vocabulary and pattern than found in the professional corpus. The author suggests that a combination of corpus analysis and systemic-functional analysis as a valuable tool in isolating insufficiencies in student lexico-grammar.
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