Current trends in corpus linguistics

1
Current trends in corpus linguistics

• Wolfgang Teubert
• University of Birmingham
• Teubertw_at_bham.ac.uk

2
Cognitive linguistics vs.corpus linguistics

• Cognitive linguistics is interested in how
  thought is turned into language and how language
  is turned into thought.
• Cognitive linguistics looks at language from a
  mental/psychological perspective
• Corpus linguistics looks at language from a
  social perspective
• Corpus linguistics deals with exchanging and
  sharing content
• Corpus linguistics is interested in how
  communication works between the members of a
  discourse community

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Cognitive linguistics, or how does the mind work?

• Meanings are in the head.
• Cognitivism looks into behaviourisms black box.
• The mind uses the universal language of thought.
• There is an innate language faculty/organ
• Natural language expressions are converted into
  mental representations.
• Mental representations are processed
  syntactically (algorithmically).
• The mind is a syntactic engine.

4
Corpus linguistics

• Corpus linguistics has a social perspective.
• The language community exchanges and shares
  content in the discourse.
• We are interested in meaning, not in peoples
  heads.
• The language of bees (dancing) has meaning only
  to us (the observers) , not to the bees.

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The agenda of corpus linguisticsReader Corpus
Linguistics Critical Concepts in Linguistics
(Routledge 2007)

• Theoretical aspects (2)
• History of CL
• Corpus composition and compilation (1)
• Standardisation, tagging, alignment,
  software, (7)
• Lexicography, collocations, idioms (5)
• Terminology

• Grammar (3)
• Translation, parallel corpora, multilinguality
  (5)
• CDA, stylistics, rhetoric, evaluation (1)
• Language history, historical linguistics
• Language teaching (2)
• Spoken language, discourse studies (2)

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The agenda of corpus linguisticsIJCL recent
issues

• (theory) My version of corpus linguistics
• (composition) The representativeness of the Czech
  National Corpus
• (software) the automatic recognition of verb
  patterns
• (lexicography/collocation) Semantic prosody and
  semantic preference
• (grammar) It-extraposition in English
• (translation) A corpus-based view of similarity
  and difference in translation
• (CDA) Examining the ideology of sleaze
• (language teaching) ESL teachers questions and
  corpus evidence
• (spoken language) Syllable contractions in a
  Mandarin conversational dialogue corpus

7
Corpus composition and compilation

• Representativeness
• Opportunistic corpora
• The Internet as (virtual) corpus
• Learners corpora
• Diachronic corpora (monitor corpora)
• Parallel corpora
• Special language corpora
• Spoken language corpora and transcription
• Corpus compiler vs. corpus user

8
Methodology and software development

• The issue of annotation/tagging pro and con
• The issue of the tagset
• The need for better automatic alignment
• Corpus-driven sense disambiguation software
• Software for diachronic corpora
• Intertextuality software
• Paraphrase recognition software
• Named entities detection software
• Neology detection software

9
Lexicography, phraseology, collocation study

• The Cobuild project
• Corpus size
• The synchronic perspective generalisation
• The collocation issue (more or less fixed
  expressions)
• The paraphrase issue
• Evaluation connotation deontic meaning
• The diachronic perspective meaning as unique
  events
• Using corpora to investigate antonym acquisition

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Terminology and special languages

• Hard terminology standardisation in engineering,
  production and maintenance
• Soft terminology emergence of new ideas in the
  sciences
• Terminology mining (paraphrases and definitions)
• The detection of new ideas
• Fixedness in genre-specific language and
  intercultural differences comparing English and
  Chinese Fire News corpora

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Grammar

• Rule-based or list-based?
• The relationship between grammar and lexis
• Lexicogrammar and local grammar
• Pattern grammar
• Valency grammar
• General grammar vs. the dictionary
• let-imperatives in English
• Genitive and of-construction in modern written
  English

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Parallel corpora etc. (1)

• Parallel corpora re-using previous translations
• The advantage of working with parallel corpora
• The compilation of parallel corpora
• The definition of the translation unit (smallest
  recurrent text segment for which there is only
  one target language equivalent)
• What is source language, what is target language?
• The Hong Kong Legal Document Corpus
• A TranslationBase built from a parallel corpus
• Parallel corpora and cultural contrast

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Parallel corpora Extracted adjectivenoun
phrases as translation equivalents

• 105 straight line
• 104 legal officer
• 101 residential care
• 101 criminal offences
• 100 annual allowance
• 99 long term
• 98 human remains
• 98 conclusive evidence
• 97 written permission
• 97 public bus
• 97 personal representatives
• 97 first column
• 96 notifiable workplace
• 96 listed company
• 95 light bus

