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Changes to marriage legislation across the globe have received much academic and public attention. However, the labels used to categorise different marital configurations are somewhat under researched. In this paper we analyse the premodification of marriage in a corpus of UK newspaper articles (2000–2018) to establish which labels are most commonly used in reference to same-sex marriage. These are gay marriage, same-sex marriage, homosexual marriage, and equal marriage. Drawing on the notion of category construction, we emphasise the fact that these labels are not neutral synonyms, as each encodes a particular understanding of same-sex marriage. Some labels even linguistically exclude certain groups, such as those who are bisexual or transgender. We use the tools of corpus-based discourse analysis to consider the nuanced differences between the category labels and consider whether the limitations of the labels are ever directly challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a methodological framework that integrates poststructuralist Discourse Theory (DT), Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and Corpus Linguistics (CL). While previous research has discussed potential compatibility between combinations of these approaches, there have been few attempts to bring them all together into a cohesive research programme. Fostering dialogue between diverse methodological perspectives can facilitate multi-level analysis to capture the complex dynamics of sociopolitical issues. In this vein, the article presents the methodological tree, an analogy used to illustrate how these traditions may come together to complement one another. This foundation lays the groundwork for practical application in discursive analysis, with a flexible analytical structure proposed and examples provided to illustrate its implementation. It is hoped that the article can stimulate further discussion around how DT, CDS and CL can be brought together to harness their strengths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics / Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada (John Benjamins Publishing Co.) is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article reports on a new Multi-dimensional model of graduate student coursework writing in two applied science disciplines from a corpus containing 1,108 texts and 2,008,316 words. The Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) revealed five dimensions: (1) Conceptual Information vs. Process-Focused Actions (2) Human/Subjective- vs. Entity/Objective- Focus, (3) Attitudinal Monoglossia vs. Precisely Measured Information, (4) Social vs. Physical Science Approaches, and (5) Speculative vs. Finalized Events. The dimensions are analyzed functionally in terms of both register and discipline. The results demonstrate that course papers exhibit distinct patterns of language use, often attributed to the varying purposes of the texts but also related to disciplinary ways of knowing. Findings have implications for disciplinary writing research and representativeness of student writing corpora while contributing to an exploration of register as a continuous construct. The research provides an enhanced understanding of academic coursework writing for stakeholders such as professors, graduate students, writing consultants. (150 words) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hate speech has become a matter of international concern, permeating institutional and lay discussions alike. Yet, exactly what it means to refer to a linguistic act as 'hate speech' remains unclear. This paper examines the lay understanding of hate speech, focusing on (1) the relationship between hate speech and hate, and (2) the relationship between hate speech and offensive speech. As part of the second question, the paper considers how hate speech is defined as a legal matter in the UK Public Order Act 1986. The study adopts a corpus-based discourse analysis approach and examines 255 hate speech-related news articles and the general English Web 2020 corpus. Hate speech is a complex multifaceted phenomenon; while 'hate' is one of its core characteristics, it is not sufficient to assess a certain behaviour as hate speech. Threats, denigration of the targets based on a protected characteristic (age, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability), the potential to cause harm and the intent to stir up hatred are also essential in distinguishing hate speech and offense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the conceptualizations of endometriosis-related pain by combining Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) with a corpus-based approach. Endometriosis is a complex and multi-faceted condition, affecting one in ten people assigned female at birth and bearing serious consequences on one's physical, social and psychological wellbeing. Especially in cases when the pain is invisible, communication resorts to violent metaphors implying harm, physical damage, or fight. These metaphors are thought to increase the likelihood of eliciting an empathetic response in the interlocutor. However, such narratives may be detrimental at the individual level (e.g., increasing pain catastrophizing) and at the community level (e.g., overshadowing the capacity of communities to construct and use metaphors in alternative ways). Therefore, this study presents an initial exploratory analysis of metaphorical source domains in descriptions of endometriosis-related pain written in online, freely accessible blogs. Metaphorical expressions were manually annotated in a sample of KWICs basing on the MIPVU procedure and thematically categorized. The adoption of a bottom-up and top-down approach within a