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Forensic authorship attribution is concerned with identifying the writers of anonymous criminal documents. Over the last twenty years, computer scientists have developed a wide range of statistical procedures using a number of different linguistic features to measure similarity between texts. However, much of this work is not of practical use to forensic linguists who need to explain in reports or in court why a particular method of identifying potential authors works. This paper sets out to address this problem using a corpus linguistic approach and the 176-author 2.5 million-word Enron Email Corpus. Drawing on literature positing the idiolectal nature of collocations, phrases and word sequences, this paper tests the accuracy of word n-grams in identifying the authors of anonymised email samples. Moving beyond the statistical analysis, the usage-based concept of entrenchment is offered as a means by which to account for the recurring and distinctive production of idiolectal word n-grams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines the compilation of a corpus of Catalan written production. The CesCa corpus presents a picture of the Catalan written language throughout compulsory schooling. It contains two kinds of data: Vocabularies of five semantic fields comprising 242,404 lexical forms and Textual data of four different discourse genres consisting of 207,028 tokens. Both vocabularies and the textual data have been morphologically analyzed and lemmatized. The corpus is freely available. This paper will outline the main features of the corpus and make some suggestions as to the uses to which the corpus can be put. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sinclair’s grammatical work is notable for its strict reliance on performance data and its avoidance of psychological theorising. His argument rests on the observation that large corpora reveal a huge discrepancy between the predictions made by cognitive models of grammar and what actually happens in performance. This discrepancy cannot be explained away by appeal to encoding/processing deficiencies, but must be taken as reason to revise our view of grammar, especially by exploring its interdependence with lexis. In this he follows Halliday’s (1966) idea that every word has its own grammar. Sinclair’s 1991 paper on the word of (‘The meeting of lexis and grammar’) exemplifies his thinking in this area with particular energy and originality. Questioning the traditional classification of of as a preposition, he proposes a new, more semantically based, approach to the analysis of noun phrases traditionally said to contain postmodification of the head with an of-phrase, e.g. the horns of the bull. This chapter reviews Sinclair’s development as a grammarian, examines the arguments of the 1991 paper and suggests that while his work has been radically transformative in linguistics, it should not indefinitely avoid engaging with the problem of how best to represent what it is that we know when we say we know a language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Signalling nouns are nouns which have cohesive properties across and within clauses. A signalling noun is potentially any abstract noun the full meaning of which can only be made specific by reference to its context. Examples of nouns which can function as signalling nouns are attitude, assistance, difficulty, endurance, process, reason, result etc. Signalling nouns in discourse are closely associated with nominalisation and are problematic for learners. Based on a corpus of argumentative essays written by Cantonese L1 learners of English, this paper presents a taxonomy of error types and frequency data of the different error types in the use of signalling nouns. The paper then compares the average number of signalling nouns used per essay with grades awarded to the essays, on the one hand, and the numbers of signalling noun errors according to grades, on the other. In both cases there is a significant correlation. The findings confirm the intuitive idea that the use of signalling nouns adds to the overall coherence of a text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to discuss actual usage of the two Korean causal conjunctive suffixes, -(e)seand-(u)nikka, and to propose their multi-layered semantics based on analysis of corpus data. To account for the functional differences of the two conjunctives, most previous studies focused on different syntactic distributions or semantic contrast by employing an objectivist viewpoint, failing to incorporate the polyfunctionality, semantic overlapping and pragmatic ambiguities of them. This paper advances that the meanings of the two causal suffixes are distributed on four different cognitive-discourse levels: content, epistemic, speech act, and discourse level. Corpus analysis does reveal that all four levels are accessible to both conjunctive suffixes but the difference between the two suffixes lies in the different degree of accessibility of these four levels in their sentence semantics. This finding suggests that we treat these linguistic categories more flexibly by accepting their gradient and pragmatically ambiguous status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study discusses an adverbial pattern which has so far been largely overlooked, namely ADV1 and ADV1, as in again and again, on and on and over and over. The paper is primarily based on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The data show that these patterns follow typical paths of change, such as a movement towards more abstract meanings (metaphorization; over and over increasingly referring to repetition rather than to physical motion), lexicalization (e.g. up and up being used as a noun with idiosyncratic meaning in on the up and up), subjectification (e.g. on and on expressing negative connotations), iconic variation (again and again and again referring to multiple repetitions), simplification (loss of again after over and over), and the development of discourse functions (and on and on meaning "and so on"). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses relations between lexico-grammatical patterns and texts. Our focus is on a specific linguistic unit, the 'suspended quotation (or 'suspension'), which has received particular attention in Dickens studies. The suspended quotation refers to an interruption of a fictional character's speech by the narrator with a sequence of at least five words. We show how corpus linguistic methods can help to systematically study suspensions in a corpus of Dickens's novels: we investigate relationships between patterns of body language presentation and suspensions; we consider the distribution of suspensions across novels; and we illustrate how patterns in suspensions relate to meanings of reporting verbs. Overall, we argue that suspensions are discernible units that contribute to meaningful patterns in narrative prose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To say that there has been a certain amount of confusion and debate over the nature and function of the notion of semantic prosody would be an understatement. In this paper we attempt to address