WRITTEN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE IN CORPUS LINGUISTICS 1

WRITTEN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE IN CORPUS LINGUISTICS

MEHWISH PARVEEN (181581)

TEHREEM TAHIR (181585)

AIR UNIVERSITY, Islamabad

Corpus linguistics is the study of language through a large collection of machine-readable

textual data. It is a methodology to recognize the frequencies of words in the content. It additionally

centers around the delight and the interest that lie in the portrayal and examination of the English

language. A definitive point is to get familiar with the language and sees well how it functions in

specific content. Collocations in a content give diverse implications relying upon the setting they

are utilized in. these collocations put an effect on the importance of the expressions and lexico-

grammar structures of the content. The significance of the words and collocations are changing

with the progression of time and same collocations and expressions are utilized in various settings

inside a similar content. Corpus here encourages the eyewitness to feature the frequencies and

ready to comprehend the utilization of the expressions and collocations in a precise request

(Gledhill, p.130-131, 2000). English is being instructed as a subject of English for explicit purposes

in various fields, consequently, extraordinary fields have their very own registers and explicit

expressions. Words and collocations utilized in the content build up certain semantic connections

in the content. It tends to be seen that with the progression of time diverse implications were given

to similar words (Nelson, p.217, 2006). The spoken and composed both corpus were taken to

comprehend the semantic affiliations and connections among the words in a particular course of

business English. Which contains 56% composed and 44% spoken corpus to be utilized for the

investigation. To the aftereffect of this investigation, it was discovered that particular words like

"supervisor", "manager" and "head "all were given similar implications that were connected to the

status. Also, these words happened habitually in the corpus (Nelson, p.223, 2006). Moreover, the

concept of concordance can also be seen in the results where the same word is used in different

contexts in the text.

Semantic prosody is a term that is utilized to allude to the distinctive relationship between

the implications of a similar word. Here and there it gives the inferred importance and some of the

time it alludes to the unequivocal significance of the word in various settings. It likewise clarifies

through the corpus of lexical choices from the content that how the significance of a similar word

has a positive idea previously and over the timeframe it has got some negative thought. The corpus

methodology really encourages a researcher to find the co-occurrences and the frequencies of the

words in the text. Since there may be the contrasts between the utilization of language or lexical

decisions by the local or non-local speakers of the language. In addition, a few words are utilized

to give the shrouded importance like irony and symbolism which additionally changes the

significance of the words in the specific content (Hunston, 2007).

Collocations in the scholastic composing are utilized broadly throughout the decades in the

educational angles since it helps the non-local students to adapt all the more productively. To

complete such examination the specialists gathered the information from the theoretical corpus

from the web which subsequently demonstrates that collocations are for the most part utilized by

the students while finding the setting in which they are talking on the grounds that without the

setting the greater part of the students are ignorant of the utilization of collocations (Wu, Chang,

Mitamura, & Chang, 2010).

Another use of corpus linguistics has been explained in Cacoullas’ and Walker’s article

“The Present of the English Future: Grammatical Variations and Collocations in Discourse”. The

study used the variationist method in order to explicate the usage of future tense in English with

regard to its different grammatical forms. The researchers argue that the usage patterns of these

tenses and verb forms show that “the choice of form is not determined by invariant semantic
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readings such as proximity, certainty, willingness, or intention”. On the contrary, there are some

occurrences of each of the general construction which occupy lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic

niches. The research further states that even though the supposed differences in meaning are

largely neutralized in discourse, the particular constructions of different degrees of lexical

specificity reflect the grammaticalization paths. They also bear distinct meanings and firm patterns

of distribution from the formerly meaningful associations. The study concludes that the shape of

grammatical variation is subsidized by the collocations.

Jiang and Conrath’s article “Semantic Similarity based on Corpus Statistics and Lexical

Taxonomy” presents a distinct approach for measuring semantic similarities and differences

among various words and concepts. The researchers have used a combination of lexical taxonomy

structure and corpus statistical information in order to get a more viable analysis of semantic

distance between nodes in semantic space constructed by taxonomy. They have then enhanced the

measure resulted through using an edge counting scheme and the node-based approach of the

information content calculation. The testing of the similarity ratings on a data set of word pair

showed that the proposed approach outperformed the computational models, giving the highest

correlational value with a standard based on human similarity judgements. However, when the

human subjects replicate the same task, an upper bound is observed.

Walker, in his article “A Corpus-Based Study of the Linguistic Features and Processes

Which Influence the Way Collocations Are Formed: Some Implications for the Learning of

Collocations” has examined the collocational behavior of the various grouos of semantically

related verbs and nouns from the business English. According to the results of this study, the

collocational behavior of the lexical items is explainable via the examination of some linguistic
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features as well as the processes which influence the formation of the collocations. It comprises of

the semantics of the individual items, the usage of metaphors, semantic prosody, and the tendency

for the selected items to become a part of various larger phraseological units. The research exhibits

the possibility of explaining many of the collocations by considering the linguistic features and

processes that influence their formation and claims that the learning process becomes more

effective when the learner looks for the explanations of the collocations.
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References

Gledhill, C. (2000). The discourse function of collocation in research article introductions. English

for Specific Purposes, 19(2), 115-135.

Nelson, M. (2006). Semantic associations in Business English: A corpus-based analysis. English

for Specific Purposes, 25(2), 217-234.

Hunston, S. (2007). Semantic prosody revisited. International journal of corpus linguistics, 12(2),

249-268.

Wu, J. C., Chang, Y. C., Mitamura, T., & Chang, J. S. (2010, July). Automatic collocation

suggestion in academic writing. In Proceedings of the ACL 2010 Conference Short Papers (pp.

115-119). Association for Computational Linguistics.

Walker, C. P. (2011). A corpus‐based study of the linguistic features and processes which

influence the way collocations are formed: Some implications for the learning of

collocations. Tesol Quarterly, 45(2), 291-312.

Jiang, J. J., & Conrath, D. W. (1997). Semantic similarity based on corpus statistics and lexical

taxonomy. arXiv preprint cmp-lg/9709008.

Cacoullos, R. T., & Walker, J. A. (2009). The present of the English future: Grammatical variation

and collocations in discourse. Language, 321-354.