qualitative framework allowed an empirically grounded analysis of candidate source domains, which calls for further quantitative testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our interconnected world, exposure to hate, fear, violence and adversarial communication is commonplace. Yet, this exposure underscores the urgent need for a more just, peaceful, and inclusive society. While research stresses the importance of nurturing peace, compassion and empathy for enhanced well-being and social justice, these three terms are rarely discussed at length in linguistics and communication studies. Little systematic work explores how language and semiotic resources actualise these ideals across contexts. This special issue, grounded in systemic functional linguistics, addresses this gap. It aims to contribute to a more just world, promote non-violent efforts for social justice, and lay the foundation for future research on the semiotics of peace, compassion and empathy. This paper outlines key definitions and contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether directed at adults or children, popularization can be viewed as a process of "translating" and "recontextualizing" expert discourse for a lay audience. In fact, knowledge dissemination for children appears to entail an additional form of "translation," given their limited background knowledge. This "re-translation" often occurs on dedicated websites based on "edutainment." While most museum websites function as promotional tools or as agents of knowledge dissemination, a small number of them are targeted at children and offer texts that insert museum objects in a broader context. By means of a small case study, this paper explores how knowledge is popularized and presented in two science museum websites: the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London and OLogy, the science website for children of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York. From a corpus-linguistic and discourse-analysis perspective, our interest lies in how popularization takes shape in these two websites, the former intended for different age groups and the latter explicitly addressing children. Quantitative and qualitative results show similarities and dissimilarities, thus accounting for different types of popularization as forms of translation. The analysis aims to grant insights to translators and interpreters engaged in museum adaptations and translation of contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although swearing is often perceived as intrinsically offensive language, it is how swearing use is indexed against a person's understanding of local social norms that constructs swearing as offensive. This paper presents an analysis of swearing within a social context where high frequency swearing is a norm: a male rugby team in New Zealand. Drawing upon a dataset collected from ethnographically collected authentic interactions, an analysis of the frequency of swear words and a comparison with other English corpora is presented, followed by an interactional sociolinguistic analysis of how swearing is used in interactions. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate not only how swearing can be used to engender solidarity, but that a range of socio-pragmatic functions of swearing such as intensifying and indexing a vernacular identity, can be used in performing leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pornography is commonly criticized for allegedly representing and promoting sexual dominance of men over women. Studies have shown varying results, with no scientific consensus reached on the matter. To contribute to the discussion with empirical discourse analysis evidence, I examine the linguistic choices reflected in a corpus of erotic novels to test whether there are gendered patterns of agency in the representation of sexual interactions. The construal of prominence is correlated to the notion of agency to find which participant specifies the trajector status and agent role in every relational expression. Results show that male participants take prominence over females in an overwhelming majority of the cases, while expressions with plural agency are marginal. The approach of this paper, combining cognitive grammar with linguistic participation roles, provides comprehensive and realistic results by attempting to operationalize agency as the linguistic expression of a particular cognitive pathway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central question of the paper is whether visual perception serves as a grounding cognitive act for experiencing and reflecting on the other in elegiac poetry. I assume that elegy has a cultural scheme in which the lyric subject can see the environment not only from his own point of view but also from the perspective of the other, and this mental contextualization has reoccurring linguistic patterns (e.g.,the expressions of retrospection/looking backwards, or looking to the natural environment from different points of view) in elegiac tradition. For testing the assumption, I use corpus-based analysing methods: in a quantitative analysis a specific research corpus is built from canonical Hungarian elegies, and it is analysed with Lancsbox with the aim of identifying the characteristic linguistic construction of visual perception. I explore the distribution and the collocational patterns of the Hungarian verbs lát 'see', néz 'look' and figyel 'watch' in the elegy corpus, and keyword analysis is made with the use of a reference corpus built from Hungarian odes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to examine the functionality of impoliteness strategies as rhetorical devices employed by acclaimed African American and White hip-hop artists. It focuses