and assess, in the light of current thinking in the field of lexical grammar, some of the main issues which have been raised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Each instance of language comparison requires observations on semantic equivalence. Meaning is by far the most popular tertium comparationis in contrastive and typological research. However, the question of how semantic equivalence is to be determined remains extremely difficult to solve. This paper presents an approach to detect semantic relatedness between a limited range of lexical items from different languages on the basis of monolingual data. Applying distributional similarity (Dagan et al. 1999) cross-linguistically, it identifies semantically related verbs governing embedded interrogatives by looking at the frequency of the question words (i.e. wh-items) that are used in the embedded interrogatives in monolingual corpora. Convincing results are obtained for six different language pairs: English-French, English-Dutch, English-Spanish, French-Dutch, French-Spanish and Dutch-Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a concept of ‘semantic sequences’, that is, series of meaning elements that can be demonstrated to occur regularly either in a general corpus or in one comprising specific types of text. Semantic sequences may be identified by examining the co-text of a lexical item such as make sure, but are also recognisable if grammatical words such as prepositions are treated as the object of investigation. It is argued that semantic sequences are useful for characterising discourses of particular kinds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COMPARA is a bidirectional parallel corpus of English and Portuguese, currently with 3 million words. The corpus was launched in 2000 and at present it is possibly the largest edited parallel corpus publicly available on the Web, with roughly 6,000 corpus queries per month. This paper summarizes an analysis of six years of corpus use. We begin by looking at user studies for language resources, especially corpora, and then we provide a snapshot of COMPARA’s users and their behaviour based on log analysis. Particular emphasis is given to the language interface preferred by users (Portuguese and English are possible), the choice between the Simple and Complex Search modes, the reasons underlying null-results and behaviour after restricted output. The data has pointed us to cases where COMPARA’s Web interface can be improved, and provided insights about our users and the problems they face, although further studies that distinguish between different kinds of users remain necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces an extension of distinctive-collocate analysis that takes into account grammatical structure and is specifically geared to investigating pairs of semantically similar grammatical constructions and the lexemes that occur in them. The method, referred to as 'distinctive-collexeme analysis', identifies lexemes that exhibit a strong preference for one member of the pair as opposed to the other, and thus makes it possible to identify subtle distributional differences between the members of such a pair. The method can be applied in the context of what is sometimes referred to as 'grammatical alternation' (e.g. the dative alternation), but it can also be applied to other choices provided by the grammar (such as the two future tense constructions in English). The method has two main applications. First, it can reveal subtle differences between seemingly synonymous constructions, many of which are difficult to identify on the basis of more traditional approaches. Second, it can be used to investigate the very notion of 'alternation'; we show that many alternations are much more restricted than has hitherto been assumed, and thus confirm the claims of recent, non-derivational views of grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a narrow sense, the term 'Measure Noun' (MN) refers to such nouns as acre and kilo, which typically measure off a well-established and specific portion of the mass or entity specified in a following of -phrase, e.g. a kilo of apples. When used like this, the MN is generally considered to constitute the lexical head of the bi-nominal noun phrase. However, the notion of 'MN' can be extended to include such expressions as a bunch of and heaps of, which, strictly speaking, do not designate a 'measure', but display a more nebulous potential for quantification. The structural status of MNs in this broader sense then is far from straightforward and most grammatical reference works of English are either hesitant or silent with regard to the issue. Two main analytical options seem to suggest themselves. Either the MN is interpreted as constituting the head of the NP, with the of -phrase as a qualifier to this head, or the MN is analysed as a modifier, more specifically a quantifier, to the head, which in this case is the noun in the of -phrase. Starting from the structural analyses of MN-constructions offered by such linguists as Halliday and Langacker, my paper goes on to discuss a corpus study aimed at charting and elucidating the structural ambivalence observed in MN-constructions. The framework eventually opted for is that of 'grammaticalization', since it provides the most comprehensive account for the developments displayed by MN-constructions, in that it brings to the fore the very intricate interplay between the lexical and the grammatical status of the MN. In addition, it also does justice to the diachronic dimension implied in the mechanisms of delexicalization and grammaticalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces an extension of collocational analysis that takes into account grammatical structure and is specifically geared to investigating the interaction of lexemes and the grammatical constructions associated with them. The method is framed in a construction-based approach to language, i.e. it assumes that grammar consists of signs (form-meaning pairs) and is thus not fundamentally different from the lexicon. The method is applied to linguistic expressions at various levels of abstraction (words, semi-fixed phrases, argument structures, tense, aspect and mood). The method has two main applications: first, to increase the adequacy of grammatical description by providing an objective way of identifying the meaning of a grammatical construction and determining the degree to which particular slots in it prefer or are restricted to a particular set of lexemes; second, to provide data for linguistic theory-building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of 698 instances of Saxon genitive and of-construction, the present paper explores the use of these modifiers from a corpus-linguistic perspective. In particular, the influence of the lexical class of the modifier, the semantic relationship expressed by the constructions, and weight and syntactic complexity is analysed. It will be argued that the variation of genitive and of-construction can be explained with regard to two major underlying factors, namely 'processability' and 'degree of human involvement'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]