Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English Book

List of figures ix

List of tables xi

To readers xvi

List of abbreviations xix

1 Corpus linguistics 1

1.1 Introducing corpus linguistics 1

1.2 The professor's shoeboxes 2

1.3 The tape-recorder and the computer 3

1.4 What can we get out of corpora? 5

1.5 Criticism from armchair linguists 8

1.6 Types of corpora 10

1.7 Very large and quite small corpora 22

1.8 Summary 23

Study questions 23

Corpus exercises 23

Further reading 23

2 Counting, calculating and annotating 25

2.1 Qualitative and quantitative method 25

2.2 Frequency 26

2.3 Comparing frequencies 37

2.4 Distribution in the corpus 40

2.5 Using percentages and normalizing 41

2.6 Representativity 42

2.7 Corpus annotation 43

2.8 Summary 49

Study questions 50

Corpus exercises 50

Further reading 50

3 Looking for lexis 51

3.1 The role of the lexicon in language 51

3.2 How lexicographers use corpora 51

3.3 The meaning of words 52

3.4 Semantic preference, semantic prosody and evaluation 57

3.5 How words change in frequency over time 59

3.6 How words spread between varieties of English 62

3.7 How authors use words 66

3.8 Summary 68

Study questions 69

Corpus exercises 69

Further reading 70

4 Checking collocations and colligations 71

4.1 Two types of collocations 71

4.2 Collocations in a window 73

4.3 Adjacent collocations 78

4.4 Colligations 87

4.5 Summary 89

Study questions 89

Corpus exercises 89

Further reading 90

5 Finding phrases 91

5.1 Phraseology 91

5.2 Idioms 93

5.3 Recurrent phrases 97

5.4 A literary application: Dickens' recurrent long phrases 108

5.5 Summary 109

Study questions 109

Corpus exercises 110

Furtherreading 110

6 Metaphor and metonymy 111

6.1 Introduction 111

6.2 Using corpora in the study of metaphor 119

6.3 Summary 129

Study questions 129

Corpus exercises 130

Further reading 130

7 Grammar 131

7.1 Introduction 131

7.2 Who and whom 131

7.3 Get-passives 134

7.4 Adjective complementation 137

7.5 Prepositional gerund or directly linked gerund 139

7.6 Using a parsed corpus: passives revisited 147

7.7 Summary 148

Study questions 148

Corpus exercises 149

Further reading 149

8 Male and female 150

8.1 Introduction 150

8.2 Referring to men and women 151

8.3 The way men and women use language 159

8.4 Summary 164

Study questions 165

Corpus exercises 165

Further reading 166

9 Language change 167

9.1 Introduction 167

9.2 What is likely happening with likely 169

9.3 Grammaticalisation: The history of beside(s) 173

9.4 The OED as Corpus: Starting to say start to and start V-ing 180

9.5 Sociolinguistic explanations of language change: The rise of third person singular-s 182

9.6 Summary 184

Study questions 185

Corpus exercises 185

Further reading 185

10 Corpus linguistics in cyberspace 187

10.1 Introduction 187

10.2 The web as corpus 188

10.3 Using commercial search engines for linguistic research 190

10.4 Piggybacking: WebCorp 192

10.5 Regional variation: agreement with collective nouns 196

10.6 Grammar: adjective comparison 198

10.7 Dialect and non-standard language 201

10.8 Web genres and compiling corpora from the web 203

10.9 Summary 204

Study questions 205

Corpus exercises 205

Further reading 205

References 207

Index 217