on the social and artistic function of the key discursive element of hip-hop, namely aggressive language. The data for this paper comprise songs of US African American and White performers retrieved from the November 2017 'TOP100 Chart' for international releases on Spotify.com. A cursory look at the sub-corpora (Black male/ Black female/ White male/ White female artists' sub-corpus) revealed the prominence of the 'use taboo words' impoliteness strategy. The analysis of impoliteness instantiations by considering race and gender as determining factors in the lyrics selection process unveiled that both male groups use impoliteness strategies more frequently than female groups. It is also suggested that Black male and White female singers employ impoliteness to resist oppression, offer a counter-narrative about their own experience and self (re)presentation and reinforce in group solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in spring 2009 and continuing annually since, members of Singapore's LGBT communities have assembled at Hong Lim Park at an event dubbed Pink Dot. The original goal of the gathering was to help build a more inclusive nation by standing up to discrimination faced by LGBT Singaporeans. While the early Pink Dot events were all but ignored by the mainstream state-run press, the change in tone, the increasing number of attendees, and the participation by members of the ruling People's Action Party and their families made the gathering impossible to ignore. This paper uses a corpus-based keywords analysis to evaluate the main lexical differences between the media coverage of Pink Dot by the state-run press and that of the sociopolitical blog The Online Citizen. Two separate language corpora (State Media and Online Citizen), each containing approximately 111,000 words, were compiled from available coverage of Pink Dot dating from 2009 to 2018. Using SketchEngine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004, 2014), top keywords and phrases were identified by comparing these corpora to each other. Through a preliminary exploration of the collocational environments and the concordance lines adjoining these keywords, this paper sheds light on how language is being deployed in an attempt to sway a debate of great national and regional significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at dialogicity in the Slow Art Day blog and focuses on the way the representation of participants encodes the complexity of the communicative action through a polyphony of textual voices. By focusing on posts from the pandemic years (2020 and 2021), and contrasting them with the previous period, we carry out a collocation analysis and a study of semantic preferences (Sinclair 2004) to explore how writers present themselves and how they interact with the reader and other textual voices in a context of cultural intermediation. By looking at forms of address and of self-mention, we trace how this blog enacts different forms of dialogic action with its readers and stakeholders in the extended situational context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dialogic interaction is a distinctive feature of Animal Crossing, a social simulation video game developed by Nintendo, yet, little attention has been paid to it from a discourse analytical perspective. This paper aims to explore how AC characters are characterised through language and which discourse strategies are applied to engage players. The analysis, based on a corpus of dialogues transcribed by fans of the game, relies on corpus-linguistics methodologies and can be framed within the context of ludolinguistics. The study shows that emotive language is used to create an active interaction between player and non-player characters (NPCs). Even though NPCs are minimally characterized in terms of gender, age, or social status, the collocational analysis of "I" and "you" highlights two opposite personalities interacting in the dialogues: type A, lexically represented as extroverted, dynamic, and active, and type B, represented as kind, hesitant, and passive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes metaphorical conceptualizations of happiness in the historical corpus of Classical Malay and in the corpus of present-day Indonesian, the national variety of Malay used in Indonesia. The aim is to explore the idea of diachronic salience and universal/variation in metaphorical conceptualizations between diachronic varieties of the same language. Token and type frequencies are used as measures of salience of the metaphors. Seven of the top-10 metaphors in Classical Malay with high token and type frequencies also make into the top-10 metaphors ranked by these measures in Indonesian, suggesting a relatively stable diachronic salience of the metaphoric cognitive models of happiness in these two Malay varieties. The shared metaphors are parts of larger networks of semantic domains, namely possession, location, motion, containment, and quantity. The metaphors are discussed in relation to themes reported in earlier cross-cultural psychological studies of the cultural folk models of happiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguistic expressions in social media vary along many axes, including author style, the specific medium and its affordances, and others. In this paper, we argue that different registers must be distinguished within social media and that register should be included as an important factor independent of (social) medium in analyses of variable linguistic phenomena. We introduce a new German cross-media corpus, consisting of blog posts and tweets from the same 44 authors. We define the registers as 'Informative', 'Narrative', and 'Persuasive', based on situational characteristics of the texts. We then correlate the registers with two variable linguistic phenomena: German modal and intensifying particles. In each case, we document considerable inter- and intraindividual variation in the expressions used and their frequency across texts. The statistical analysis shows that the register grouping corresponds more closely to linguistic similarities between texts than the grouping by medium does. