Gerald Nelson

Exploring natural language: working with the British component of the international corpus of English

ICE-GB is a 1 million-word corpus of contemporary British English. It is fully parsed, and contains over 83,000 syntactic trees. Together with the dedicated retrieval software, ICECUP, ICE-GB is an unprecedented resource for the study of English syntax. Exploring Natural Language is a comprehensive guide to both corpus and software. It contains a full reference for ICE-GB. The chapters on ICECUP provide complete instructions on the use of the many features of the software, including concordancing, lexical and grammatical searches, sociolinguistic queries, random sampling, and searching for syntactic structures using ICECUPs Fuzzy Tree Fragment models. Special attention is given to the principles of experimental design in a parsed corpus. Six case studies provide step-by-step illustrations of how the corpus and software can be used to explore real linguistic issues, from simple lexical studies to more complex syntactic topics, such as noun phrase structure, verb transitivity, and voice.

Using Fuzzy Tree Fragments to explore English grammar

Readers of ET may recall two papers, the first by the late Sidney Greenbaum (‘ICE: the International Corpus of English,’ ET 7, 1991, 3–7), the second and by Akiva Quinn & Nick Porter (‘Investigating English Usage with ICECUP’, ET 10, 1994, pp. 21–24) which introduced the International Corpus of English (ICE) and its search facility ICECUP (the ICE Corpus Utility Programme). The present paper has a two-fold aim: to (re-)acquaint readers with ICE and discuss the latest developments in ICECUP – including its recent release on CD-ROM. The International Corpus of English was initiated by Sidney Greenbaum, whose aim was to set up a number of identically constructed corpora (for the purpose of grammar research) in the worlds various English-speaking countries.

An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics

On first looking into a corpus, teachers as well as students may well be blinded by the sheer scale of the resource and by the possibilities for research that it offers. As the author of this book puts it, “The research topics in a machine-readable cor pus are potentially as various and wide ranging as are the facts about a language and the use of that language” (274). The value of this book is that it provides practical examples of the range of research possibilities that a corpus offers, as well as indi cating how corpus-based research projects may be undertaken. It is informed throughout by the view that corpus linguistics is not a separate branch of linguistics, but rather “descriptive linguistics aided by new technology” (268). There is some theoretical discussion of the place of corpus linguistics in the wider field, but in general, the author’s approach is to let the results speak for themselves. The author’s declared aim is to whet the appetites of teachers and students, and in this he clearly succeeds. In the “Introduction,” the author suggests that some readers might usefully begin with chapter 3, “Corpus-Based Descriptions of English.” This is the central part of the book and by far the most valuable in terms of whetting the appetite. It consists of a very comprehensive and wide-ranging review of previous corpus-based research, divided into the following sections: lexical description, grammatical studies cen tered on morphemes or words, grammatical studies centered on the sentence, pragmatics and spoken discourse, and studies of variation. The first section of the chapter investigates how computerized corpora are increasingly being used in lexi cography and continues with a review of collocational studies based on the LOB corpus, as well as work by Sinclair and Renouf on collocational frameworks. Under “word-centered” grammatical studies, previous work on modals, voice, aspect, the subjunctive, as well as prepositions and conjunctions are very comprehensively ex emplified and described. The list continues. The latter sections of this chapter re view work by Kuc*era and Francis on sentence length, Altenberg on verb complementation, Mair on nonfinite complementation, Meyer on apposition,