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This volume offers a state-of-the-art picture of work undertaken in the field of computer-aided corpus linguistics. While the focus is on English, central insights can be generalised to other languages, as well. As a work intended to mark the Silver Jubilee of ICAME, the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English, the book combines surveys of the discipline by some of its major pioneers, including founders of ICAME itself, with cutting-edge work by younger scholars. It is divided into three sections: Overviewing years of corpus linguistic studies, Descriptive studies in English syntax and semantics , and Second Language Acquisition, parallel corpora and specialist corpora . The book bears witness to the impressive advances that have characterised the development of corpus linguistics over the past few decades from terminological issues to practical applications, from theoretical and descriptive research to applied approaches, from monolingual to multilingual and specialist corpora, from corpus design to corpus exploitation tools. Roberta Facchinetti is Professor of English at the University of Verona, Italy. Her research field and publications are mainly concerned with language description textual analysis and pragmatics. This is done mostly by means of computerized corpora of both synchronic and diachronic English. ***Contents*** Roberta FACCHINETTI: Introduction *** 1. Overviewing 25 years of corpus linguistic studies *** Jan SVARTVIK: Corpus linguistics 25+ years on *** Antoinette RENOUF: Corpus development 25 years on: from super-corpus to cyber-corpus *** Stig JOHANSSON: Seeing through multilingual corpora *** Anne WICHMANN: Corpora and spoken discourse *** 2. Descriptive studies in English syntax and semantics *** Michael STUBBS: An example of frequent English phraseology: distributions, structures and functions *** Ylva BERGLUND and Christopher WILLIAMS: The semantic properties of going to: distribution patterns in four subcorpora of
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Corpus Linguistics 25 Years on LANGUAGE AND COMPUTERS: STUDIES IN PRACTICAL LINGUISTICS No 62 edited by Christian Mair Charles F. Meyer Nelleke Oostdijk Corpus Linguistics 25 Years on Edited by Roberta Facchinetti Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Cover design: Pier Post Online access is included in print subscriptions: see www.rodopi.nl The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of "ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence". ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2195-2 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in The Netherlands Contents Introduction Roberta Facchinetti 1. 1 Overviewing 25 years of corpus linguistic studies Corpus linguistics 25+ years on Jan Svartvik 11 Corpus development 25 years on: from super-corpus to cybercorpus Antoinette Renouf 27 Seeing through multilingual corpora Stig Johansson 51 Corpora and spoken discourse Anne Wichmann 73 2. Descriptive studies in English syntax and semantics An example of frequent English phraseology: distributions, structures and functions Michael Stubbs 89 The semantic properties of going to: distribution patterns in four subcorpora of the British National Corpus Ylva Berglund and Christopher Williams 107 The superlative in spoken English Claudia Claridge 121 Semantically-based queries with a joint BNC/WordNet database Mark Davies 149 Size matters – or thus can meaningful structures be revealed in large corpora Solveig Granath 169 Inversion in modern written English: syntactic complexity, information status and the creative writer Rolf Kreyer 187 The fillin