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One way to investigate learner writing is by analyzing the most frequently recurring sequences of words, that is, lexical bundles. This paper presents results for lexical bundles analyses of a Malaysian corpus (MCSAW) against its reference language variety, LOCNESS (Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays). Key 4-word lexical bundles are firstly investigated in terms of their frequencies as well as distribution in both corpora. Following this, key lexical bundles are further categorized and analyzed according to their functions, including qualitative analysis of the most recurrent bundles by examination of concordance lines. Results show that learners use simple types of lexical bundles repeatedly compared to their native speaker counterparts. Evidence of tautology can also be found in learner writing. The findings highlight that using lexical bundles appropriately is important to achieve native-like fluency, while the absence of more varied lexical bundles in learners' discourse may result in unidiomatic-sounding writing style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, Islamic State (ISIS) has made numerous attempts to propagate their beliefs on a global scale via a range of social media platforms (e.g. Twitter), enabling them to reach an extensive audience within a very short time span; when successful, people enlist as supporters of their ideas and, essentially, become radicalised. ISIS also achieve this through publishing propaganda materials, such as the two online magazines Dabiq and Rumiyah (Heidarysafa et al. 2019). In this paper, our focus lies with the former. Through a transitivity analysis of three issues from Dabiq, this paper explores how the in-group (the believers) and the Other (the non-believers) are represented in the magazine. The transitivity framework is useful here because it exposes the linguistic choices that people make and, in turn, reveals how they perceive their world. To retrieve both quantitative and qualitative findings, the UAM Corpus Tool (O'Donnell 2016) is employed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of technology, in particular, innovations in natural language processing and means to explore big data, has influenced different aspects in the training of translators and interpreters. This paper investigates how learner corpora and their research contribute to the teaching and learning of translation and interpreting. It starts with a review of the evolvement of learner corpora in translator and interpreter training. Drawing on data from the Chinese/English Translation and Interpreting Learner Corpus (CETILC), a learner corpus developed for the study of lexical cohesion, the paper introduces three case studies to illustrate the possibilities of exploring learner data through human annotation, machine-facilitated human annotation, and finally human-supervised/edited machine annotation. The findings of the case studies suggest the complexity of learner language and its intricate relationships with various factors concerning the learner, text, and task. The paper ends with a discussion of the great potentials of purposely made learner corpora such as the CETILC in translator and interpreter training, as well as the application of learner corpora in (semi-) automatic processing of learner texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The borrowing of words from one language into another is most likely as ancient as language itself. While ample linguistic attention has focused on various linguistic contact scenarios in which words from one language enter productive use into another, their aim has been largely restricted to documenting the words which are borrowed, their frequency, and other situation-specific information. In this paper, we propose new methods for studying loanwords, namely a combination of statistical testing techniques which can be used together to increase knowledge in this area. We illustrate these tools with a case-study of loanwords from an indigenous language (Māori) into a world dominant language (New Zealand English). Using a topic-constrained newspaper corpus in conjunction with quantitative methods, we explore the use of loanwords diachronically and analyse variation in loanword use across newspapers and across writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics / Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada (John Benjamins Publishing Co.) is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Existing training programmes in the field of public service interpreting and translation (PSIT) do not to focus on how best to develop students' lexical competence and corpora-based search skills. This paper reports the design, implementation and evaluation of a novel corpus-based module intended to develop Spanish postgraduate PSIT students' lexical competence and search strategies. Adopting a mixed-methods quasi-experimental design, we administered a pre- and post-test to both an experimental group and a control group to collect quantitative data and determine whether the corpus-based module contributes to improving participants' lexical competence and search strategies. Semi-structured focus groups were conducted to collect qualitative data, which were thematically analysed. The findings indicate that a corpus-based methodology significantly