Books in the English Corpus Linguistics series

Corpora in Language Teaching and Learning

The things we do with words are reflected in texts and we do things with texts just as we do things with words. This book sets out to explore how texts function in a given discourse community, and how the functions that texts may have in that particular community can be identified and assessed from a diachronic perspective.

This multidimensional study focuses on computer chat, i.e. synchronous and supersynchronous computer-mediated communication, here termed "conversational writing". It employs Douglas Biber's methodology to compare systematically computer chat to speech and writing, and situates two genres of computer chat on Biber's dimensions of linguistic variation.

This book presents the first large-scale usage-based investigation of the conventionalization process of English neologisms in the online speech community. It strings together findings and assumptions from lexicological, sociolinguistic and cognitive research and supplements the existing theories with novel data-driven insights.

Traces the history of MILLION in English. This title focuses on the shift in word class/function from noun/noun-phrase head (three millions of dollars) to determinative/determiner (three million dollars). It includes a chapter on morphosyntax/semantics that probes natural word class and function of number words and their historical categorization.

This study analyses syntactic dislocation in congregational song between 1500 and 1900. Two distinct dislocation patterns, which combine poetic factors and syntactic criteria, allow for a comparison to other genres. Indeed, syntactic dislocation makes congregational song a conservative genre both compared to religious prose and to secular poetry.

The study provides a comprehensive description of from a micro- and macro-linguistic perspective. A corpus of different spoken and written genres is the basis for a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis, which shows that 'general nouns' fulfil various genre-specific functions.