Costas Gabrielatos- BA, Dip.TESOL, MPhil, PhD
- Reader in Corpus Linguistics & English Language at Edge Hill University
Costas Gabrielatos
- BA, Dip.TESOL, MPhil, PhD
- Reader in Corpus Linguistics & English Language at Edge Hill University
10th Symposium on Corpus Approaches to Lexicogrammar, https://sites.edgehill.ac.uk/lxgr
About
114
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Introduction
My work focuses on corpus linguistics methodology, theoretical and pedagogical lexicogrammar, and discourse studies.
For details, see http://ehu.ac.uk/gabrielatos.
If you can't find a full text here, contact me: gabrielc@edgehill.ac.uk
Current institution
Additional affiliations
June 2002 - July 2012
August 2021 - present
August 2017 - July 2021
Publications
Publications (114)
Keyness analysis is perhaps the most widely used technique within corpus approaches to (critical) discourse studies. This chapter will first define the nature of keyness, and outline the research foci that keyness analysis can be usefully employed to address (e.g. not only differences, but also similarities). It will then provide a brief historical...
It has often been claimed that conditionals have a special relation to modality. This study empirically tests this claim by examining the frequency of modal marking in a number of conditional and non-conditional structures using a corpus-based approach. It then seeks to provide explanations for the emerging frequency patterns in light of the tenets...
This paper discusses the frequency distribution of the types of if-conditionals recognised in the corpus-based classification developed in Gabrielatos (2010: 230-265). It is pertinent to mention at the outset that if-conditionals have been estimated to account for about 80 per cent of all conditional constructions in written British English (Gabrie...
Press representations of autism and autistic people both reflect and help shape public attitudes towards autism and neurodiversity and may establish critical barriers to social integration for autistic individuals. This study examined such representations in UK newspapers in the period 2011–2020 using a corpus-based approach. It also considered how...
A recent large-scale study on the portrayal of autism in British newspapers revealed a deficit-based coverage, which concentrated on children and boys in particular, typically represented from the mothers' perspective. This follow-up study refines these representations, considering how they differ by gender and family role. We analysed 2,998 text s...
The focus of LxGr is the interaction of lexis and grammar. The focus is influenced by Halliday’s view of lexis and grammar as “complementary perspectives” (1991: 32), and his conception of the two as notional ends of a continuum (lexicogrammar), in that “if you interrogate the system grammatically you will get grammar-like answers and if you interr...
A recent large-scale study on the portrayal of autism in British newspapers revealed a deficit-based coverage, which concentrated on children and boys in particular, typically represented from the mothers' perspective. This follow-up study refines these representations, considering differences by gender and family role. We analysed 2,998 text sampl...
A recent large-scale study on the portrayal of autism in British newspapers revealed a deficit-based coverage, which concentrated on children and boys in particular, typically represented from the mothers' perspective. This follow-up study refines these representations, considering differences by gender and family role. We analysed 2,998 text sampl...
This presentation discusses the findings of the recent British Academy funded project, Implicit Attitudes towards Autism in the British Press (Maden-Weinberger et al., 2021; Karaminis et al., 2022). At the same time, it shows that, in many crucial respects, the methodological approach of discourse-oriented corpus studies (DOCS) is akin to critical...
18 presentations by 22 speakers from 16 universities in 12 countries.
Presentations focus on lexicogrammatical issues in relation to theoretical frameworks, learner language, pedagogical description, pedagogical/reference materials, and discourse patterns.
The Symposium Programme is here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348351755
Corpus linguistic approaches have been employed extensively in both lexicography and critical discourse studies. However, the foci of these two areas seem to be treated as being unrelated. This paper will argue that discourse-oriented corpus studies (DOCS) can be usefully regarded as critical corpus lexicography, in that their foci and practices ov...
The bibliography contains publications (including PhD theses) directly related to the use of corpora and corpus linguistic techniques in discourse studies – or, seen from a different perspective, corpus studies focusing on discourse issues. The approach may be ‘corpus-based’, ‘corpus-driven’ or ‘corpus-assisted’ (to the extent that these distinctio...
Corpus linguistic approaches have been employed in both lexicography and critical discourse studies. However, the foci of these two areas seem to be treated as being unrelated. This paper will argue that discourse-oriented corpus studies (DOCS) can be usefully regarded as critical corpus-based lexicography, in that their foci and practices overlap...
The press reflects and constructs public views. The language used to portray autism in the press can reveal implicit attitudes, perceptions, and stereotypes and offer insights into the acceptance of autism and autistic people.
We investigate how the British press uses language to describe autism based on a corpus-linguistics and critical-discours...