improves PSIT students' skills in these areas, leading to the conclusion that such an approach should be adopted more widely in PSIT pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the viability of a synergy between corpus linguistics and the study of argumentation in context. While quantitative approaches to the study of discourse have been profitably integrated at the levels of lexico-grammar and syntax, more rarely has this been the case for higher levels of analysis such as argumentative structures. Such an approach would help identify those recurring patterns of argumentation that build up cumulatively, and which can only be identified in larger samples of discourse. In particular this paper concerns how the tools of corpus linguistics can be put to use for the analysis of strategic manoeuvring, and especially topical selection. In order to do so, the televised prime ministerial debates held on the occasion of the 2010 general election in the UK will be taken as a case study, with a focus on the use of linguistic indicators that might help retrieve argumentative patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine the concept of surprise from a cognitive linguistic perspective. As previous studies indicate, surprise is a not-quite-prototypical emotion category. My focus will be on the structure and content of surprise as an emotion category, as this can be revealed on the basis of the language speakers of English use to talk about it. As regards methodology, I will follow my earlier work and employ a "lexical approach" to emotion concepts (see, e.g., Kövecses, 1986, 1990, 2000) to explore the language-based folk model of surprise in English. I will investigate the conceptual metaphors and metonymies associated with surprise and will propose a cognitive model for the emotion. It is hoped that this methodology enables us to see why surprise is not a prototypical emotion concept on a par with, for example, anger or fear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the Twitter Corpus of Philippine Englishes (TCOPE): a dataset of 27 million tweets amounting to 135 million words collected from 29 cities across the Philippines. It provides an overview of the dataset, and then shows how it can be employed to examine Philippine English (PhilE) and its relationship with extralinguistic factors (e.g. ethno-geographic region, time, sex). The focus is on the patterns of variation involving four PhilE features: (1) irregular past tense morpheme -t, (2) double comparatives, (3) subjunctive were, and (4) phrasal verb base from. My analyses corroborate previous work and further demonstrate structured heterogeneity within PhilE, indicating that it is a multifaceted and dynamic variety. TCOPE has shown itself to be useful for exploring both the "general" features of contemporary PhilE and the different forms of variation within it. It contributes to a deeper understanding of Philippine English(es) over time and in different social contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the example of the alternation [to fish (det) river(s)]/[to fish prep (det) river(s)/], this paper adopts a corpus linguistics approach in order to show how it can contribute to studies in cognitive semantics, combining statistics with a more qualitative analysis. The main aim is to investigate whether these two constructions (with or without a preposition) correspond to a single meaning with alternations or to two distinct meanings. Two studies, both using the Web as corpus, were carried out to elucidate this issue. The first study compared occurrences of the two constructions on French and English websites and showed that, statistically speaking, the construction without a preposition occurs mainly in angling websites that have an emotional dimension, such as blogs. The second study, focusing solely on English websites, examined the lexical environment of the two constructions and identified certain distinct semantic classes for each construction, defining two semantic scenarios. These two semantic scenarios were found to correlate closely with the nature of the website. In light of the corpus evidence, the paper concludes in favor of two meanings, each concerned by one or the other construction (with or without a preposition). The role of the emotional dimension in the relationship between the angler and the river is crucial in determining the presence or absence of a preposition before river. Such a conclusion positions this study firmly in the perspective of cognitive sociolinguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses constructional variation in the domain of contrastive negation in English, using data from the British National Corpus. Contrastive negation refers to constructs with two parts, one negative and the other affirmative, such that the affirmative offers an alternative to the negative in the frame in question (e.g. shaken, not stirred; not once but twice; I don’t like it – I love it). The paper utilises multiple correspondence analysis to explore the degree of synonymy among the various constructional schemas of contrastive negation, finding that different schemas are associated with different semantic, pragmatic and extralinguistic contexts but also that certain schemas do not differ from each other in a significant way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics / Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada (John Benjamins Publishing Co.) is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper uses a bibliometric analysis to map the field of Corpus Linguistics (CL) research in arts and humanities over the last 20 years, tracking changes in popular CL research topics, outlets, highly cited authors, and geographical origins based on the metadata of 5,829 CL-related articles from 429 Scopus-indexed journals. Results reveal an increase in corpus-assisted discourse studies, lexical bundles and academic writing, alongside newer topics including multilingualism and social media. CL studies span 193 languages/dialects with a significant rise in Chinese, Russian, Spanish, and Italian CL research over the past decade. Clusters of highly cited CL researchers are identified spanning (inter)disciplinary research areas. An increase of CL researchers in China, Poland, South Korea, Japan, and more is evidence of the now global reach of CL research. These findings mirror diachronic socio-cultural developments in applied linguistics and society more generally and provide insights into what CL research might come next. