Dependency Structure from Syntax to Discourse. A Corpus Study of Journalistic English

This volume is witness to a spirited and fruitful period in the evolution of corpus linguistics. In twenty-two articles written by established corpus linguists, members of the ICAME (International Computer Archive of Modern and Mediaeval English) association, this new volume brings the reader up to date with the cycle of activities which make up this field of study as it is today, dealing with corpus creation, language varieties, diachronic corpus study from the past to present, present-day synchronic corpus study, the web as corpus, and corpus linguistics and grammatical theory. It thus serves as a valuable guide to the state of the art for linguistic researchers, teachers and language learners of all persuasions. After over twenty years of evolution, corpus linguistics has matured, incorporating nowadays not just small, medium and large primary corpus building but also specialised and multi-dimensional secondary corpus building; not just corpus analysis, but also corpus evaluation; not just an initial application of theory, but self-reflection and a new concern with theory in the light of experience. The volume also highlights the growing emphasis on language as a changing phenomenon, both in terms of established historical study and the newer short-range diachronic study of 20th century and current English; and the growing area of overlap between these two. Another section of the volume illustrates the recent changes in the definition of ‘corpus’ which have come about due to the emergence of new technologies and in particular of the availability of texts on the world wide web. The volume culminates in the contributions by a group of corpus grammarians to a timely and novel discussion panel on the relationship between corpus linguistics and grammatical theory.

Corpus linguistics has emerged as one of the most dynamic fields in English language studies, offering empirical insights into patterns of vocabulary, grammar, discourse, and variation across diverse contexts. Over the past three decades, the scope of corpus studies has expanded remarkably, moving beyond early text collections such as the Brown Corpus to vast learner corpora, multimodal resources, and real-time social media datasets. This review article examines the current trends shaping corpus research and highlights promising future directions. Current scholarship demonstrates an increasing interest in world Englishes, learner corpora, and corpus-assisted discourse analysis, particularly in political and media communication. At the same time, new applications in pedagogy, translation, and forensic linguistics illustrate the methodological versatility of corpus approaches. Advances in computational tools and natural language processing have further broadened possibilities for large-scale, automated analysis of language data. However, challenges remain concerning representativeness, ethical issues in digital corpora, and the balance between quantitative and qualitative methods. Looking ahead, corpus studies are expected to place greater emphasis on under-represented English varieties, including South Asian and African Englishes, as well as on the integration of multimodal data and artificial intelligence techniques. This review argues that corpus linguistics is not only consolidating its role as a central methodology in applied linguistics but also redefining how scholars conceptualize language use in global, digital, and multilingual contexts.

For dependency structures of incomplete sentences to be fully connected, nodes in addition to those corresponding to the words in the sentence prefix are necessary. We analyze a German dependency corpus to estimate the extent of such predictive structures. We also present an incremental parser based on the WCDG framework and describe how the results from the corpus study can be used to adapt an existing weighted constraint dependency grammar for complete sentences to the case of incremental parsing.

Recent corpus studies found that academic prose is particularly rich in metaphor,but exhibits an unexpectedly low proportion of forms of ‘direct metaphor’,such as simile (cf. Steen, Dorst, Herrmann, Kaal, & Krennmayr, 2010a; Steenet al., 2010b). One explanation is deliberate metaphor use: in opposition toindirect forms (he attacked my argument), direct forms of metaphor (the leaf isshaped like a minaret) are normally explicitly signaled and often appear morevividly ‘metaphorical’. To control precision of linguistic reference, and to abideby an overarching stylistic maxim of academic prose that regulates markedfigurativeness, writers of academic texts may thus try to delimitate deliberatemetaphor use in the form of direct metaphor.However, recent advances in the study of English for Academic Purposeshave stressed that the analysis of academic discourse cannot ignore ‘disciplinaryspecificity’ (cf. Hyland, 2009). Using an exploratory approach, the present chapterhence transgresses the rather broad unit of ‘register’ to zoom in on academicprose as specialist discourse of distinct ‘sub-registers’. Using the academic textsample (some 49,000 words) of the VUAMC (Steen et al. 2010c), it analyzesthree metaphor types (indirect, implicit, and direct) across four different academicsub-registers (humanities arts, natural sciences, politics law education,social sciences). I report variation of metaphor type across the sub-registers,with the highest proportion of direct metaphors in natural sciences, followed byhumanities arts. My findings on variation of metaphor type advances a finergrainedview of metaphor use in academic prose, taking into account distinctcommunicative functions of metaphor types.

It has been long held that languages of the world are divided into rhythm classes so that they are either stress-timed, syllable-timed or mora-timed. It is also known for a long time that duration serves various informational functions in speech. But it is unclear whether these two kinds of uses of duration are complementary to each other, or they are actually one and the same. There has been much empirical research that raises questions about the rhythm class hypothesis due to lack of evidence of the suggested isochrony in any language. Yet the alleged cross-language rhythm classification is still widely taken for granted and continues to be researched. Here we conducted a corpus study of English, an archetype of a stress-timed language, and Mandarin, an alleged syllable-timed language, to look for evidence of at least a tendency toward isochrony when much of the informational use of duration is controlled for. We examined the relationship between segment and syllable duration and the relationship of syllable and phrase duration in the two languages. The results show that in English syllables are largely incompressible to allow stress-timing because segment duration is inflexible to allow variable syllable duration beyond its functional use. Surprisingly, Mandarin does show a small tendency toward both equal syllable duration and equal phrase duration. Additionally, the duration of pre-boundary syllables in English increases linearly with break index, whereas in Mandarin, the duration increase stops after break index 2, which is accompanied by the insertion of silent pauses. We conclude, therefore, timing and duration in speech are predominantly used for encoding information rather being controlled by a rhythmic principle, and the residual equal-duration tendency in the two languages examined here show exactly the opposite patterns from the predictions of the rhythm class hypothesis.