Books in the Corpus and Discourse series

This volume showcases original, agenda-setting studies in the field of learner corpus research of both spoken and written production. The studies have important applications for classroom pedagogy. The volume brings readers up-to-date with new written and spoken learner corpora, often looking at previously under-examined variables in learner corpus investigations. It also demonstrates innovative applications of learner corpus findings, addressing issues such as the effect of task, the effect of learner variables and the nature of learner language. The volume is of significant interest to researchers working in corpus linguistics, learner corpus research, second language acquisition and English for Academic and Specific Purposes, as well to practitioners interested in the application of the findings in language teaching and assessment.

Building on Raymond Williams' iconic "Keywords" released in 1975, Jeffries and Walker show how some pivotal words significantly increased in use and evolved in meaning during the years of the 'New Labour' project. Focussing on print news media, this book establishes a set of socio-political keywords for the 'Blair Years', and demonstrates how their evolving meanings are indicative of the ideological landscape in Britain at that time, and the extent to which the cultural hegemony of the New Labour project influenced the language of the commentariat.Combining corpus linguistic approaches with critical stylistics the authors conduct an analysis of two newspaper corpora using computational tools. Looking closely at textually-constructed meanings within the data, their investigation of the keywords has a qualitative focus, and sets out a clear methodology for combining corpus approaches with systematic co-textual analysis.

Explores the complex nature of idiomaticity by bringing together a quantitative corpus-linguistic approach and judgement data. Adopting a usage-based perspective, this study addresses the question 'which factors do speakers rely upon when assessing the idiomaticity of a construction?'.

Examines real-life speech data from the British National Corpus to show how language is used in natural conversation. This monograph describes the composition, annotation and transcription of the corpus, as well as providing a discussion of the methodology used in corpus analysis.

Using the 2003 war in Iraq as an illustrative tool for highlighting the impact which advances in communication systems have had on message relays, this book enables a critical evaluation of the way language is used in the news.

A compilation of research exploring different ways to apply corpus-based and corpus-informed approaches to English language teaching. It shows how corpora may be used directly in the classroom and how corpus research may be applied to inform syllabi and classroom materials.

English is a global language which has spread historically through imperialism and more recently through communication networks throughout the world. This research monograph examines English as it is spoken by the Xhosa people in South Africa, and is based primarily on an extensive spoken corpus of Xhosa English.