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the use of the shi...de construction, based on the analysis of structures with predicative adjectives in a 500,000-character corpus of spoken Mandarin assembled from transcripts of a popular Chinese chat show. Overall, de was omitted more than 40% of the time with a predicative adjective, a significantly higher rate than that found in previous studies. The data reveal a number of factors that may all play a role in determining the likelihood of de omission or retention: the time dependency of the adjective, the particular intensifier chosen to modify the adjective, the discourse function of the utterance and the presence of certain markers of epistemic modality. The findings also lend support to the hypothesis that shi is grammaticalizing to a bound morpheme in some so-called 'conventionalised forms' involving epistemic and evidentiality markers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper puts forward the hypothesis that wh-exclamatives in Present-day English are much more genre-specific than has previously been acknowledged. To test this, prototypical how- and what-exclamatives are searched for in three different corpora containing material from conceptually oral language, that is prose fiction, personal letters and informal, spontaneous face-to-face conversations. The results show that in terms of token frequency, wh-exclamatives are most frequent in personal letters, a genre which has hitherto not been linked with exclamatives. Furthermore, the outcomes demonstrate that each genre shows a different distribution of exclamatives. In all cases, the different structural realizations (clausal vs. non-clausal form) can be connected to the function the exclamative fulfills in the respective genre and to the general properties of the three distinct text types. The results compel us to consider that exclamatives might be more specialized than has been believed so far. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics / Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada (John Benjamins Publishing Co.) is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper investigates the phenomenon known as trolling -- the behaviour of being deliberately antagonistic or offensive via computer-mediated communication (CMC), typically for amusement's sake. Having previously started to answer the question, what is trolling? (Hardaker 2010), this paper seeks to answer the next question, how is trolling carried out? To do this, I use software to extract 3,727 examples of user discussions and accusations of trolling from an eighty-six million word Usenet corpus. Initial findings suggest that trolling is perceived to broadly fall across a cline with covert strategies and overt strategies at each pole. I create a working taxonomy of perceived strategies that occur at different points along this cline, and conclude by refining my trolling definition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of appropriate assessment methods for academic writing skills in higher education has received increasing attention in SLA research in recent years. Despite this, there is still relatively little understanding of how academic writing skills develop at the most advanced levels of proficiency. Use of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) is one way to ensure the comparability of findings across research efforts and continue to move the field forward. This paper presents some key concepts and definitions from the fields of SLA and advancedness research, language assessment and corpus linguistics and introduces several papers that address writing assessment within the context of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the interface of lexis and grammar and provides corpus evidence for the inseparability of two areas that have traditionally been kept apart, both in language teaching and in linguistic analysis and description. The paper will first give an overview of a number of influential research strands and model-building attempts in this area (Pattern Grammar and Collostructional Analysis, among others) and then explore the use of a selected lexical-grammatical pattern, the introductory it pattern (e.g. it is essential for EFL learners to come to grips with connotations, attested example) in corpora of expert and apprentice academic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a large-scale study on how "enemies" are linguistically constructed by Greece's radical right. The research combines corpus linguistics approaches and insights from critical discourse analysis, with the aim of analysing the referential/nomination and predication strategies used to delineate "others" as outgroups. Drawing on a 90 million-word corpus comprising the full set of texts from 13 radical right web-based platforms from 2001 to 2019, the research identifies and statistically classifies principal designators and qualifiers. By closely examining their diachronic variations and correlation with significant