E-Book Overview
Throughout history, linguists and literary scholars have been impelled by curiosity about particular linguistic or literary phenomena to seek to observe them in action in original texts. The fruits of each earlier enquiry in turn nourish the desire to continue to acquire knowledge, through further observation of newer linguistic facts. As time goes by, the corpus linguist operates increasingly in the awareness of what has gone before. Corpus Linguistics, thirty years on, is less an innocent sortie into corpus territory on the basis of a hunch than an informed, critical reassessment of existing analytical orthodoxy, in the light of new data coming on stream. This volume comprises twenty-two articles penned by members of the ICAME (International Computer Archive of Modern and Mediaeval English) association, which together provide a critical and informed reappraisal of the facts, data, methods and tools of Corpus Linguistics which are available today. Authors reconsider the boundaries of the discipline, exploring its areas of commonality with Sociolinguistics, Language Variation, Discourse Linguistics, and Lexical Statistics and showing how that commonality is potentially of immense benefit to practitioners in the fields concerned. The volume culminates in the report of a timely and novel expert panel discussion on the role of Corpus Linguistics in the study of English as a global language. This encompasses issues such as English as an international lingua franca, 'norms' for global English, and the question of 'ownership', or who qualifies as a native speaker.
E-Book Content
Corpus Linguistics: Refinements and Reassessments
LANGUAGE AND COMPUTERS: STUDIES IN PRACTICAL LINGUISTICS No 69
edited by Christian Mair Charles F. Meyer Nelleke Oostdijk
Corpus Linguistics: Refinements and Reassessments
Edited by
Antoinette Renouf and Andrew Kehoe
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009
Cover image: Collocational “heat map” for the word credit (detail); from the paper “Weaving web data into a diachronic corpus patchwork”, by Andrew Kehoe & Matt Gee. Cover design: Pier Post 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: 978-90-420-2597-4 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2598-1 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in The Netherlands
Contents Introduction Antoinette Renouf and Andrew Kehoe
1
1. Looking more closely at existing boundaries of the discipline Corpus linguistics meets sociolinguistics: the role of corpus evidence in the study of sociolinguistic variation and change Christian Mair
7
Creating corpora from spoken legacy materials: variation and change meet corpus linguistics Joan C. Beal
33
Discourse linguistics meets corpus linguistics: theoretical and methodological issues in the troubled relationship Tuija Virtanen
49
'Tis well known to barbers and laundresses: Overt references to knowledge in English medical writing from the Middle Ages to the Present Day Turo Hiltunen and Jukka Tyrkkö
67
Comparing type counts: The case of women, men and -ity in early English letters Tanja Säily and Jukka Suomela
87
2. Examination of a known language feature from a new point of view Does English have modal particles Karin Aijmer
111
A reassessment of the syntactic classification of pragmatic expressions: the positions of you know and I think with special attention to you know as a marker of metalinguistic awareness Julie Van Bogaert
131
The functions of expletive interjections in spoken English Magnus Ljung
155
3. Examination of the potential of a new corpus, tool, model or technique to extend l