Charles F. Meyer

The verb in contemporary English : theory and description

This collection of essays sheds new light on the verb in English. The authors illustrate that verbs can only be properly understood if studied from both a ...

The World Wide Web as Linguistic Corpus

Increasingly, corpus linguists have begun using the World Wide Web as a corpus for conducting linguistic analyses. The Web, however, is really a very different kind of corpus: we do not know, for instance, precisely how large it is or what kinds of texts are on it. In this chapter, we evaluate the Web as a linguistic corpus, providing estimates of its size and composition. In addition, we conduct a series of sample analyses of the Web, demonstrating that while commonly available search engines have definite limitations, they can in a matter of seconds retrieve extremely large volumes of data that are very relevant to a corpus analysis, and also provide frequency information that may not be entirely accurate but suggestive of how frequently particular words and grammatical constructions occur.

Apposition in English

Commenting on examples like (2), Huddleston (1971:42) remarks that &dquo;The relationship [between Ul and U2] is probably too loose to be handled formally as apposition&dquo;. I wish to argue in this paper that examples (1) and (2) both contain appositions and that these appositions can be accounted for formally if apposition is viewed as a semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic relation. Linguists and grammarians have had difficulty defining apposition mainly because they see it as primarily a syntactic relation. Sopher (1971:412) remarks that apposition is &dquo;a grammatical category distinct from both co-ordination and subordination&dquo;. Quirk et al. (1972:620) maintain that apposition is more like coordination because &dquo;typically the two or more units in apposition are constituents of the same level&dquo;. And although Matthews (1981:224 f.) argues that apposition is a type of juxtaposition, he notes instances where it is more like coordination, complementation, modification, and parataxis. Matthews’ difficulty classifying apposition syntactically is one indication that it may not be a syntactic relation, and indeed there is evidence to show that it is not simply a syntactic relation. For instance, one test for apposition is that U2 can usually be introduced by a marker of apposition, a word or phrase such as namely or that is. As the sentences below illustrate, however, there are no syntactic

In the Profession The “Empirical Tradition” in Linguistics

Linguistics has always been an empirical enterprise, concerned with data and facts and description, but it seems that the bar has been raised on the nature of the evidence we work with. That is, research papers are more experimentally based now than ever before . . . also, they are more corpus-based with many studies using as primary data (not just as corroborating data) examples that have been gleaned from available corpora, including the Internet. (Joseph 2008:687)

Gapped coordinations in English: Form, usage, and implications for linguistic theory

Abstract This paper reports the results of a usage-based study of gapping (as in “I ate fish, Bill [ ] rice, and Harry [ ] roast beef”), one of the most extensively studied syntactic constructions in English. Using the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) as the database, our investigation demonstrates that gapping is an extremely marginal grammatical construction in English. It is virtually non-existent in interactive speech and has only a very limited presence in certain types of monologues and written registers. Syntactically speaking, gapping favors simple structures, linking and low transitivity verbal elements, and can ostensibly be deemed as copula-derived. From a discourse pragmatic point of view, information flow, social interaction, and stylistic functions are found to be contributing factors to the ways that gapping structures are constituted and used. Our study can thus be taken as evidence that an adequate understanding of the form and discourse functions of syntactic structures is best achieved through examinations of actual language use.

Textual analysis: from philology to corpus linguistics

In the pre-electronic era, textual analysis was largely a matter of analyzing “static” texts, i.e., texts produced by writers at a given point in time. For instance, Otto Jespersen’s (1909–1949) seven volume A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles is based on a large collection of written texts (e.g. novels, essays, newspaper articles) that Jespersen used for examples and as the basis of generalizations that he made about the structure of the English language. Technology, however, has greatly changed how we view the text: it is no longer an isolated entity existing only in printed form and accessible only through tedious manual analysis. Instead, when a text is encoded in computerreadable form and becomes part of an electronic corpus, it can be subjected to many different kinds of linguistic analysis. In my chapter, I will focus on how the field of corpus linguistics has greatly changed the potential for textual analysis, moving us beyond traditional philological analyses of “dead” texts to analyses that highlight the dynamic nature of language. For instance, traditional research in historical linguistics has focused mainly on structures found in a series of largely canonical written texts. However, because the Corpus of Early English Correspondence contains texts (e.g. personal letters) written between 1440–1800 that are very close to spoken language, analyses of this corpus can give us a sense of what the spoken language of this period might have been like, and additionally, can help us track changes in the language as they occurred in correspondence written by males and females belonging to different social classes. More synchronically oriented corpora permit similar kinds of analyses, primarily because they contain spoken as well as written language, and are encoded in a manner permitting easy access to the information in them. In short, current linguistic corpora are giving us unprecedented views into the structure of English used in diverse contexts at various times in its history by differing speakers and writers.