sociopolitical events, we critically categorise and discuss the empirical findings and thus unveil topics, as well as aspects of the argumentation, pooled by Greece's radical right in their discursive constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed overview of the changes undergone by the reflexive buru-construction in Basque under the light of grammaticalization theory. On the basis of quantitative historical data, the reflexive construction is argued to have undergone changes predicted by the grammaticalization path of reflexive markers: the distinction between regular and reflexive possessive pronouns is lost; anaphoric, non-reflexive uses of buru disappear; and number agreement between the subject and buru is no longer obligatory. The buru-construction is furthermore argued to have become more prevalent at the expense of other reflexivization strategies. As opposed to these changes, the reflexive construction seems to have degrammaticalized as well: the number of direct object uses of this construction decreases over time, and it occurs in subject position with more predicates in present-day written Basque than in the historical period. In view of these facts, an argument is made against unidirectional conceptions of grammaticalization. External motivations for these developments, such as the standardization of the language, are also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not that sentences (NTSs), like the one in the title, have been little studied. This paper, based on a corpus of authentic instances of the form, provides the first thorough examination of the interpretations assigned to NTSs m context and an account for those interpretations. The brief version of the account is that the NTS structure encodes procedural instructions to the effect that NTSs are to be interpreted as the rejection of conclusions derived from contextual assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will analyse the most frequent French and Italian proverbs in speeches at plenary sessions of the European Parliament (EP) from 2014 to 2022. After illustrating the methodology used in corpus-driven extraction of proverbs in French and Italian reference corpora (frWaC and itWaC) and in plenary sessions of the EP, some examples of proverbs in speeches at plenary sessions will be analysed in order to see how the EP staff interpreters deal with them in simultaneous interpreting (SI) from Italian into French. Furthermore, the multimodal dimension of proverbs and its management in SI will be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dutch uses cardinal posture verbs (zitten 'to sit', staan 'to stand', and liggen 'to lie') for all sorts of purposes, many of which have received considerable research attention – like the posture progressive, e.g. zitten te lezen 'lit. sit to read: to be reading'. This paper investigates a posture verb pattern in which a posture verb is combined with a past participle, e.g. zitten verstopt 'lit. sit hidden: to be hidden'. Previous analyses disagree on whether these patterns correspond to a fixed set of combinations, or to a productive schema with semantic restrictions. By examining over 6,000 attestations of the pattern, this paper evaluates these competing accounts, concluding that the data point strongly at productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a contrastive legal and corpus-based linguistic and terminological analysis to translate a common legal instrument on a global scale, the power of attorney in English or procuração in Portuguese. This usually takes the shape of a written document, granted before a notary public as required by law, allowing one person to appoint another person to act on his/her behalf. Civil law and common law systems differ considerably with respect to requirements, formalities and range of powers permitted. In cross-border transactions, a translation is required to certify the authority given to third parties who do not speak the language. Bearing this in mind, a comparable corpus of authentic Portuguese and British texts (from England and Wales, and Northern Ireland) pertaining to this legal genre (12 procurações and 24 PoA) is analysed to identify its characteristics at functional, situational, thematic, lexical and grammatical levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Follow-ups are elliptical interrogative forms typically constituting an utterance in their own right. They are used to signal attention to the interlocutor, to encourage them to continue or as a reply to a call. This paper investigates the invariant follow-up sì? ('yes?') in Italian and it argues that it represents a case of pragmatic language change. To this end, it investigates the diachronic distribution, collocation and contexts of usage of sì? in a variety of language sources in relation to plausible, equivalent expressions (i.e., dimmi and dica ['tell me']). The analysis will show that since its earliest record of use in films in 1960, the frequency of occurrence of this form has dramatically increased to the point that, today, it is the preferred device. The study will also provide solid evidence of positive correlations between the use of yes? in English language audio-visual products and the use of sì? in scripted and real-use Italian, strongly suggesting that the marker would in fact be a case of pragmatic borrowing from English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paradigmatic transgender woman is often negatively oversexualised, pornographised and fetishised in mainstream conceptualisations and discourses. However, self-sexualisation by transgender individuals is often portrayed as a (sex-)positive social phenomenon. Little research has been conducted that analyses the self-sexualisation strategies of the multiple instantiations of gender-variant identity, including transmasculine and non-binary social actors. This paper uses a corpus-informed socio-cognitive approach to critical discourse studies to identify differences between the self-sexualisation strategies and underpinning cognitive models of different gender-variant user-groups on Twitter. 