scholarly journals Modal Verbs Hedging: The Uses and Functions of “Will” and “Shall” in Nigerian Legal Discourse

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Ibrahim Bashir ◽  
Kamariah Yunus ◽  
Tamer Mohammed Al-Jarrah
Keyword(s):  
Legal Discourse ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Modal Verbs ◽  
True Value ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Reference Corpus ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Court Proceedings ◽  
Law Reports ◽  
National Corpus

This is a corpus-based study on the uses and functions of modal verbs “will” and “shall” in the Nigerian legal discourse. It aims at examining their pragmatic functions as hedges in the legal discourse. It specifically aims to investigate how hedges are used in the legal texts to indicate precision and uncertainty. To achieve these objectives a specialised corpus was constructed which we named as “Nigerian Law Corpus” (NLC). The compilation of NLC is based on the Nigerian court proceedings and law reports. Hence, the compiled NLC corpus contains 546,313-word tokens. Meanwhile, reference corpus of law with 2.2 million word tokens based on the British National Corpus (BNC) is retrieved for comparison with NLC. To this end, two concordance tools were utilised to analyse the data of this study viz. “AntConc version 3.5” a semi-automated computer-aided tool and a web-based tool “Lextutor version 7”. Based on the frequency distribution the results revealed that model verb “will” featured in 493 instances in the NLC and 7,711 instances in the BNC Law, while, “shall” occurred at 401 instances in NLC and 1,348 instances in BNC Law. The results also indicated that “shall” was an overused element in NLC than in BNC Law with standardised concordance hits per million (NLC=734, BNC Law =589) while, “will” is the least used element of NLC (902 instances per million) compared to BNC Law (3,369 instances per million). The study also enumerated different semantic and pragmatic functions of “will” and “shall” in legal discourse, citing examples from both tag corpus (NLC) and reference corpus (BNC Law). Some of the functions as hedges (conveying a truth value of a proposition) are epistemic meanings: politeness, obligation, precision, duty, intention, and permission. In nutshell, the results indicated that “will” and “shall” are used by legal practitioners more especially lawyers in a courtroom to achieve precision in their argument in a case to persuade the court by showing the true value of commitment of the proposition.

scholarly journals Detecting innovations in a parsed corpus of learner English

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerold Schneider ◽  
Gaëtanelle Gilquin
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Phrasal Verbs ◽  
Scale Method ◽  
T Score ◽  
Reference Corpus ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Qualitative Analyses ◽  
National Corpus

In research on L2 English, recent corpus-based studies indicate that some non-standard forms are shared by indigenized (ESL) and foreign (EFL) varieties of English, which challenges the idea of a clear dichotomy between innovation and error. We present a data-driven large-scale method to detect innovations, test it on verb + preposition structures (including phrasal verbs) and adjective + preposition structures, and describe similarities and differences between EFL and ESL. We use a dependency-parsed version of the International Corpus of Learner English to automatically extract potential innovations, defined as patterns of overuse compared to the British National Corpus as reference corpus. We measure overuse by means of collocation measures like O/E or T-score, and compare our results with similar results for ESL. In both quantitative and qualitative analyses, we detect similarities between the two varieties (e.g. discuss about) and dissimilarities (e.g. accuse for, only distinctive for EFL). We report more verb/adjective + preposition combinations than previous studies and discuss the roles of analogy and transfer.

scholarly journals Extracting Significant Words in Engineering Texts for Specialised Language Descriptions

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. 5862-5868
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Academic Discourse ◽  
Multivariate Technique ◽  
Technical Vocabulary ◽  
Reference Corpus ◽  
Language Needs ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Potential Tool ◽  
National Corpus

