This chapter begins by considering the contrast between the data-driven paradigm characteristic of corpus linguistics and the theory-oriented paradigm characteristic of some other schools of linguistics, particularly those espousing a generative framework. To illustrate the corpus linguistics paradigm in detail, I present a case study of grammatical differences observed in the LOB and FLOB corp...

Preface In almost every culture of the world, the sciences of language and the study of cultural-heritage documents are inextricably bound. In Western tradition, as in many others, the need to preserve the literary or historical legacy of the past gave the strongest input to the development of a formalized grammatical speculation. Since the foundation of linguistics as a discipline, the interac...

This study aims to investigate the semantic and syntactic features of verbs used in the introduction section of Applied Linguistics research articles published in Iranian and international journals. A corpus of 20 research article introductions (10 from each journal) was used. The corpus was analysed for the syntactic features (tense, aspect and voice) and semantic meaning of verbs. The finding...

I am greatly honoured to be invited by his former PhD students to contribute to this volume of papers dedicated to Professor Yang Huizhong. Unlike many other contributors to this volume, my first encounter with Professor Yang was not as his student. We met some twenty years ago at the University of Birmingham, where I was managing the Cobuild corpus-based lexicographic project (Renouf, 1987a), ...

This paper presents the use of corpus linguistics techniques on supposedly “clean” corpora and identifies potential pitfalls. Our work relates to the task of filtering sensitive content, in which data security is strategically important for the protection of government and military information, and of growing importance in combating identity fraud. A naïve keyword filtering approach produces a ...

The growing interest in corpus linguistics methods in the 1970s and 1980s was largely enabled by the increased power of computers and the use of computational methods to store and process language samples. Before this, even simple methods for studying language such as extracting a list of all the different words in a text and their immediate contexts was incredibly time consuming and costly in ...

Computational tools and methods employed in corpus linguistics are split into three main types: compilation, annotation and retrieval. These mirror and support the usual corpus linguistics methodology of corpus collection, manual and/or automatic tagging, followed by query and analysis. Typically, corpus software to support retrieval implements some or all of the five major methods in corpus li...