2,565 users are coded into five categories: (1) transfeminine; (2) transmasculine; (3) transsexual; (4) transvestite; (5) non-binary. Findings show that transvestite- and transsexual-identifying users most closely fit the pornographised and fetishised conceptualisation, whilst non-binary users are the least self-sexualising user-group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates media representations of same-sex marriage debates in the UK using a combination of corpus linguistics tools and close reading, and drawing on Queer Linguistics. Following related work by Bachmann (2011), Baker (2004), and Love and Baker (2015), we analyse a 1.3 million-word corpus of UK national newspaper texts compiled for the Discourses of Marriage Research Group. Our corpus stretches from September 2011 and the announcement of a government consultation on same-sex marriage, to April 2014 when the first same-sex marriages took place. Using a top-down approach we investigate the discourses drawn upon in same-sex marriage debates (as indexed by keywords and key semantic fields) and uncover the binary social categories used to normalise social structures and hold the same-sex marriage debate in place. We also consider which social actors are (not) given a voice and/or agency and discuss how (same-sex) marriage is constituted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an introduction to the special issue, this paper presents an overview of previous corpus linguistic work in the field of language and sexuality and discusses the compatibility of corpus linguistic methodology with queer linguistics as a central theoretical approach in language and sexuality studies. The discussion is structured around five prototypical aspects of corpus linguistics that may be deemed problematic from a poststructuralist, queer linguistic perspective: quantification and associated notions of objectivity, reliance on linguistic forms and formal presence, concentration on highly frequent features, reliance on categories, and highlighting of differences. It is argued that none of these aspects rules out an application of corpus linguistic techniques within queer theoretically informed linguistic work per se and that it is rather the way these techniques are employed that can be seen as more or less compatible with queer linguistics. To complement the theoretical discussion, a collocation analysis of sexual descriptive adjectives in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is conducted in an attempt to address some of the issues raised. The concluding section makes suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I discuss the potential that corpus linguistics approaches have to make in terms of enabling research on language and sexuality. After giving some background relating to my involvement in the development of this approach and discussion of some of the benefits of using corpus linguistics, I then outline some potential areas for concern, including: misconceptions of the field as only quantitative, the danger of reading only concordance lines, over-reliance on the idea of removing bias, the tendency of corpus approaches to focus on difference or easily searchable features and issues with copyright and ethics. I then discuss potential future directions that the approach could take, focussing on work in non-western and non-English contexts, the development of new tools such as Lancsbox, and the integration of multimodal analyses, using examples from my own work and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are few published estimates of vocabulary sizes amongst students in tertiary education. Research does not offer estimates of the vocabulary size tertiary students might be expected to possess, though estimates exist for K-12 education, some EFL contexts, and the general population. Such research is important. For reading comprehension during tertiary education, a vocabulary of minimally 10,000 words is recommended, along with proficiency in academic vocabulary. A recent study of three universities in the United Kingdom concluded pedagogical intervention was required, since estimates indicated undergraduates knew fewer than 10,000 words. A subsequent study of a New Zealand university found students knew 16,000 words and pedagogical intervention was not required. The current study investigates 433 tertiary students at an Australian university to determine if students required vocabulary support. It contributes to a research record allowing for comparisons internationally, nationally, and over time. Methods employed included the Vocabulary Size Test/VST and Academic Vocabulary Test/AVT. Results indicate an average vocabulary size of 16,117 words, with academic vocabulary well-known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a number of linguistic properties of English SIT, STAND, and LIE which are argued to be the cardinal posture verbs of English. The distinctiveness of just these three posture verbs is evidenced by their relatively high frequency within the class of posture verbs in English and matched by grammaticalization facts in other languages. The paper considers the difficulty of differentiating action and state senses of these verbs and explores the use of posture verbs with inanimate subjects. It is argued that human experiential realities of posture motivate a number of these facts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]