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The present study offers an alternative methodological approach to the growing body of literature on stance —the linguistic arrangements that construe a writer's perspective on knowledge. A number of recent studies have concluded that control over linguistic stance tends to develop through college and that preferred markers of stance differ by discipline. We know relatively little, however, about how those patterns differ within and between individuals. This study uses a person-centered method, multilevel latent profile analysis, to determine how secondary students in the United States use typical markers of stance in their writing, and to what extent that use varies across texts. The analysis focuses on 338 informal responses produced by 27 rising high school seniors during a college access program. Findings point to wide variation in how students at this level use linguistic markers in their writing, and to the role of the larger instructional context in shaping stance in the informal response genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper discusses the development of corpus-based curriculum for ESP, with a focus on two underresearched areas: health care communication and the use of corpus materials for pronunciation. Three aspects of corpus-based curriculum development are explored: corpus-based needs analysis; corpus-based materials development; and corpus-based assessment and evaluation (Flowerdew, 2012; Tono, 2011). First, this paper briefly reports on a quantitative corpus-based analysis of 104 nurse-patient interactions that was conducted to identify needs of nurses in clinical interactions, with a focus on the findings related to pronunciation (pitch range, tone choice, and prominence/sentence stress). Key differences were found between international and U.S. nurse discourse in the use of these features. Next, the paper describes the curriculum for a Pronunciation for Nurses course, with an emphasis on corpus-based materials development from the corpus described above. Finally, the paper discusses the corpus-based assessment of participants' progress and an evaluation of the Pronunciation for Nurses curriculum, including pre and post-tests, interviews with nurse participants, interviews with ESL teachers, and course evaluations. The methods discussed in the paper have implications for other ESP contexts and other aspects of language use. Highlights • Α corpus analysis of prosodic features was conducted on nurse–patient interactions. • Τhe discourse of internationally educated nurses (IENs) and U.S. nurses was compared. • The findings showed that IENs marked greater prominence and narrower pitch range. • The findings and corpus materials were integrated into a pronunciation course. • The course yielded more pragmatically appropriate pronunciation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the small but growing field of corpus-based work on metaphor offers numerous examples of fine-grained analyses of metaphor as it occurs in discourse, such work has generally been extremely narrow in focus, examining the distribution either of particular, searchable lexical items or of instantiations of a certain conceptual metaphor within a given discourse domain. Aiming for a broader approach, this paper addresses some of the methodological issues associated with using corpora as a tool for metaphor research, and proposes criteria for identifying metaphor in spontaneous discourse. Based on approximately 500 metaphorical utterances drawn from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (DuBois 2000; DuBois et. al. 2003), this study assesses the overall frequency of metaphor in discourse, as well as the relative frequencies with which various types of topics are referred to metaphorically, towards the goal of a better understanding of how and why speakers use metaphor in common language. It is discovered that the frequency of each of these categories of metaphor corresponds closely with its degree of concreteness, as verified independently with a survey of college students. In addition, this paper explores the role of metaphor as a discourse-level structuring tool. The overall methodology is offered as a model for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether the position of adverb phrases in sentences is regionally patterned in written Standard American English, based on an analysis of a 25 million word corpus of letters to the editor representing the language of 200 cities from across the United States. Seven measures of adverb position were tested for regional patterns using the global spatial autocorrelation statistic Moran's I and the local spatial autocorrelation statistic Getis-Ord Gi*. Three of these seven measures were indentified as exhibiting significant levels of spatial autocorrelation, contrasting the language of the Northeast with language of the Southeast and the South Central states. These results demonstrate that continuous regional grammatical variation exists in American English and that regional linguistic variation exists in written Standard English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compared three-word move-specific lexical bundles (MLBs) in dissertation abstracts authored by linguistics doctoral students from China and the United States. Two separate corpora were constructed for analysis: (1) The China Linguistics PhD Abstracts Corpus (CLC), consisting of 700 abstracts totaling 613,713 words generated by doctoral students from China specializing in linguistics, and (2) the America Linguistics PhD Abstracts Corpus (ALC), comprising 700 abstracts totaling 247,359 words written by American doctoral students in linguistics. The identification of MLBs was based on log-likelihood values, indicating a notably higher number of instances within a specific move in contrast to the overall corpus. The study then proceeded to compare the structures, functions, and communicative purposes of MLBs in the two corpora. The findings of the analysis are as follows: (1) Chinese students employed a higher percentage of NP- and PP-based MLBs but a lower proportion of VP-based MLBs, and both groups used different words within similar structures; (2) Chinese students employed a higher percentage of research- and participant-oriented MLBs but a lower proportion of text-oriented MLBs, and the two groups used dissimilar MLBs to fulfill similar functions; and (3) the two groups employed distinct MLBs to achieve identical communicative purposes, with Chinese students utilizing MLBs specific to the CLC corpus. These findings highlight the pedagogical significance of MLBs and underscore the importance of corpus linguistics in identifying and teaching essential move-specific vocabulary to second/foreign language learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Espanola de Linguistica is the property of Sociedad Espanola de Linguistica 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.)

