Modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies: methodologies for tracking language change over recent time

This paper presents a description of the tools and methodologies employed in the novel discipline of modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies. The main instruments are a set of three ‘sister’ corpora of parallel structure and content from different moments of contemporary time, namely 1993, 2005 and 2010, along with a number of corpus interrogation tools. The methodologies are the particular techniques devised by the SiBol research team1 for employing these interrogation tools to shed light on the various research questions treated in the paper. The first part of the paper outlines ways in which these tools and techniques can be used to track changes in the grammar, lexis and discourse practices of UK broadsheet or ‘quality’ newspapers. Given the important role of newspapers, some of these changes may well be indicative of general changes in UK written English. The second part, instead, describes a number of studies conducted by the research group into how the reporting of various social and cultural themes and issues, ranging from what is seen as a moral issue, to the rhetoric of appeals to science, to how antisemitism is debated, has developed over the time period in question. The concluding section discusses the relationship between the methodologies employed in modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies and wider scientific research methodology. 1 SiBol is a portmanteau of Siena and Bologna, the two universities involved in initiating the project. http://www3.lingue.unibo.it/clb

Semantic prosody and semantic preference

Ever since their recent arrival on the scene of lexical grammar, the concepts of semantic prosody and semantic preference have been fraught with complications. In this paper I examine the two related concepts, in the light of recent work by Hoey (2005). Each section begins with a definition, attempt a review of relevant current positions and then describe a number of corpus-based experiments I conducted to throw light on the two phenomena. Finally, I will try to draw some conclusions about the relationship between them

The changing discourses on antisemitism in the UK press from 1993 to 2009: A modern-diachronic corpus-assisted discourse study

This paper examines the discourses relating to antisemitism in the three leading UK national “quality“ newspapers from 1993 to 2009. To this end, three corpora were compiled, each consisting of the complete set of instances in context in these papers where antisemitism is mentioned, the first from 1993 the others from 2005 and 2009. Considerable changes were noted between the discourses in the earlier corpus compared to the later ones. In the first, the majority of discourses were either historical and/or literary-artistic (typically discussing whether a particular writer or artist had been antisemitic) or, if they were related to contemporary society, they were discussions of potential or reported antisemitism outside the UK, especially in Eastern Europe. In the later corpora, however, there is much more discussion about a perceived resurgence of antisemitism in the UK and Western Europe. After an overview of these changing patterns, particularly controversial recent cases of alleged antisemitism in British politics are discussed. The methodology of this research combines corpus-analysis techniques with more traditional close textual analysis, characteristic of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS: Stubbs 1996, Partington 2008)

Journal of Corpora & Discourse Studies

The Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies showcases research into language as a vehicle of communication which incorporates the use of corpus techniques. The Journal is highly interdisciplinary in nature, first, in combining discourse analysis with corpus linguistics and, second, in accommodating an ever-increasing number of other disciplines which employ the analysis of spoken or written texts beyond linguistics proper which use corpus techniques to help analyse the texts they employ, including political science, sociology, history, literary criticism, business studies, healthcare, and many more. We particularly welcome papers which address methodological issues concerning the use of corpora in these and other fields. The journal is on-line open-access with the opportunity to store research data on the publisher’s server. The language of publication is English, but we welcome submissions on all other languages. Published by Cardiff University Press. Editor in chief, Alan Partington. Editors, Costas Gabrielatos and Amanda Potts. Reviews editor, Sylivia Jaworska. Technical editor, Jane Johnson. The first issue is planned for July 2018

Reading Concordances. John Sinclair; London: Longman,

Prof. John Sinclair\u2019s pioneering role in the field of ELT as editor-in-chief of the Collins-Cobuild dictionaries and grammar is well known. Just as remarkable has been his contribution to the development of modern language theory, particularly as regards the relationship between grammar and lexis. He has successfully illustrated how technological developments, principally the advent of electronic corpora and the software to interrogate them, influence and refine perceptions of language and how these clearer perceptions affect both linguistic theory and pedagogical practice. The present volume also has a dual impetus: one pedagogical, the other theoretical. On one level, it is a textbook which aims to introduce corpus work to \u2018students, researchers and workers in the language\u2019, more specifically, to show them how to \u2018interrogate a corpus in order to retrieve evidence that is relevant to a linguistic enquiry\u2018 and then to refine those queries further until a \u2018neatly organised body of evidence\u2019 (p. ix) is available as a report on the findings. On the second, a large number of theoretical points are made, and despite the disclaimer that \u2018they are not gathered and organised into a specific stance\u2019 (p. ix), the reader is guided in Socratic question-answer fashion to an appreciation of what, elsewhere, Sinclair has called 'lexical grammar'

Journal of Corpora & Discourse Studies

The Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies showcases research into language as a vehicle of communication which incorporates the use of corpus techniques. The Journal is highly interdisciplinary in nature, first, in combining discourse analysis with corpus linguistics and, second, in accommodating an ever-increasing number of other disciplines which employ the analysis of spoken or written texts beyond linguistics proper which use corpus techniques to help analyse the texts they employ, including political science, sociology, history, literary criticism, business studies, healthcare, and many more. We particularly welcome papers which address methodological issues concerning the use of corpora in these and other fields. The journal is on-line open-access with the opportunity to store research data on the publisher\u2019s server. The language of publication is English, but we welcome submissions on all other languages. Published by Cardiff University Press. Editor in chief, Alan Partington. Editors, Costas Gabrielatos and Amanda Potts. Reviews editor, Sylivia Jaworska. Technical editor, Jane Johnson. The first issue is planned for July 2018