• 105 straight line
• 104 legal officer
• 101 residential care
• 101 criminal offences
• 100 annual allowance
• 99 long term
• 98 human remains
• 98 conclusive evidence
• 97 written permission
• 97 public bus
• 97 personal representatives
• 97 first column
• 96 notifiable workplace
• 96 listed company
• 95 light bus

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Parallel corpora etc. (2)Linguistic anthropology

• A Chinese-English/English-Chinese corpus of
  fiction
• A cross-cultural study of emotions
• grief, sorrow, melancholy, depression in the
  English and Chinese culture
• Individual person vs. society
• The diachronic dimension

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Parallel corpora etc. (3) grief and sorrow some
translation equivalents
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Parallel corpora etc. (4) grief and sorrow
beishang

• ????,?????????,???,????????????????,????????????,?
  ??????????????
• In the dining-room she had been demure and
  discreet. Now all pretense of grief had passed
  away from her. Her eyes shone with the joy of
  living , and her face still quivered with
  amusement at some remark of her companion.
• ????????????,????????????,????????????,????????,??
  ??????????????
• Suellen and Careen had cried themselves to sleep,
  as they did at least twice a day when they
  thought of Ellen , tears of grief and weakness
  oozing down their sunken cheeks
• ??????????????,???????????,????????????????,
  ????????,??????,???????,????
• The manager suffered this as a personal appeal.
  It came to him as if they were alone, and he
  could hardly restrain the tears for sorrow over
  the hopeless, pathetic, and yet dainty and
  appealing woman whom he loved

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Words denoting emotions vs. words for facial
expressions, gestures etc.

• hun shen fa chan (trembling all over the body)
• tui fa ruan (legs becoming soft)
• lian dou huang-le (face also yellow/fear)
• liang-le ban jie (cold over half the body)
• lei gan qi jue (tear dry breath cut off)
• bian se (change colour/get angry)
• lian bai qi ye (face white breath hiccup/angry)

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Critical discourse analysis (1)

• Discourse and society
• Discourse and reality
• Mass media and the construction of social reality
• Comparing texts
• Corpus linguistics methodology for CDA
• Analysing the homosexual marriage discourse

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Critical discourse analysis (2)

• Marriage is for procreation.
• the purpose of marriage is to produce children.
• Marriage is for raising children
• marriage is only between a man and a woman
• marriage is the union of a man and a woman
• Marriage is a sacred sacrament.
• Marriage is a sacred institution.
• Gay marriage is a civil rights issue
• Prohibiting homosexual marriage is discrimination
• Why Gay Marriage is a Fundamental Human Rights
  Issue
• opposition to gay marriage is based on religious
• In some ways marriage is a white GLBT issue.
• same-sex marriage is the culmination of a larger

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Critical discourse analysis (3)

• Prohibiting homosexual marriage is a
  discrimination against homosexuals and a
  violation of multiple human rights.  Article 16
  of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
  states that, Men and women of full age, without
  any limitation due to race, nationality or
  religion, have the right to marry and found a
  family.
• Some today claim that a marriage among
  homosexuals is a right. What the Considerations
  highlights is that people cannot simply create
  rights claiming them to be human rights when
  they are not founded in the natural moral order.
  The State can create certain categories of legal
  rights. It cannot create natural moral law.

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Historical linguistics (1)

• Diachronic perspective
• Semantic change
• Each text segment occurrence a unique event
• The necessity of diachronic corpora
• How to organise diachronic corpora
• Texts as reactions to previous texts
• The issue of intertextuality
• The necessity of software development

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Historical linguistics (2) diachronic corpus of
social Vatican encyclicals property

• Every man has by nature the right to possess
  property as his own. 1891,Rerum novarum,  6  
• The natural right itself of owning goods ought
  always to remain intact and inviolate, since this
  indeed is a right that the state cannot take
  away. 1931, Quadragesimo anno,  49
• Every man has in principle the right to use all
  the material goods of this earth, and this right
  can by no means be abolished, not even by other
  rights. 1941, Whitsun address.
• The right to private ownership of goods has
  permanent validity. 1961, Mater et magistra,
   109
• Private property does not constitute for anyone
  an absolute and unconditional right. 1967,
  Populorum progressio.  23
• The violation of the human right to ownership of
  property leads to inefficiency. 1991, Centesimus
  annus,  24

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Language teaching translation studies

• Teaching foreign languages vs. teaching
  translation
• Learners corpora, over-use and under-use, error
  analysis
• ESL teachers questions and corpus evidence
• Using monolingual corpora
• Using parallel corpora for language learning and
  for translation
• Replacing the word by the unit of meaning and the
  translation unit, respectively
• CALL (computer-aided language learning)
• Tim Johns DDL ( data-driven learning) webpage
  (Birmingham)
• TALC (Teaching and Language Corpora)

