This chapter provides a critical overview of how L2 researchers have used measures of lexical and phraseological complexity, with a special focus on their definition and operationalization. Lexical and phraseological complexity are often measured in terms of diversity (the number of different words or multi-word units respectively) and sophistication (the number of ‘sophisticated’ words or multi-word units, with ‘sophisticated’ variously understood as less frequent, more specialized, or in the case of phraseological sophistication, as more strongly associated word combinations). With the development of natural language processing (NLP) tools such as the Lexical Complexity Analyzer (Lu, 2012) or the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Lexical Sophistication (Kyle et al., 2018), L2 researchers can now analyze lexical complexity in L2 English texts using dozens or even hundreds of measures with a click of a button. However, unresolved questions remain: How accurate, reliable, and valid are these measures across learner samples and research contexts? Can they assess L2 proficiency across registers? How should measures be selected from the many available? By contrast, do the current, limited set of measures of phraseological complexity represent the full construct, or is there a need to develop for further development?

Burroughs’ writing is widely interpreted to depict existence in terms of universal addiction, and a fight against it. This chapter shows the extent to which drug use in his life and work lies outside this simplistic model. His ‘Algebra of Need’ polemics are shown to belong to a specific period, and an account of his career with drugs outlines his opiate use; his excursion into hallucinogens, notably yagé, as psychic exploration; and his chosen literary precursors, notably De Quincey. Burroughs became more comfortable with his dependency in later life, and he finally emphasizes drug use, particularly in an American historical context, as a libertarian political issue. The chapter notes his depiction of drug experience as a potentially valuable subjective space, together with nostalgia and dreaming, and suggests that a common denominator throughout his changing stances on drugs is freedom: not only from addiction, but from the body, and from social control.

The chapter explores the legal and transactional governance of venture capital (VC) from the viewpoint of the theory of the firm as a knowledge commons. At first sight, VC seems far removed from any notion of commons, if that is taken to mean a shared resource constituted by emergent rules of conduct based on interactions between multiple stakeholders. Bright line rules favouring the interests of capital holders over those of producers and communities dominate the orthodox legal account of VC, which stresses the importance of US-style transactional flexibility in managing investment risks. On closer inspection, however, VC ecosystems have many commons-like aspects, involving risk-sharing, information pooling, and the braiding of formal and informal rules. The public benefits of VC depend on the positive externalities generated by knowledge spillovers, which cannot be fully captured by private ordering. Understanding these features through Masahiko Aoki’s theory of the firm as embedded cognition, and drawing on interviews with mostly Europe-based VC funds, entrepreneurs and legal advisers, the chapter argues that the governance of VC should be concerned with maximising the net social return from innovation, taking into account the multiple interests involved in knowledge creation and preservation.

As young people progress from primary school, through secondary, and, for many, on to university, they gain knowledge, develop skills, and learn to relate to others in ways that remain influential throughout their lives. Language is central to this process. At each educational stage, students need to understand and express new types of content to new audiences in new contexts. For some, this offers a rich opportunity for language growth. For many, however, academic language is a barrier that can seriously hamper their educational and life chances. Understanding language development at school and university is therefore central both to understanding linguistic, and sociocognitive development and to achieving a socially just education. This chapter reviews the contribution that corpus research has made and can make to understanding educational writing. It reviews the main foci of research, critically evaluates its methods, summarizes our current state of knowledge, and suggests directions for future work. It then looks in detail at one project, led by the author, that researched the grammar and vocabulary of children in schools in England. It highlights central findings and reflects on methodological strengths and weaknesses and on what lessons might be learned for future research.

This chapter explores William Burroughs’s literary and theoretical engagement with the virus as a figure of both destruction and transformation. Drawing on works such as The Cities of Red Night, Naked Lunch, and Ghost of Chance, this chapter examines how Burroughs reimagines parasitical entities – not solely as biological threats but as units of language, ideology, and cultural transmission. Situating Burroughs’ writing alongside scientific thought and postmodern theory, the essay conducts a close reading of Burroughs’ lectures on the virus at the City College of New York in 1974, exploring the virus as a liminal force capable of mutating identity, dissolving fixed moral binaries, and challenging notions of agency and autonomy. Burroughs’s fascination with symbiosis and parasitism, both literal and metaphorical, reveals a vision of the self as shaped by infectious systems: genetic, linguistic, and media-based. Ultimately, the essay argues that Burroughs seeks not just to expose viral control but to become a viral force himself, rewriting perception through a radical reprogramming of language and consciousness.

