This chapter sets out the book’s aim: an attempt to map the changing lexicons of Christian expression in the English language from the end of the Middle Ages to the early Victorians. It is thus a contribution to historical theolinguistics, drawing on the one hand on corpus linguistics and, on the other, the history of the many varieties of English Christianity that existed during this period. The methodology to be adopted in the body of the book is then illustrated with reference to two contrasting groups of female writers active in the middle of the seventeenth century, a period of exceptional religious turmoil: Fifth Monarchists and Quakers. The special analytic tools and resources harnessed include the Oxford English Dictionary, Semantic EEBO, Glasgow’s Historical Thesaurus of English, UCREL’s Log-Likelihood Calculator, and Sheffield’s Linguistic DNA. The remainder of the chapter defines notions and addresses issues that will recur later in the book: notions of register and genre, and questions to do with the handling of corpora, and with the structuring of religious ‘communities of practice’.

This chapter discusses how corpus stylistics relates to other fields in terms of methodologies and explanatory purposes. It proposes a specific take on corpus stylistics, which makes it possible to both focus on meanings in individual texts and identify features that are shared across texts. This approach brings considerations of register and style together, and it has clear relevance to literary scholarship. To illustrate this kind of corpus stylistics, the chapter presents Mahlberg (2013) as a case study on patterns of characterization in works by Charles Dickens. Mahlberg (2013) addresses the following question: In a corpus of texts by Dickens, can textual patterns be identified that have discernible functions in the creation of fictional worlds? The study uses the concept of local textual functions to combine corpus linguistic and literary perspectives in the analysis of n-grams, and it proposes a novel approach to characterization in Dickens. What this case study illustrates for corpus stylistics more widely is how the application of relative basic corpus linguistic methods can support the creation of a coherent theoretical approach to explain meanings in texts.

Any research question or application relating to language variation and/or use can be approached from a corpus linguistic perspective. The goals of The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (CHECL) are to survey the breadth of these research questions and applications in relation to the linguistic study of English. The handbook addresses a range of topics, including chapters on lexical variation, grammatical variation, historical change, online language and social media, multimodal corpora, the linguistic description of dialects and registers, and applications to language teaching and translation. In each chapter, authors assess what we have learned from corpus-based investigations to date and provide detailed case studies that illustrate how corpus analyses can be employed for empirical descriptions, documenting surprising patterns of language use that are often unanticipated previously. By bringing together diverse perspectives and cutting-edge research, this volume serves as a comprehensive resource for researchers seeking to understand and apply a corpus-based approach to the study of English.

This chapter provides a critical overview of how L2 researchers have used measures of lexical and phraseological complexity, with a special focus on their definition and operationalization. Lexical and phraseological complexity are often measured in terms of diversity (the number of different words or multi-word units respectively) and sophistication (the number of ‘sophisticated’ words or multi-word units, with ‘sophisticated’ variously understood as less frequent, more specialized, or in the case of phraseological sophistication, as more strongly associated word combinations). With the development of natural language processing (NLP) tools such as the Lexical Complexity Analyzer (Lu, 2012) or the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Lexical Sophistication (Kyle et al., 2018), L2 researchers can now analyze lexical complexity in L2 English texts using dozens or even hundreds of measures with a click of a button. However, unresolved questions remain: How accurate, reliable, and valid are these measures across learner samples and research contexts? Can they assess L2 proficiency across registers? How should measures be selected from the many available? By contrast, do the current, limited set of measures of phraseological complexity represent the full construct, or is there a need to develop for further development?

This chapter starts out from the serendipitous observation of patterns where look forward to is complemented not by a verbal -ing form (as would be expected by standard grammars) but by a plain infinitive, as in I’m looking forward to meet you. It investigates the spread and frequency of this construction in a wide range of corpora, some of which also allow a diachronic comparison, and considers several potentially conditioning factors. Grammatically, this pattern can be explained as a case of reanalysis in the process of structural transmission, showcasing structural simplification that may characterise second-language acquisition. The form to, the final element in the phrasal-prepositional verb under discussion, is reinterpreted as a homonymic but functionally different form, the to infinitive marker. The results clearly support the hypothesis that the ’look forward to + plain infinitive’ pattern constitutes more than mere performance errors and appears to represent an ’embryonic’ manifestation of an incipient change, with a strong focus in Asian Englishes, and possibly with Indian English as an epicentre, although the trend may have been reversed recently in formal registers.

