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Using data from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and the British National Corpus (BNC), this article examines what Turkish learners of English know about a set of frequent verb-argument constructions (VACs, such as ‘V with n’ as illustrated by ‘I like to go with the flow’) and in what ways their VAC knowledge is influenced by native English usage and by transfer from their first language (L1), Turkish. An ICLE Turkish analysis gave us access to dominant verb-VAC associations in Turkish learners ́ English, and provided insights into the productivity and predictability of selected constructions. Comparisons with the BNC and other ICLE subsets (ICLE German and ICLE Spanish) allowed us to determine how strong the usage effect is on Turkish learners’ verb-VAC associations and whether Turkish learners differ in this respect from learners of other typologically different L1s. Potential effects of L1 transfer were explored with the help of a large reference corpus of Turkish, the Turkish National Corpus (TNC).

This paper introduces the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) as a new resource that will enable researchers and teachers of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) to investigate the written discourse of highly advanced student writers whose written assignments have been awarded the grade ‘A’. The usefulness of two aspects of the design of the corpus — variation across discipline and across student level — is illustrated by two case studies, one on attribution and one on recurrent phraseological patterns. The first case study investigates how references to the work of others are realized and to what extent disciplinary variation exists in unpublished academic writing by students. The second study examines the use of phraseological items (n-grams and phrase-frames) by students at four different levels of undergraduate and graduate study. The paper closes with a discussion of the results of both case studies and describes future avenues for MICUSP-based research.

Starting from the observation that meaning does not primarily reside in individual words but in the phrase, this paper focuses on the examination of recurring phrases in language. It introduces a new analytical model that leads corpus researchers to a profile of the central phraseological items in a selected text or text collection. In this paper, the model is applied to a 3.5-million word corpus of online academic book reviews that represents part of the specialized discourse of the global community of linguists. This demonstrates how the model facilitates the study of the occurrence and distribution of the central phraseological items in linguistic book reviews, and how it helps to determine the extent of the phraseological tendency of language.

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.

DISCOURSE IN THE PROFESSIONS: PERSPECTIVES FROM CORPUS LINGUISTICS. Ulla Connor and Thomas A. Upton (Eds.) . Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2004. Pp. vi + 334. $119.00 cloth. Whereas general corpora have been used successfully by linguists and language practitioners for more than 40 years now, corpora that capture the language of particular discourse communities are only recently becoming the focus of attention. The chapters in the present collection, edited by Connor and Upton, respond to the growing research interest in academic and professional discourses and illustrate the profitable use of specialized corpora in linguistics and in the learning and teaching of English for academic purposes (EAP) and English for specific purposes (ESP).

In late 2009 the Corpus Research Group at the University of Michigan’s English Language Institute launched on the web the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). MICUSP Simple, the search and browse interface to the corpus, provides free and immediate access (without need to register) to 829 A-graded papers written by University of Michigan students in their final undergraduate year or in their first three years of graduate educationdhence the label “Upper-level.” The papers have been drawn from 16 disciplines across the four academic divisions of the university, and represent a wide range of text-types or genres. The total number of words stored in the electronic database is around 2.6 million. The URL for the current version of MICUSP is http://search-micusp. elicorpora.info/simple. The MICUSP project website is at http://micusp.elicorpora.info. MICUSP has been designed with a range of users in mind, including corpus linguists, scholars in disciplinary variation, writing instructors, those concerned with English for Academic Purposes, and graduate and undergraduate students, both native speakers of English and speakers of English as an Additional Language. The MICUSP Simple interface features interactive graphs, user-friendly navigation, automatic results update in response to user selection, and full paper view. Initial responses from around the world have been very positive. A number of internal research projects are already under way, one investigating student use of ‘scare quotes’, the other whether students accompany a sentence-initial “This” with a noun phrase or not. On the basis of the successful Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE, see http://micase.elicorpora.info), launched in 2001, we expect MICUSP to be adopted externally for a range of teaching and research purposes, not excluding its use as a source of data for doctoral dissertations. MICUSP has been five years in the making. The original research design was put together by Professor John Swales and Dr Rita Simpson-Vlach in 2004. Then Dr Annelie Adel spearheaded the project; subsequently Dr Ute Romer and Dr Matthew Brook O’Donnell have brought the project to successful completion, aided by considerable numbers of part-time research assistants and interns. The projected next stages of the project will be an enhancement of MICUSP Simple with additional features, and the release of an offline version of the corpus, accompanied by a handbook. Please direct inquiries about the MICUSP project to elicorpora@umich.edu