As the eye-catching title indicates, this collection presents a wide range of studies regarding corpus compilation, register and grammatical variation, and pragmatics of spoken English, reflecting ongoing changes in the field of English corpus linguistics. By applying a rich variety of software and statistical techniques, these studies demonstrate how the corpus approach can be extensively used to explore different aspects of English (e.g. lexical, semantic, and pragmatic) as well as different registers of English (e.g. academic, journalistic) from different perspectives (e.g. synchronic, diachronic). Thus, researchers in corpus linguistics will find this book thought-provoking and methodologically useful.
This well-organized collection contains 15 chapters. The editors’ introductory chapter provides an informative summary of the main contents of the collection, highlighting different concerns and unique contributions of each chapter. The remaining 14 chapters are grouped into four parts, corresponding to different thematic focuses.
Part I provides new insights into corpus compilation. In Chapter 2, ‘English urban vernaculars, 1400–1700: Digitizing text from manuscript’, Anita Auer, Moragh Gordon & Mike Olson outline the methodological process leading to the construction of a multi-genre early English corpus spanning 300 years (from 1400 to 1700) in their ‘Emerging Standards’ project. They provide a detailed description on how they digitalize early manuscripts for a machine-readable corpus while keeping closely to the originals, which will be of great value to researchers who are interested in historical English research. In Chapter 3, ‘Creating a corpus of student writing in Economics: Structure and representativeness’, Martti Mäkinen & Turo Hiltunen outline the processes of data collection, text processing, annotation and tagging involved in compiling their own economic learner monitor corpus (i.e. a corpus that keeps developing by adding new texts periodically), the Hanken Corpus. They illustrate how they design the corpus to be comparable with an ‘exemplar’ corpus (i.e. published academic writing) and with an ‘analogue’ corpus (e.g. another leaner corpus). In Chapter 4, ‘Ongoing changes and advanced L2 use of English: Evidence from new corpus resources’, Mikko Laitinen argues that variant forms of second-language (L2) English should not be seen as ‘deficiencies’, but rather as adaptations of variabilities. From the perspective of historical linguistics, Laitinen innovatively applies methods of ongoing grammatical variability in advanced L2 English research and demonstrates how a multi-genre learner corpus (containing academic writing, news, and blogs reflecting the written–spoken continuum) can be used to trace the process of grammatical variability. Methodologically, his study shows how evidence from a single-genre traditional learner corpus can be elaborated by multi-genre corpus evidence from non-instructional settings, highlighting the need for new learner corpora resources with larger sizes and wider textual variation for systematic studies on advanced L2 English.
Part II shifts the emphasis from corpus compilation to register variation. Focusing specially on academic register, in Chapter 5, ‘Verbs and verb phrases in advanced Dutch EFL writing: Case studies in quantitative and qualitative EFL analysis’, Pieter de Haan conducts a longitudinal study to see if the use of verb phrases is related to the ‘syntactic development’ in advanced EFL [English as a foreign language] students’ writing (90). His study shows that the use of verb phrases cannot be considered an indicator of mature EFL writing because the complexity of long sentences is achieved by embedded noun phrases as well as embedded clauses. Continuing the theme of academic writing, in Chapter 6, ‘Discourse-organizing metadiscourse in novice academic English’, Hilde Hasselgard makes a three-way comparison (i.e. novice native-language (L1) writers, novice L2 writers, and expert writers) as well as a three-dimensional comparison (i.e. discipline, L1 background, and writer expertise) of the use of metadiscourse in linguistics and business. One of the major findings is that novice L1 writers differ from expert writers in the use of metadiscourse, revealing that ‘novice L1 writing does not represent the target norm for learners of English’ (128). Given that novice L1 writing corpora have been used as reference corpora in many previous studies, this finding is very important, and calls for more caution in choosing reference corpora for comparative learner corpus research. Following the same theme, in Chapter 7, ‘Passives in academic writing: Comparing research articles and student essays across four disciplines’, Turo Hiltunen examines the use of passives in research articles (RAs) and student essays (SEs) across four disciplines. His study reveals significant disciplinary and RA–SE differences in the use of passives. Rather than simply summarizing the inappropriate use of passives by students, Hiltunen attributes RA–SE differences to the variety of genres and text types (e.g. SEs contain a much more varied group of texts than RAs). His shift in interpretation perspective draws attention to the impact of corpus composition on the results from comparative learner studies. In Chapter 8, ‘Adverbial hapax legomena in news text: Why do some coinages remain hapax?’, Antoinette Renouf turns from academic registers to journalistic registers, exploring the non-occurrence of adverbial ‘hapax legomena’ (158) (i.e. words occurring only once in a finite corpus) in a newspaper corpus spanning from 1984 to 2012, and identifying various possible reasons (e.g. grammatical irregularity, genre specificity). She supplements the automatic tagging procedures with manual tagging because most hapax ‘are largely unknown to tagging systems’ (161) and tools (e.g. APRIL) have a high error rate in analyzing adverbs. Her study enriches our understanding of the evolution of unusual lexis in the journalistic register, and emphasizes the necessity of integrating corpus-based automatic search and manual tagging.
