Assignment 3 and 4 Corpora
Feedback from teacher on the assignments:
have gone through your Assignment 3 (see comments in the attached document). Your question has great potential, but you need to limit yourself and clarify what you actually investigate. Then you must describe exactly what you are actually doing, how you are looking for in the corpus and present the results in one or more tables before you comment on them. My general advice is not to complicate it too much. This is a small task. There is more than enough to, for example, compare the use of got and gotten in American English based COCA. Although such an approach needs delimited, but I leave it to you when you are thinking a bit. There are many good examples of studies and issues in Lindquist you can be inspired by.
There are a lot of language problems in your text too, but I do not comment on them now, except in a few cases. Because you also have many fine words, I think that is very careless mistakes that you can go through and correct before sending the text next time. J
Before I can comment on Assignment 4, of gender neutral language, you need to go through it and make sure it follows the instructions for what to include in an assignment. The topic in itself is promising, as much of the background information that you describe. But what is the question? What should you look for in the corpus? Remember also to shorten considerably so that you can fit in the actual corpus search too. Kill your darlings, if you heard that expression. J
Objectives
Corpus Linguistics
. At the end of the course, you should be able to do the following:
– give an account of key concepts in corpus linguistics,
– give an account of the principles and methods in the design of linguistic corpora,
– give an account of how scientific research is conducted in the field and how studies have affected the current state of knowledge, – carry out corpus-based investigations.
Corpora
We will be working with the free online corpora made available by Mark Davies at http://corpus.byu.edu/. Register for a free account.
Course materials
Main course book
Lindquist, Hans. 2009. Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Articles available via the MDH university library
– Deignan, A., & Potter, L. (2004) A corpus study of metaphors and metonyms in English and Italian. Journal of Pragmatics 36(7): 1231-1252.
– Hyland, K. (2008) As can be seen: Lexical bundles and disciplinary variation. English for Specific Purposes 27(1): 4-21.
– Kuperman, V., & Bertram, A. (2013) Moving spaces: Spelling alternation in English noun-noun compounds. Language and Cognitive Processes 28(7): 939-966.
– Liu, D. (2012) The most frequently-used multi-word constructions in academic written English: A multi-corpus study. English for Specific Purposes 31(1): 25-35.
– Prado-Alonso, C. (2011) Text structuring in written English: The role of inversion. English Studies 92(4): 449-463.
– Qin, J. (2014) Use of formulaic bundles by non-native English graduate writers and published authors in applied linguistics. System 42(1): 220-231.
– Reershemius, G. (2012) Research cultures and the pragmatic functions of humor in academic research presentations: A corpus-assisted analysis. Journal of Pragmatics 44(6-7): 863-875.
– Rudanko, J. (2007) Text type and current grammatical change in British and American English: A case study with evidence from the Bank of English Corpus. English Studies 88(4): 465-483.
– Schmid, H.-J. (2013) Is usage more than usage after all? The case of English not that. Linguistics 51(1): 75-116.
– Yaguchi, M, Iyeiri, Y., & Baba, Y. (2010) Speech style and gender distinctions in the use of very and real/really: An analysis of the Corpus of Spoken Professional American English. Journal of Pragmatics 42(3): 585-597.
Online resources
– Web-based exercises based on Lindquist:
www.euppublishing.com/page/series/ETOTELAdvanced/Lindquist/ (linked on Blackboard)
grade):
– Assignment 3: a corpus study on grammar,
For the assignment part of the course, you are expected to complete and submit written reports of your own, individual, limited corpus studies.. If the second draft is not satisfactory yet, a third one may have to be written, etc.
In both cases, your study should deal with an aspect of the English language that can be subjected to a meaningful corpus investigation. The report should, furthermore, be well-written and contain the following structural elements:
– an informative heading,
– an introduction to the question or topic at hand, ideally featuring one or several reasons why it is interesting or worthwhile investigating,
– the presentation of some background information from at least one secondary source,
e.g. a dictionary, usage guide, scientific article, or a (group of) native speaker(s)
[this part can be merged with the introduction],
– the presentation of your material and methods, including some information on the corpus and search strings used, as well as on the selection of (relevant) hits and the analytical approach adopted,
– a reader-friendly presentation of the results, including figures, tables and/or illustrative examples if and where appropriate,
– a conclusion,
– a list of references.
For referencing, make consistent use of a system appropriate for this field of study, e.g. APA. The style should be formal and academic.
Assignment 3: a corpus study on a grammatical aspect
In this assignment, you are expected to deal with some grammatical issue, i.e. something syntactic or morphological in nature. An example would be the difference in use, if any, between START + V-ing N (start doing something) and START + to + V + N (start to do something); another would be the frequency and use of cleft sentences or relative clauses; a third would be the word order after clause-initial so.
The approximate number of words is expected to be 800-1000 for the running text (i.e. excluding the heading, examples lifted out of the running text, the list of references, as well as possible appendices or tables/figures). The report should not be substantially longer than 1000 words.
To get some inspiration for possible topics, you can read some questions and answers on The English Language Blog (co-edited by Hans Lindquist!).
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