The academic discourse of a specialised language is characterised by specialised and technical vocabulary, and lexicogrammar. Studies on language description suggest the need to explore and determine the specific characteristics of the academic discourse of each specialised language, to serve the language needs of the learners. This study demonstrates an exploration of this discipline specificity by looking at the nouns used in a specialised language - an Engineering English. It attempts to integrate a multivariate technique, i.e. the Correspondence Analysis (CA), as a tool to extract significant nouns in a specialised language for any further language use scrutiny. CA allows visual representations of the word interrelationships across different genres in a specialised language. To exemplify this, an Engineering English Corpus (E2C) was created. E2C is composed of two sub-corpora (genres): Engineering reference books (RBC) and online journals articles (EJC). The British National Corpus (BNC) was used as the reference corpus. 30 key-key-nouns were identified from the E2C, and the frequency lists of the words were retrieved from all the corpora to run the CA. The CA maps of the nouns display how these corpora are different from each other, as well as, which words characterise not only E2C from a general corpus (BNC), but also the different genres in E2C. Thus, CA proves to be a potential tool to display words which characterise not only a specialised corpus from a general corpus, but also the different genres in that specialised corpus. This study promises more informed descriptions of a specialised language can be made with the identification of specific and significant vocabulary for any academic discourse investigations.

Genitive coordinations with personal pronouns

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 363-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN PAYNE
Keyword(s):  
Single Unit ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
The Other ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Web Based ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Genitive Case ◽  
National Corpus

English genitive noun-phrase coordinations follow two patterns. The first is the single genitive, in which exponence of the genitive case occurs solely on the final coordinate, e.g. Mary and Jane's; and the second is the multiple genitive, in which exponence of the genitive case occurs on all coordinates, e.g. Mary's and Jane's. When either of the coordinates is a personal pronoun, difficult choices have to be made about the form of the pronoun. These difficulties arise especially with the single genitive, which is judged to be totally ungrammatical in coordinations like *my wife and I's or *my wife and my. On the other hand, the alternative use of the multiple genitive, my wife's and my, conflicts with a preference for the single genitive when the coordinates are felt to constitute a single unit. In this article, we first conduct a corpus-based analysis for genitive coordinations with personal pronouns, based on the British National Corpus. This, supplemented by some non-standard examples from web-based sources, gives some insight into the choices actually made by native speakers. We then provide a theoretical account of the syntactic problems that genitive coordinations with pronouns create. This account is shown to be compatible solely with an analysis of the English ’s genitive as an inflectional affix.

Variation between modal adverbs in British English

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 392-412
Author(s):  
Daisuke Suzuki
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Final Position ◽  
Modal Verbs ◽  
British English ◽  
Modal Verb ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Subjective Context ◽  
National Corpus

Abstract This study investigates the use and distribution of the synonymous adverbs maybe and perhaps in order to determine their functional similarities and differences. After extracting usage data from the British National Corpus (BNC), this study explores the following factors by analyzing the target adverbs in a larger context: (i) the kind of register, (ii) the kind of NP chosen as the subject in maybe/perhaps clauses, (iii) the kind of modal verb used in the same clause, and (iv) the position occupied by the target adverbs in a clause. The corpus analysis demonstrates that maybe is more prone to subjective use while perhaps is a more strongly grammaticalized item, and that the factors related to a highly subjective context contribute much to the variation between the adverbs. In addition, I suggest that both maybe and perhaps (in combination with modal verbs or in final position) can be used in an intersubjective context.

scholarly journals The degree of grammaticalization of gotta, gonna, wanna and better: A corpus study

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dagmar Machová
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
The Other ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Modal Verbs ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Web Forums ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Clausal Negation ◽  
High Degree ◽  
National Corpus

Abstract The paper studies the degree of grammaticalization of the structures gotta, gonna, wanna and better. The study presumes that the semantics of these structures – more precisely their modal polyfunctionality (i.e. the ability to express deontic and epistemic meaning at the same time) – has an impact on their morphosyntactic properties. Using corpora (predominantly the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English) and web forums, the paper studies in detail the level of independence of gotta, gonna, wanna and better from their respective auxiliaries (have and be) and the development of the operator properties of these structures typical for central modals (i.e. inversion in questions, compatibility with clausal negation and occurrence in elliptical contexts). It demonstrates that gonna and gotta are partially grammaticalized, especially with respect to the independence of their auxiliaries, but they do not syntactically behave as modals. The verb wanna behaves as a modal morphologically but not syntactically. On the other hand, better is grammaticalized to a high degree, and it does demonstrate both the morphology and syntax of central modal verbs.