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Spoken language

• Spoken language corpora vs. speech corpora
• Spoken language and discourse analysis
• HKCAC The Hong Kong Cantonese Adult Language
  Corpus
• The corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew
• Syllable contractions in a Mandarin
  conversational dialogue corpus
• // CAN I help you // The use of rise and
  rise-fall tones in the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken
  English

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Language theory (1)

• The focus of CL is on meaning.
• CL deals with recorded (written, transcribed)
  language.
• Texts are symbolic form and meaning are
  indivisible.
• Meaning is only in the discourse.
• Speakers intentions are irrelevant.
• Meaning is independent of reality.
• The discourse contains only testimony, not 1st
  person experiences.
• Meaning is paraphrase.
• Meaning is always provisional.
• Meaning is negotiated by the discourse community
  members.
• The discourse is self-reflexive it talks about
  language use. The discourse is democratic.

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Language theory (2)

• Synchronic CL makes general claims based on
  recurrence.
• Synchronic CL defines types of tokens.
• Diachronic CL deals with unique occurrences of
  units.
• Diachronic CL looks at intertextuality.
• What is said is a reaction to what has been said
  before.
• CL looks for differences in languages, not for
  universals.
• The single word is not privileged. What is a unit
  of meaning is a matter of perspective.
• Units of meaning are monosemous.
• There is no difference between linguistic meaning
  and encyclopaedic meaning.
• CL is not about true meaning, it is about
  interpretation.
• Linguists are not privileged over lay speakers.

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Conclusions

• CL is growing stronger (three journals now).
• CL is about meaning.
• CL deals with all aspects of language.
• CL is different from computational linguistics
  and cognitive linguistics.
• CL has a social perspective.
• CL brings better dictionaries.
• CL facilitates translation.
• Corpus linguistics analyses the discourse.
• CL needs a diachronic dimension.

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Brief bibliography

• Altenberg, Bengt, and Sylvian Granger (eds.)
  (2002) Lexis in Contrast. Amsterdam Benjamins
• Aston, Guy, Silvia Bernardini and Dominic Stewart
  (eds.) (2004) Corpora and Language Learners.
  Amsterdam Benjamins
• Biber, Doug, Susan Conrad and Randi Reppen
  (1998) Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge Cambridge
  University Press
• Bowker, Lynne, and Jennifer Pearson (2002)
  Working with Specialised Corpora A practical
  Guide to Using Corpora. London Routledge
• Garside, Roger, Geoffrey Leech and Anthony
  McEnery 1997) Corpus Annotation. London Longman
• Granger, Sylviane, Joseph Hung and Stephanie
  Petch-Tyson (eds.) (2002) Computer Learner
  Corpora, Second Language Acquisition and Foreign
  Language Teaching. Amsterdam Benjamins
• Granger, Sylviane, Jacques Lerot and Stephanie
  Petch-Tyson (eds.) (2003) Corpus-Based
  Approaches to Contrastice Linguisitcs and
  Translation Studies. Amsterdam Rodopi
• Halliday, M.A.K., Wolfgang Teubert and Colin
  Yallop, with Anna Cermakova (2004) Lexicology
  and Corpus Linguistics. London Continuum
• Hoey, Michael (1991) Patterns of Lexis in Text.
  Oxford Oxford University Press
• Hunston, Susan, and Gill Francis (1999) Pattern
  Grammar. Amsterdam Benjamins
• Hunston, Susan (2002) Corpora in Applied
  Linguistics. Cambridge Cambrifge University
  Press
• Krishnamurthy, Ramesh (ed.) (2004) English
  Collocation Studies, by John M. Sinclair, Susan
  Jones and Robert Daley. London Continuum
• Nelson, Gerald, Sean Wallis and Bas Aarts (2002)
  Exploring Natural Language Working with the
  British Component of the International Corpus of
  English Amsterdam Benjamins
• Olohan, Maeve (2004) Introducing Corpora in
  Translation Studies. London Routledge
• Pearson, Jennifer (1998) Terms in Context.
  Benjamins Amsterdam
• Peters, Pam, Peter Collins and Adam Smith (eds.)
  (2002) New Fronties of Corpus Research.
  Amsterdam Rodopi
• Sinclair, John (1991) Corpus, Concordance,
  Collocation. Oxford Oxford University Press
• Sinclair, John (2004) Trust the Text Language,
  Corpus and Discourse. London Routledge
• Sinclair, John (ed.) (1987) Looking Up An
  Account of the COBUILD Project in Lexical
  Computing. London HarperCollins