This chapter examines the nature of tone sandhi and various other tonal mutations in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM). Each base tone in this language corresponds to a specific sandhi tone, with sandhi resulting from two sets of tonal shifts: smooth tone chain shifts and checked tone chain shifts. Each shift modifies either register or pitch, but not both simultaneously.

Some experimental studies have reported low rates of sandhi application, suggesting limited productivity. However, evidence from both experiments using real words and corpus analysis reveals high rates of appropriate tonal alternations, indicating that productivity is the primary mechanism. Theoretical works have further elaborated the tonal alternations as systematic chain shifts, lending support to this productivity-based view. The evidence suggests that future models of TSM tone sandhi should primarily incorporate productive phonological processes, supplemented by selective lexical storage mechanisms for certain exceptional or high-frequency cases.

In diminutive suffixation, the tone of the pre-á syllable undergoes modification through dextrosinistral spreading of register and/or pitch from the -á suffix, whereby the derived [35] ([Lr, h][Hr, h]) tonal output emerges as a distinctive tone cluster. Conversely, in neutral tone operations, sinistrodextral tone spreading applies to a subsequent function word, which may alternatively acquire a low tone by default in the absence of such spreading.

Different texts have different characteristics. In this chapter, we first explore the concepts of register, genre and style, which are, in the tradition of Biber, linked to communicative functions and situational characteristics. The co-occurrence of register features and dimensions are introduced as the linguistic indicators of communicative functions. A particularly useful approach to register centres around keyness, which we demonstrate with historical Portuguese data. We then introduce discourse traditions as a historical-linguistic concept closely related to genre and register. We use French literary examples to explain stylistic differences and the link with the Labovian distinction between indicators, markers and stereotypes. This leads to a discussion of indexicality and indexical fields more generally, for which we draw on ancient Greek plays. The chapter continues the discussion of the literary representation of language variation on the basis of English texts comprising dialect, and explains the important concept of enregisterment.

This chapter investigates the diction of the fragments attributed to Ennius’ Saturae by ancient sources and conjecturally by modern editors. While thirty or so transmitted lines naturally do not permit one to paint a conclusive picture of Ennius’ experiment, a little more can be said about the relationship between his Saturae and those of Lucilius, and ultimately about Ennius’ role in the introduction of personal poetry at Rome. Monologic and dialogic utterances and the mixture of metres (iambo-trochaic, hexameter, Sotadean) and registers (comic, informal, mock-epic) will be discussed, using Lucilius as a comparandum. Attention is paid to “early” features of language and style, with reference to Ennius’ diction in his epic and dramatic works.

Chapter 6 aims to help readers understand how variation and change affect language, so that translation practices and decisions are not based on personal biases and lay views about language but, rather, on a principled understanding of how language interacts with society. Another goal is to create awareness of the impact of social and use-related (contextual) factors on language so that translated texts respond to the requirements of the translation instructions. Other sociolinguistic notions reviewed in this chapter, along with their implications for translation are register, dialectal variation, socioeconomic variation, the nature of language change and variation, prestigious varieties vs. stigmatized varieties, and translating in multilingual societies. The discussion of register includes field of activity, medium and level of formality, as well as the implications for translation of not considering these within the context of the translation brief and translation norms. The connection between register selection and linguistic and translation competence is explained. Illustrative examples are used throughout the chapter.

Registers have proved to be powerful proxies for language variation and stylistic change in historical research. This chapter investigates five sub-registers within the domain of scientific discourse: philosophy (humanities), history (social sciences), life sciences and astronomy (natural sciences) and medical texts. With data from the Coruña Corpus of Scientific Writing and the corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts, we carry out a Multi-dimensional analysis of one million words of eighteenth-century scientific English, this leading to the scaling of the five sub-registers along two main dimensions of variation: ‘Involved/Interpersonal versus Narrative/Abstract’ and ‘Complex/Elaborate versus Non-elaborate’ discourse. The analysis confirms, first, that there are substantial differences among sub-registers in terms of the distribution and pervasiveness of distinctive linguistic features, and, second, that fluctuation in prose discourse is a general characteristic of Late Modern English scientific writing.