Discovering varieties of English around the world using corpus-linguistic methods - Claudia Lange & Sven Leuckert, Corpus Linguistics and World Englishes: A Guide for Research. New York: Routledge, 2019. Pp. xv+220. eBook £15.99, ISBN: 9780429489433

English Today ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Huayong Li
Author(s):  
Christian Mair

The first part of the chapter surveys the traditional corpus-linguistic working environment for the study of varieties of English around the world, focussing on the International Corpus of English (ICE) as a major cooperative venture. The second part assesses the potential of larger digital text archives and the World-Wide Web as additional sources of data for the study of World Englishes. Corpora and digital text databases not only serve as rich and convenient sources of data, but also encourage a specific corpus-linguistic “take” on World Englishes and are thus also important for advancing the theoretical debate in the field. Analysis of traditional corpora has deepened our understanding of the nature of morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes as a whole and of fine-grained variety-internal variablility determined by medium (spoken vs. written), genre and style, whereas the use of Web data frequently highlights the role of standard and nonstandard Englishes in transnational and global domains. The chapter ends with a plea to develop corpora documenting World Englishes in their multilingual settings and thus bring together research on World Englishes and the related field of the sociolinguistics of globalisation.


2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 555-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Egbert

The use of corpora and corpus linguistic methods in language testing research is increasing at an accelerated pace. The growing body of language testing research that uses corpus linguistic data is a testament to their utility in test development and validation. Although there are many reasons to be optimistic about the future of using corpus data in language testing, the convergence of these two fields introduces uncharted waters that should be traversed carefully to ensure that high standards of methodological rigor are maintained. The objectives of this paper are as follows: (1) to describe and evaluate the ways corpora and corpus data have been used in language testing to date; and (2) to offer recommendations for best practices to encourage rigorous and appropriate corpus linguistic methods for language testing purposes. This is accomplished with the aid of examples from papers in this special issue, as well as other previous work in this area. The future holds great promise for a useful methodological synergy between corpus linguistics and language testing. The choices researchers make as they navigate the uncharted and challenging waters that lie ahead will ultimately determine whether that potential is fully realized.


2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Stockwell ◽  
Michaela Mahlberg

We suggest an innovative approach to literary discourse by using corpus linguistic methods to address research questions from cognitive poetics. In this article, we focus on the way that readers engage in mind-modelling in the process of characterisation. The article sets out our cognitive poetic model of characterisation that emphasises the continuity between literary characterisation and real-life human relationships. The model also aims to deal with the modelling of the author’s mind in line with the modelling of the minds of fictional characters. Crucially, our approach to mind-modelling is text-driven. Therefore we are able to employ corpus linguistic techniques systematically to identify textual patterns that function as cues triggering character information. In this article, we explore our understanding of mind-modelling through the characterisation of Mr. Dick from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Using the CLiC tool (Corpus Linguistics in Cheshire) developed for the exploration of 19th-century fiction, we investigate the textual traces in non-quotations around this character, in order to draw out the techniques of characterisation other than speech presentation. We show that Mr. Dick is a thematically and authorially significant character in the novel, and we move towards a rigorous account of the reader’s modelling of authorial intention.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 205395172110214
Author(s):  
Martin Schweinberger ◽  
Michael Haugh ◽  
Sam Hames

Public discourse about the COVID-19 that appears on Twitter and other social media platforms provides useful insights into public concerns and responses to the pandemic. However, acknowledging that public discourse around COVID-19 is multi-faceted and evolves over time poses both analytical and ontological challenges. Studies that use text-mining approaches to analyse responses to major events commonly treat public discourse on social media as an undifferentiated whole, without systematically examining the extent to which that discourse consists of distinct sub-discourses or which phases characterize its development. They also confound structured behavioural data (i.e., tagging) with unstructured user-generated data (i.e., content of tweets) in their sampling methods. The present study aims to demonstrate how one might go about addressing both of these sets of challenges by combining corpus linguistic methods with a data-driven text-mining approach to gain a better understanding of how the public discourse around COVID-19 developed over time and what topics combine to form this discourse in the Australian Twittersphere over a period of nearly four months. By combining text mining and corpus linguistics, this study exemplifies how both approaches can complement each other productively.


2013 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 240-243
Author(s):  
Nicole Nau

Dace Prauliņš, Latvian. An Essential Grammar. London & New York: Routledge, 2012. ɪsʙɴ 978-0-415-57692-5. Descriptive grammars of Modern Latvian written in English are still something of a rarity, and any such book will be warmly welcomed bylinguists as well as by the growing number of people learning Latvian all over the world. It is for the latter group that Dace Prauliņš wrote this book, and it would be unfair to review it as a scholarly contribution to the analysis of Latvian grammar.


2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-106
Author(s):  
Janet Klein ◽  
David Romano ◽  
Michael M. Gunter ◽  
Joost Jongerden ◽  
Atakan İnce ◽  
...  

Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 352 pp. (ISBN: 9780199603602).Mohammed M. A. Ahmed, Iraqi Kurds and Nation-Building. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 294 pp., (ISBN: 978-1-137-03407-6), (paper). Ofra Bengio, The Kurds of Iraq: Building a State within a State. Boulder, CO and London, UK: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2012, xiv + 346 pp., (ISBN 978-1-58826-836-5), (hardcover). Cengiz Gunes, The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey, from Protest to Resistance, London: Routledge, 2012, 256 pp., (ISBN: 978-0-415—68047-9). Aygen, Gülşat, Kurmanjî Kurdish. Languages of the World/Materials 468, München: Lincom Europa, 2007, 92 pp., (ISBN: 9783895860706), (paper).Barzoo Eliassi, Contesting Kurdish Identities in Sweden: Quest for Belonging among Middle Eastern Youth, Oxford: New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 234 pp. (ISBN: 9781137282071).


Author(s):  
Anwar Ibrahim

This study deals with Universal Values and Muslim Democracy. This essay draws upon speeches that he gave at the New York Democ- racy Forum in December 2005 and the Assembly of the World Movement for Democracy in Istanbul in April 2006. The emergence of Muslim democracies is something significant and worthy of our attention. Yet with the clear exceptions of Indonesia and Turkey, the Muslim world today is a place where autocracies and dictatorships of various shades and degrees continue their parasitic hold on the people, gnawing away at their newfound freedoms. It concludes that the human desire to be free and to lead a dignified life is universal. So is the abhorrence of despotism and oppression. These are passions that motivate not only Muslims but people from all civilizations.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document