Modals and Modality in Legal Discourse

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Le Cheng ◽  
Xin Wang
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
Genre Analysis ◽  
People’S Republic Of China ◽  
People's Republic Of China ◽  
Modal Verbs ◽  
Parallel Corpora ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Legal Texts

In this study, parallel corpora of the Civil and Commercial Laws and the English translation of the People's Republic of China (hereinafter P. R. C.) are built. Modal verbs in the legal texts are examined from the perspective of genre analysis and semantics. Moreover, a comparative study on different variations of legal genre is adopted. This study further explores the findings from a sociosemiotic perspective in terms of the distinctions on modal verbs and modality between different variations of legal genre. The authors have noticed the disparity of modal verbs in different situations depends on distinct functions of situations. Although linguistic and textual analyses are significant in exploring issues of legal texts, it is not enough to linger within these domains.

scholarly journals Effects of L2 usage and L1 transfer on Turkish learners’ production of English verb-argument constructions

2019 ◽  
pp. 107-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ute Römer ◽  
Selahattin Yilmaz
Keyword(s):  
First Language ◽  
L1 Transfer ◽  
English Usage ◽  
Reference Corpus ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Using Data ◽  
English Verb ◽  
National Corpus

Using data from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and the British National Corpus (BNC), this article examines what Turkish learners of English know about a set of frequent verb-argument constructions (VACs, such as ‘V with n’ as illustrated by ‘I like to go with the flow’) and in what ways their VAC knowledge is influenced by native English usage and by transfer from their first language (L1), Turkish. An ICLE Turkish analysis gave us access to dominant verb-VAC associations in Turkish learners ́ English, and provided insights into the productivity and predictability of selected constructions. Comparisons with the BNC and other ICLE subsets (ICLE German and ICLE Spanish) allowed us to determine how strong the usage effect is on Turkish learners’ verb-VAC associations and whether Turkish learners differ in this respect from learners of other typologically different L1s. Potential effects of L1 transfer were explored with the help of a large reference corpus of Turkish, the Turkish National Corpus (TNC).

scholarly journals A Corpus-Based Analysis Of The Complementation Patterns Of The Adjective “Ashamed”

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-50
Author(s):  
Sylvia Dimitrova ◽  
◽  
Temenuzhka Seizova-Nankova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
The Other ◽  
Full Description ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Reference Corpus ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
National Corpus

The paper presents a corpus-based analysis of the predicative use of the adjective “ashamed” giving a full description of its complementation patterns with the help of the Valency Theory (VT – Herbst et al., 2004). The findings are based on a reference corpus extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC) by using the SkE software. The analysis reveals the advantages of the approach used for learners at levels B1 and B2 while, on the other hand, it shows the insufficiency of information found in the main English dictionaries (OALD, LDCE, etc.). It also demonstrates how both language learning and teaching, and materials production could be optimized using the corpus-based analysis.

scholarly journals Comparing Knowledge Sources for Nominal Anaphora Resolution

2005 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katja Markert ◽  
Malvina Nissim
Keyword(s):  
Anaphora Resolution ◽  
Lexical Knowledge ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Data Sparseness ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Context Dependent ◽  
Hand Modeling ◽  
The Web ◽  
National Corpus

We compare two ways of obtaining lexical knowledge for antecedent selection in other-anaphora and definite noun phrase coreference. Specifically, we compare an algorithm that relies on links encoded in the manually created lexical hierarchy WordNet and an algorithm that mines corpora by means of shallow lexico-semantic patterns. As corpora we use the British National Corpus (BNC), as well as the Web, which has not been previously used for this task. Our results show that (a) the knowledge encoded in WordNet is often insufficient, especially for anaphor' antecedent relations that exploit subjective or context-dependent knowledge; (b) for other-anaphora, the Web-based method outperforms the WordNet-based method; (c) for definite NP coreference, the Web-based method yields results comparable to those obtained using WordNet over the whole data set and outperforms the WordNet-based method on subsets of the data set; (d) in both case studies, the BNC-based method is worse than the other methods because of data sparseness. Thus, in our studies, the Web-based method alleviated the lexical knowledge gap often encountered in anaphora resolution and handled examples with context-dependent relations between anaphor and antecedent. Because it is inexpensive and needs no hand-modeling of lexical knowledge, it is a promising knowledge source to integrate into anaphora resolution systems.

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