Pam Peters

New Frontiers of Corpus Research

This volume presents highlights of the first ICAME conference held in the southern hemisphere, in papers on new kinds of corpora for business and communications technology, as well as those comprising computer-mediated communication and college newspapers. The latter yield lively insights into the digitized discourse of younger adults and non-professional writers -- speech communities that have been underrepresented in the standard English corpora. Other groups that are newly represented in research reported in this volume are bilingual users of English in Singapore, Hong Kong and China, as corpus data is brought to bear on second-language speech and writing. The proposed corpus of spoken Dutch profiled here will support research into its variation in different genres and contexts of use in the Netherlands and in Belgium. Research on new historical corpora from C15 to C18 is also reported, along with techniques for normalizing prestandardized English for computerized searching. Meanwhile papers on contemporary usage show some of the continual interplay between British and American English, in grammar and details of the lexicon that are important for English language teachers.

Learning essential terms and concepts in Statistics and Accounting

This paper describes a terminological approach to the teaching and learning of fundamental concepts in foundation tertiary units in Statistics and Accounting, using an online dictionary-style resource (TermFinder) with customised termbanks for each discipline. Designed for independent learning, the termbanks support inquiring students from non-English-speaking backgrounds – including international students – in their understanding of the key concepts of their discipline. Two quasi-experimental studies of the use of these termbanks are reported here, showing the difference that they made in the performances of first-year students studying Statistics and Accounting, when compared with those from the previous year before the termbanks were available. In both units, the exam results for the experimental cohorts were significantly better than those of the cohorts in the preceding year. Higher success rates and raised levels of engagement with terminological questions were registered for all students, Australian domestic and international. Individual study patterns emerged in the trial of the accounting termbank, with international students making early use of the termbank with its translation equivalents in Mandarin Chinese, and Australian students more inclined to use it close to the final exam. The testing of the customised termbanks, developed collaboratively by lexicographers and academic staff, vindicates their use in large, diverse classes and their value to students as resources for independent learning. That apart, the research affirms the value of focusing on terminology and the nexus with disciplinary concepts in introductory courses.

Australian Narrative Voices and the Colloquial Element in Nineteenth Century Written Registers

This paper analyses the colloquial elements used in the narratives of three Australian writers of the later nineteenth century—Marcus Clarke, AJ Boyd and Henry Lawson—to investigate whether their narrative styles can be traced back to nineteenth century journalism. A set of four reference corpora were created out of the COOEE corpus data (its narrative and newspaper categories) for the last two quartiles of the century, and one for each of the three writers. Six linguistic variables from Bibers multidimensional analysis representing interactive speech were used for four-way comparisons among the reference corpora, showing contrasting shifts in style. The later narratives proved increasingly colloquial in style, and the later news reporting increasingly impersonal. The use of colloquial elements intensifies from Clarke to Boyd to Lawson, and is always more marked than in the reference corpora. Their narrative voices are their own, not simply derived from contemporary narrative or news writing.

Usage Guides and Usage Trends in Australian and British English

This paper presents a mini-diachronic investigation into the question of whether usage guides (prescriptive or descriptive) affect the evolution of standard written English, using the notions of codification, standardization and hyperstandardization. It examines the commentaries on three variable usage items (-ise/-ize spellings, alright v. all right, and data in singular/plural agreement) in dictionaries, style manuals and usage guides published in Australia and Britain from 1966 to 1995. The treatment of each usage item in terms of prescription/proscription or acceptance is then compared with quantitative evidence of actual usage, using (a) a set of standard corpora (Australian and British) from 1966 to 1995, and (b) twenty-first century data from the internet (Google searches of Australian and UK sites). Changes in relative frequencies of the variants for each pair are then analysed as reflections of the standardization process and/or the putative hyperstandardizing influence of usage commentaries. Despite markedly different treatments in Australian and British references, the trends for the three variable usage items in twenty-first century English are found to be much the same. Hyperstandardization may be seen where prescribed spellings replace the alternatives previously available; but the outcomes for the other variable items suggest they are rationalized by common usage sooner or later, whether the local usage commentary is prescriptive or descriptive.

Textual structure and segmentation in online documents

Despite the flexibility of the electronic medium, the computer screen itself puts constraints on the shape of the discourse accessed through it. The effects are likely to show up in longer documents, where the communication strategies relied on for the printed page would need to be modified and/or supplemented. This paper describes a comparative study of structural units in print and electronic documents (p-texts taken from AUS-ICE, and e-texts from a new corpus of electronic documents (EDOC), a selection of hypertexts that were “digitally born”, i.e. published first in electronic form). The study focuses on segmentation and local structures in a matched sample of e-texts and p-texts from two genres of prose (informational and instructional). The findings point to more explicit marking of local structures in e-texts, with much more regular use of sections and multilevel headings. In the electronic medium lists are a more important aspect of text structure and paragraphs less so.

