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Page 1 of 3

  • Expanding the scope of grammatical variation: towards a comprehensive account of genitive variation across registers

  • DOUGLAS BIBER, BENEDIKT SZMRECSANYI, RANDI REPPEN, TOVE LARSSON
  • Journal:
    English Language & Linguistics / Volume 28 / Issue 1 / March 2024
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    07 December 2023, pp. 95-133
    • Article
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  • Most studies of genitive variation in English have considered only the choice of two variants ('s versus of), based on analysis of only tokens that are judged to be interchangeable. We argue in the present article that research on genitive variation can be usefully extended in both respects: including premodifying nouns as a third variant; and attempting to account for all tokens of the genitive. In addition, we extend the scope of analysis to explore the possibility of contextual constraints having different importance in different registers.

    First, we carry out a text-linguistic analysis comparing the rates of genitive variants in texts from three registers (conversation, newspaper reports, academic articles), showing that genitives overall are much more frequent in written registers, with the premodifying noun variant being especially frequent. Then, a variationist analysis is undertaken to account for the choice of genitive variant in particular contexts and registers. A total of 3,425 genitive tokens were coded for ten contextual characteristics (e.g. length of the Modifying NP, semantic category of the Modifying noun and the Head noun, final sibilancy of the Modifying noun). Statistical analyses with random forests and conditional inference trees are triangulated, showing how contextual factors interact in predicting the use of each genitive variant – and how patterns of variation differ across registers.

The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics
  • Edited by Douglas Biber, Randi Reppen
  • Published online:
    05 July 2015
    Print publication:
    25 June 2015
  • The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (CHECL) surveys the breadth of corpus-based linguistic research on English, including chapters on collocations, phraseology, grammatical variation, historical change, and the description of registers and dialects. The most innovative aspects of the CHECL are its emphasis on critical discussion, its explicit evaluation of the state of the art in each sub-discipline, and the inclusion of empirical case studies. While each chapter includes a broad survey of previous research, the primary focus is on a detailed description of the most important corpus-based studies in this area, with discussion of what those studies found, and why they are important. Each chapter also includes a critical discussion of the corpus-based methods employed for research in this area, as well as an explicit summary of new findings and discoveries.

Corpus Linguistics
  • Investigating Language Structure and Use
  • Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad, Randi Reppen
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    23 April 1998
  • This book is about investigating the way people use language in speech and writing. It introduces the corpus-based approach to linguistics, based on analysis of large databases of real language examples stored on computer. Each chapter focuses on a different area of linguistics, including lexicography, grammar, discourse, register variation, language acquisition, and historical linguistics. Example analyses are presented in each chapter to provide concrete descriptions of the research methods and advantages of corpus-based techniques. Ten methodology boxes provide clear and concise explanations of the issues in doing corpus-based research and reading corpus-based studies and there is a useful appendix of resources for corpus-based investigation. This lucid and comprehensive introduction to the subject will be welcomed by a broad range of readers, from undergraduate students to professional researchers.

  • 2 - Using corpora in the language classroom

  • Edited by Brian Tomlinson, Leeds Metropolitan University
  • Book:
    Materials Development in Language Teaching
    Published online:
    09 February 2023
    Print publication:
    07 April 2011, pp 35-50

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Since the mid 1990s, dictionaries based on corpora (collections of naturally occurring texts) have been widespread in English as a second language (ESL) classrooms. These dictionaries, based on large collections of natural language, not only provide learners with information about word meanings, but also provide important information about word use. As a natural extension of using dictionaries based on corpora, teachers have become increasingly interested in using information from corpora to inform and create language-learning materials. In the 1990s resources such as Johns (1994) and Tribble and Jones (1997) provided teachers with some ideas and guidelines for ways to use corpus information in the classroom. Now, with more and more corpus-informed or corpus-based teaching resources becoming available (such as: Focus on Vocabulary (Schmitt and Schmitt 2005); the Touchstone series (McCarthy, McCarten and Sandiford 2006/2006); and Real Grammar (Conrad and Biber 2009)), this interest has continued to grow and has even expanded to teachers themselves wanting to bring corpora into language classrooms. Using corpora in the language classroom can provide teachers and students with several advantages. Corpora can provide a rich source of authentic material, and, therefore, examples of the language students will encounter outside the language classroom. Corpora can also provide students with many examples of the target feature (e.g. a vocabulary item or grammatical structure) in a concentrated manner, to help them better understand the feature and its contexts and cotexts of use.

    Before discussing some ways to bring corpora into a classroom, a word about corpora and corpus linguistics is in order. A corpus is a collection of naturally occurring texts that is usually stored on a computer (see Biber, Conrad and Reppen 1998 for more on the characteristics of corpora). If the texts are stored on a computer, it is possible to search texts for particular features. A number of tools are available for searching corpora (e.g. AntConc, MonoConc, WordSmith – see the Appendix for more information). It is also important to note that the term ‘text’ is used to refer to either spoken or written discourse. The spoken texts are usually transcribed into a written version, and in most cases the audio files are not available.

  • Corpus-Based Investigations of Language Use

  • Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad, Randi Reppen
  • Journal:
    Annual Review of Applied Linguistics / Volume 16 / March 1996
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    19 November 2008, pp. 115-136

  • On a basic level, there are two main areas of study within linguistics: language structure and language use. Language practioners as well as theoreticians must be concerned with both areas; that is, they need a full understanding of the structural resources available in a language as well as analyses of what speakers and writers actually do with those resources. Investigations of a representative text corpus—a principled collection of texts stored on computer—provide important insights into both of these domains and open new avenues of inquiry.

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