This chapter focuses on learner corpora of L2 English and the analysis of learner language varieties. The first part of the chapter describes the main characteristics of learner corpus data and presents a survey of the aspects that have most often been dealt with in the literature within the frame of learner corpus research (LCR) and its three main research orientations (descriptive, predictive, and pedagogical). A number of representative studies are selected to illustrate various facets of LCR. The chapter then describes the methods that are typically used in LCR, including multimethod approaches. It identifies the recent advances in LCR as well as the challenges that it still needs to address in terms of data collection, methodology, linguistic analysis, and applications. In the second part of the chapter, the main aspects of LCR are illustrated in an empirical study that the authors conducted on the use of discourse markers (DMs) in learner spoken English. The study compares six frequent two-word DMs (and so, and then, I mean, in fact, sort of, you know) in native and learner speech, both from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The study considers individual texts in addition to entire corpora, showing that corpora may display a high degree of internal variability.

The inspiration for this volume is Simon Deakin’s proposal to think of the corporation as a shared resource which is collectively held and managed for the benefit of multiple interests. A small but fascinating recent literature extended this insight to mutuals, cooperatives, and benefit corporations, while an independent literature applied a similar line of Ostromian thinking to inter alia cities, land trusts, civil society organization, and certain kinds of platforms. All these studies noted the importance of shared knowledge, but none deployed the governing knowledge commons (GKC) framework. What this volume attempts to do is to steer the discussion toward this unifying framework. This chapter introduces the contributions, which despite their diversity engage with the idea that corporations and ecosystems comprising corporate actors cohere around shared knowledge, values, and other kinds of intellectual or cognitive resources, the sustainable production and reproduction of which depends on specific practices and rule configurations.

The book concludes with a short chapter that invites readers to re-consider the relationship between Truth Commissions and international law. It emphasizes the consequences of this relationship for the quality of state-society relations in the aftermath of violent conflict. It also highlights the importance of paying attention to who is authorizing the inclusion of local cultural expressions of violent conflict in the accounts produced by Truth Commission; who benefits from such inclusions; and what ends are being served.

Spoken discourse is a less commonly explored domain of corpus-based research. This chapter explores these challenges, as well as providing an overview of current corpus research on spoken discourse and emerging research areas. It concludes with a case study illustrating methods for these emerging research areas. The chapter highlights newer areas of corpus-based research such as fluency, prosody, and multimodal studies, language variation and change, and discourse-level units and includes an empirical study that illustrates two of these research areas through the use of fluency, prosody, and multimodal features across nurse–patient interactions. Rather than reporting on the interactions as a whole, the analysis also shows frequency of occurrence across discourse-level units: opening the visit, establishing the patient’s chief complaint, examination of the patient (both physical and patient history), counseling the patient (providing care options), and closing the interaction. The data comes from the US Nurse–Standardized Patient Corpus (Staples, 2015), and includes fifty interactions between nurses and standardized patients, who are actors trained to present the same case to multiple providers. The study demonstrates some of the more challenging elements of spoken discourse analysis and offers insights for the analysis of spoken discourse, particularly in these emerging research areas.

This chapter focuses on the multiple identities performed by William Burroughs through the sign system of his distinctive fashion choices. It explores the paradox that Burroughs’ sartorial appearance made him both immediately recognizable and yet permanently elusive. In particular, it reads the many significations of his trademark choice of hat, arguing that it aligned Burroughs with identities ranging from gangsters to bankers as well as a specific past era at odds with his futuristic writing. The hat also had a psychological function as a mask for Burroughs’ emotional vulnerability and ambivalence about being an outsider. Miles makes a comparative analysis with such figures as David Bowie, to argue that in his fashion choices, “El Hombre Invisible” was at his most visible as a performance artist.