Abstract: The development of new communication technologies has created a wide variety of new fields in which human beings can construct identities. The past decade has seen a proliferation of opportunities to use the internet for health related advice and information and many new sites have been created where participants can construct identities, formulate problems and seek solutions concerning health related issues. This paper will report on a study of emails written in to a UK-based website concerned with health issues for young people. Our analysis was driven by corpus linguistics, a computational methodology for interrogating extensive datasets, and we have combined both quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of language. We interrogated a 400,000 word dataset of messages and were able to identify terms whose usage was elevated compared to the English language as a whole. As well as personal pronouns, these included many terms related to sexual health and bodily development, as well as terms such as ‘normal’ and ‘worried’ which were identified for further exploration. Whereas previous research on sexual health has discovered the use of vague terms and euphemisms, here, young people described themselves, their anatomy and their identities in meticulous detail. This study enables us to define the role of health topics raised, the presentation of health concerns, and contributes towards the discovery of a distinctive ‘genre’ of health messages concerning sexual health which differs from that found by other researchers concentrating on face to face encounters. In conclusion we suggest that for researchers and practitioners working in health with young people in the medium of English there could be valuable lessons in communication to be learned from examination of corpora of the health care language concerned. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study examines the use of metaphors, metonymies and metaphorical similes for love in a corpus of 52 year-end number one hit songs in the USA from 1946 to 2016 according to Billboard charts. The analysis is performed within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and from quantitative and qualitative perspectives. Our findings indicate that the theme of romantic love is prevalent in US mainstream pop music over the course of seven decades but shows evolutionary features. Metaphors of love evolve from conventional to novel with a notable increase in both heartbreak and erotic metaphors. Remarkably, the study finds that the two predominant conceptualizations of love in pop songs – which in a significant number of cases overlap – are the following: experiential, originating in the physical proximity of the lovers, and cultural, reflecting possession by one lover and showing a non-egalitarian type of love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we take a queer linguistics approach to the analysis of data from British newspaper articles that discuss the introduction of same-sex marriage. Drawing on methods from critical discourse analysis (CDA) and corpus linguistics, we focus on the construction of agency in relation to the government extending marriage to same-sex couples, and those resisting this. We show that opponents to same-sex marriage are represented and represent themselves as victims whose moral values, traditions and civil liberties are being threatened by the state. Specifically, we argue that victimhood is invoked in a way that both enables and permits discourses of implicit homophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article exploits the synergy of critical discourse studies and Corpus Linguistics to study the pervasive representation of Islam and Muslims in an approximate 670,000-word corpus of US news media stories published between 2001 and 2015. Following collocation and concordance analysis of the most frequent topics or categories which revolve around the representation of Islam and Muslims in US news stories, the Discourse-Historical Approach to critical discourse analysis was adopted to investigate how the discursive strategies of nomination (construction of in-groups and out-groups) and predication (labeling social actors more or less positively or negatively) are used in US news media stories. The findings indicated that, in general, Islam and Muslims are associated with violence, religious radicalism, and Islamic extremist militants. Finally, the article discusses the discursive themes resulting from the analysis of personal pronouns as well as the educational implications of the findings for social studies and multicultural education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes the discursive strategies deployed in the linguistic production of homelessness and homeless persons in the context of city-level policies on urban camping in a major urban center in the USA, and outlines the ways that homeless activists contested their use in the public sphere. Homelessness has historically been defined as a deviant form of behavior and the subjectivity of ‘homeless’ has functioned as a social stigma alongside other forms of deviance. I build on analysis of racism and anti-Semitism by examining three linguistic mechanisms deployed by speakers to produce and contest homelessness as a deviant subjectivity: the use of metonyms in processes of synechdochization, the use of metaphors in describing groups and actions, and how processes of lexicalization attach meaning to places and social categories across three categories of deviance prevalent in descriptions of homelessness and urban camping: dirtiness, drugs, and danger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we explore linguistic constructions of gender in US sports reportage concerning two related basketball altercations: the Pacers-Pistons NBA fight in 2004 and the Shock-Sparks WNBA fight in 2008. We use a combined corpus and qualitative textual analysis to investigate coverage from the days immediately following the fights and to compare that coverage to sports reportage more generally. Our analysis reveals key differences in narrative focus; for example, that NBA coverage is most interested in blame assignation in the isolated event, while WNBA coverage concerns gender and the league writ large. Such patterns, which are realised linguistically in both explicit and implicit ways, contribute to the 'othering' of women and women athletes in the increasingly important sports-media-commercial complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Sociolinguistics is the property of Wiley-Blackwell 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.)

Population counts and longitude and latitude coordinates were estimated for the 50 largest cities in the United States by computational linguistic techniques and by human participants. The mathematical technique Latent Semantic Analysis applied to newspaper texts produced similarity ratings between the 50 cities that allowed for a multidimensional scaling (MDS) of these cities. MDS coordinates correlated with the actual longitude and latitude of these cities, showing that cities that are located together share similar semantic contexts. This finding was replicated using a first-order co-occurrence algorithm. The computational estimates of geographical location as well as population were akin to human estimates. These findings show that language encodes geographical information that language users in turn may use in their understanding of language and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the twentieth century, a new type of adverb, viewpoint adverbs formed with the suffix -wise. appeared in English. This article traces the diffusion and development of viewpoint -wise adverbs using American and British newspaper corpora, the spoken component of the British National Corpus. and the Longman Spoken American Corpus. It is shown that the adverbs are at least twice as frequent in the spoken corpora as in the written, that they are increasing in both American and British English, and that the originally American adverb type is now more frequent in British English. Its spread seems to be motivated by both functional and social factors. In newspapers, a high proportion occurs in represented speech, and the major domains are sports, art and entertainment, and "living." It has extended its range of bases from nouns to noun phrases and, to some extent, generalized to adjectives and adverbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]