After discussing register variation, the book turns in Part III to grammatical variation in world varieties of English. In Chapter 9, ‘English in South Africa: The case of past-referring verb forms’, Johan Elsness investigates the variation of two main past-referring verb forms (i.e. the present perfect and the preterite) in South African English (SAE), an under-researched English variety in relation to tense and aspect. By comparing data from an elicitation test and the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, he uncovers that black SAE is similar to American English in using more preterite forms, while white SAE is closer to British English in employing more present perfect forms. His study explicitly illustrates the methodological issues of data comparison between the elicitation test and the corpus and provides solutions (e.g. ratio normalization), offering practical insights into the integration of the corpus approach with other approaches. In Chapter 10, ‘A look at participial constructions with get in Hong Kong English’, Eduardo Coto-Villalibre compares three sub-corpora (the Hong Kong component, the British component, and the Indian component) of the International Corpus of English (ICE), investigating syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of get-constructions in present-day spoken Hong Kong English (HKE). Based on the classification of five types of get-constructions (e.g. central get-passives, idiomatic get-constructions), he uncovers differences in the three varieties of English in terms of subjects, verb types, and semantic prosody, many of which confirm previous findings in other studies. One unexpected finding is that most get-constructions are agentless and tend to convey semantically neutral meanings. In Chapter 11, ‘Who is the/a/Ø professor at your university? A construction grammar view on changing article use with single role predicates in American English’, Marianne Hundt explores the variable article use of five single role nouns (professor, president, governor, manager, and director) in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Two methodological choices are worthy of mention. First, she employs a multivariate analysis to investigate the role of different factors in the choice of articles (e.g. copula verb, lexical item, and modification within the noun phrase). Second, she applies cognitive construction grammar to explain the extensions of single role construal to other non-prototypical constructions. In this way, she outlines the possibility of combining corpus-based approach with other theoretical approaches to investigate language variation. Her study shows that diachronically there is a general tendency towards greater use of definite and indefinite articles in these constructions, while different lexical items vary to different degrees. In Chapter 12, ‘Clause fragments in English dialogue’, Jill Bowie & Bas Aarts adopt a corpus-based approach to examine discourse functions of clause fragments (i.e. non-sentential units of discourse that- depend on grammatical links to surroundings structures to be interpreted and contribute meaning to the discourse) in British English dialogue. They demonstrate how extensions (e.g. in a half-hearted way, this week) and matches (e.g. what window, on the way to the pub not on the way back), which are two frequent grammatical types of fragments, perform various discourse functions (e.g. clausal adjunct, posing questions) and contribute to discourse cohesion. Furthermore, they provide authentic examples to argue against Culicover & Jackendoff’s (Reference Culicover and Jackendoff2005: 236) ‘strict ellipsis’ (i.e. the idea that underlying every elliptical utterance has to be a sentence).
Three chapters make up Part IV, the final part of the volume, which investigates pragmatic features in spoken English. In Chapter 13, ‘The expression of directive meaning: A corpus-based study on the variation between imperatives, conditionals, and insubordinate if-clauses in Spoken British English’, Beatriz Mato-Míguez explores the variation of three constructions expressing directive meaning (orders, requests, and suggestions) in spoken British English, and analyzes their illocutionary force. Her study indicates that some directive constructions have specialized for specific pragmatic functions. For example, let-imperatives are more related to expressing suggestions, while insubordinate if-clauses and conditional structures are more closely associated with the issuing of requests. In Chapter 14, ‘Taboo language and swearing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English: A diachronic study based on the Old Bailey Corpus’, Bianca Widlitzki & Magnus Huber investigate the functions, themes, and social distributions of taboo language and swearing as well as their representation in print in the Old Bailey Corpus (OBC). Their study indicates that swearing changes in the themes and functions, with the cursing function on the decline and slot fillers on the rise. Interestingly, they find that females use more taboo language than males and bad language produced by higher-class or female speakers is less often censored. The study demonstrates how a corpus with detailed sociobiographical mark-up (e.g. gender, social class, and age) can be used to investigate sociolinguistic features in English. In the final chapter, Chapter 15, ‘The “humour” element in engineering lectures across cultures: An approach to pragmatic annotation’, Siăn Alsop examines the functions of humor, a specific pragmatic device, in a cross-cultural corpus of academic English lectures from the UK, Malaysia, and New Zealand. The analysis uncovers different humor types and laughter responses across three sub-corpora. Unlike the traditional way of retrieving humor ‘from the structural mark-up of laughter’ (341), which may be ‘potentially erroneous’ (342), Alsop uses a corpus with pragmatic annotation to achieve the same goal. The study shows how a corpus with pragmatic annotation can facilitate better retrieval of humor and how analysis of specific functions of humor can deepen our understanding of cultural significance in academic settings.
As a whole, this collection is a valuable addition to the field of corpus linguistics and a great source of inspiration and insight. Its strength lies in several aspects. First, the studies in this collection adopt diverse methodologies and approaches to investigate various registers in different contexts, offering a wide variety of contemporary perspectives on corpus-based research and setting models for future research. Second, many researchers in this collection discuss challenges encountered in the research and explicitly explain their decisions on various methodological issues (e.g. digitalization, accuracy of taggers, range of texts in learner corpus, and corpus compatibility), offering valuable direction to future researchers who want to compile specialized corpora to meet their specific research purposes. Last, the list of corpus websites at the end of each chapter is a useful resource for readers.
Although this book is informative and useful in many ways, it would be more helpful if it also discussed other topics of interest, for example, corpus-assisted discourse analysis, the web as a corpus, or multi-modal corpora. Despite this minor limitation, this interesting and well-written book will surely serve as a powerful impetus to ongoing research in the field of English corpus linguistics.