Langscape 6: Surveying contemporary English usage

LANGSCAPE is a Cambridge University Press project associated with both ‘English Today’ and a new international usage guide for the year 2000 by Pam Peters, author of the ‘Cambridge Australian English Style Guide’ (1995). Like the Australian publication, the international work will be distinctive in its use of empirical evidence from computer corpora as well as data elicited from surveys of users of English round the world. Because English is a world language, any account of usage that is limited to one persons views and resources is inadequate. The first topic and questionnaire (‘The ubiquitous letter e’) appeared in ET 53 (Jan 98), the second (‘To capitalize or not to capitalize’) in ET 54 (Apr 98), the third (‘Differing on agreement’) in ET 55 (Jul 98) and the fourth (‘Permanent loans: plurals for Latin borrowings’) in ET 56 (Oct 98). See the accompanying box for further information on the Survey.

Speech Styles and Spoken Interaction in the Australian National Corpus

This special issue of the Australian Journal of Linguistics brings together a set of freshly researched studies of spoken Australian English, which have in common their use of data from the Australian National Corpus (AusNC). The AusNC initiative came from a meeting of interested parties at the Australian Linguistic Society conference in Sydney 2008, converging on the need for a national computer-based archive of Australian English and language in Australia. The AusNC has since been established at Griffith University in conjunction with Macquarie University, with support from the former HCS-Net (Human Communication and Speech Network). Support for the construction of the AusNC platform came from a 2010–2012 technology grant from the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), while AusNC’s content has been contributed by Australian linguistic researchers—diverse collections of digitized language data compiled over several decades. Only some of these collections have hitherto been available through the university where they were set up, but all are now accessible online on a single platform at the AusNC website <www.ausnc.org.au>. The present AusNC collection ranges in time over more than two centuries: from a large and diverse collection of early Australian texts representing written fiction and nonfiction from 1788 to 1895 (the COOEE corpus, i.e. Corpus of Oz Early English); to the ‘Braided Channels’ collection of videoed interviews and archival photos of people from the mid-twentieth century pastoral community on the borders of Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia and Northern Territory; to the recordings of Australian adolescents’ speech, made in the 1960s by Mitchell and Delbridge; to twenty-first century recordings of Australian radio talkback, taken from both commercial shows and the ABC (the ART corpus). There are several sociolinguistic collections from the last decade of the twentieth century, including spoken data from migrant families over several generations (in the Monash corpus), different registers of private and public speech (in the ICE-AUS corpus compiled at Macquarie University), and informal conversational data representing different age Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2014 Vol. 34, No. 1, 1–3, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2014.875451

Introduction: new frontiers of corpus research

This volume presents a selection of papers from the 21st ICAME conference (International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English), which was held over Easter 2000 at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. It was the first ICAME conference to be held in the southern hemisphere, and designed to provide fresh perspectives on corpus linguistics through their application in places bordering on the Indian and Pacific oceans. This put a focus on Asian speech communities who use English as a second language, as well as antipodeans whose usage both reflects and varies the norms of native-speaker Englishes in the northern half of the world. The conference featured several papers on the discourse of younger users of English, and on its form and use in communicating via electronic and telephonic media, as well as print. The conference agenda also included papers from ICAME’s established areas of strength, with new research into English grammar, discourse and the lexicon. All these frontiers are documented in the present volume. Fresh correlations between genre and language variation are identified. Diachronic change and English language history are illuminated with data from standard and newly created corpora. The methodology of corpus creation, and tools for interrogating and manipulating corpus data, are features of various papers below. Some of the greatest technical challenges come from the data contained in historical corpora, though the computational techniques developed there have application to modern nonstandardized English. The three sections of this volume group together papers with broadly similar focuses: · new corpora and new speech communities · historical and regional studies · corpus-based language description Such headings are not of course discrete, and in reviewing the papers from each section we will note comparable themes and issues in the other sections – to provide the print equivalent of hypertext links for the interested reader. For ease of reference, the papers in each section are ordered alphabetically by their authors’ surnames.

Orthography and identity: An overview of the aims and findings of the Langscape project

PAM PETERS of Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia, provides the first part of a two-part general concluding review of the Langscape Project, a major contribution to the creation of her prospective world English style guide (to be published by Cambridge University Press)