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This book will be of particular interest to anyone interested in the application of corpus linguistic techniques to language study and instruction. This volume includes selected papers from the Fourth North American Symposium, held in Indianapolis and hosted by the Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication at Indiana University Purdue University in Indianapolis (IUPUI) in November, 2002. These papers – from authors representing eight countries including the U.S., Belgium, China, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Spain – provide a wide range of views of and approaches to corpus linguistic. Topics range from theory and analysis to classroom application, and include the study of oral discourse as well as the study of written discourse, including internet-based discourse. Consequently, this volume is divided into two sections. The first section focuses on the use of corpus linguistics in the analysis of spoken and written discourse; the second section focuses on the direct pedagogical application of corpus linguistics, reflecting the applied foundation of this branch of linguistics.
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Preface The papers published in this volume were originally presented at the Fourth North American Symposium on Corpus Linguistics and Language Teaching, co-sponsored by the American Association of Applied Corpus Linguistics and the Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication, held on 13 November 2002 at the Athletic Club in Indianapolis, Indiana. The conference drew more than 100 participants from 14 different countries. Altogether, 52 papers and 12 posters were presented. The 15 papers in this book are divided into two sections: (1) analyses of spoken and written language corpora and (2) pedagogical applications of corpora. The first section opens with Anne O’Keeffe’s paper that uses a corpus of phone calls to an Irish radio show to explore vague categorization and shared socio-cultural knowledge. Employing a bottom-up approach, O’Keeffe shows how a corpus can be used to identify a wider range of vague categories than a preset list would allow. Once identified, the forms were analyzed and showed that vague language categorization was a by-product of a close relationship at a societal level of interaction. The next two papers are based on the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English. Martin Warren reports on the analysis of discourse intonation to study how speakers assert dominance and control in conversation. His findings suggest that the choice of a certain tone is at least partly determined by the discourse types as well the roles of the speakers; no difference was found between native English speakers and Hong Kong Chinese English speakers in the corpus in terms of their tone choices. Winnie Cheng’s paper analyzes patterns of lexical collocations and intonation in public speeches made by a government official in Hong Kong. She found that these features were often used to establish a dynamic relationship between the official and his audience, and to promote ideology and political agendas. For the purposes of analyzing both written and oral discourse, Douglas Biber et al. use an approach that combines corpus-linguistic and discourse-analytic perspectives to examine patterns in two corpora: the T2KSWAL (TOEFL-2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language) Corpus and the Longman Spoken and Written English Corpus. Three different registers (i.e. classroom teaching, textbooks, and academic research articles) were analyzed for the use of the Vocabulary-Based Discourse Units. These units were then subjected to the analysis of their primary linguistic characteristics, using Multi-Dimensional techniques. Interesting patterns were found across the registers in the use and type of units. JoAnne Neff et al. conducted a contrastive study of argumentative essays by expert and novice writers in English and Spanish, and of similar essays wri