Corpus-based examinations of the extent of modal marking (modal load, ML) in if-conditionals in the British National Corpus (BNC) have revealed that they have a significantly higher ML than average, as well as a higher ML than conditionals with other subordinators (e.g. assuming), conditional concessives, and non-conditional constructions with if (...
Mood, modality and evidentiality are popular and dynamic areas in linguistics. Re-Assessing Modalising Expressions – Categories, co-text, and context focuses on the specific issue of the ways language users express permission, obligation, volition (intention), possibility and ability, necessity and prediction linguistically. Using a range of eviden...
This talk combines results from corpus-based studies on the use of English if-conditionals in speech and writing by native speakers and learners of English – and compares their use with the typology of conditionals usually presented in ELT materials. More precisely, the talk examines the extent to which the ELT typology a) reflects actual language...
This presentation provides a critical examination of the following: the nature of keyness, the types and foci of keyness analysis, possible units of a keyness analysis, the principled selection of corpora, appropriate metrics for establishing the level of keyness, principled procedures for selecting key items for further analysis. The above are als...
The talk discusses an approach situated at the intersection of linguistic theory, analysis of learner language, frequency studies, and evaluation of pedagogical materials, with the aim of developing a body of corpus-based lexicogrammatical information for language learners, particularly on issues that are (deemed to be) problematic for language lea...
This paper aims to contribute to both lexicogrammatical description and language pedagogy. It examines lexicogrammatical patterns of BE interested in L1 and L2 speech and writing, using the BNC, ICLE and LINDSEI, as well as the relevant information in pedagogical materials (grammars and dictionaries) for intermediate and advanced learners. The meth...
Keyness analysis is perhaps the most widely used technique within corpus approaches to (critical) discourse studies. The talk discusses the nature and types of keyness, and critically examines the possible foci of keyness analysis and its core aspects: the linguistic unit of analysis, appropriate metrics, the attributes of ‘study’ and ‘reference’ c...
Keyness analysis is perhaps the most widely used technique within corpus approaches to (critical) discourse studies. As an automated keyness analysis usually returns a much larger number of key items than is feasible to examine manually within an appropriate co-text, the approach to selection of key items is of paramount importance, as it will dete...
The chapter examines the use of the emerging pragmatic marker you get me (e.g. I'm just gonna give her a little backhand or whatever cos she needs to learn you get me?) in the 1.5 million word Multicultural London English Corpus (MLEC) (2008). The corpus contains sociolinguistic interviews with London English speakers and the metadata provide infor...
The session provides a critical outline of author citation metrics, focusing on the h-index (the most widely used author citation metric), and the emerging approach of Altmetrics. It will also demonstrate how researchers can access their citation data in three major databases (ISI Web of Knowledge, Scopus, Google Scholar). There will be time for qu...
The session provides a critical outline of author citation metrics, focusing on the h-index (the most widely used author citation metric), and the emerging approach of Altmetrics. It will also demonstrate how researchers can access their citation data in three major databases (ISI Web of Knowledge, Scopus, Google Scholar). There will be time for qu...
BE interested' exhibits a variety of complementation patterns (Quirk et al., 1985: 1061, 1063): a) BE interested in + Noun Phrase b) BE interested in + –ing participle Clause c) BE interested in + Noun (wh-) Clause d) BE interested + to-infinitive Clause e) BE interested (no complementation) However, only the first two patterns are included in peda...
The paper reports on the analysis of if-conditionals in a corpus of learner-examiner interactions during an oral proficiency exam in English. The corpus comprises transcripts of the interactions of 588 participants with Spanish and Russian first language and their native English speaker interlocutors at 11 different levels of language proficiency....
This article uses methods from corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis to examine patterns of representation around the word Muslim in a 143 million word corpus of British newspaper articles published between 1998 and 2009. Using the analysis tool Sketch Engine, an analysis of noun collocates of Muslim found that the following categories...
Is the British press prejudiced against Muslims? In what ways can prejudice be explicit or subtle? This book uses a detailed analysis of over 140 million words of newspaper articles on Muslims and Islam, combining corpus linguistics and discourse analysis methods to produce an objective picture of media attitudes. The authors analyse representation...
This paper aims to contribute to the methodological toolbox of “pedagogy -driven corpus-based research” (Gabrielatos 2006), that is, research which is situated at the intersection of language description, pedagogical lexicogrammar, and pedagogical materials evaluation (e.g. Harwood 2005; Hunston & Francis 1998; Kennedy 1992; Owen 1993). The contrib...
This paper focuses upon two issues. Firstly, the question of identifying diachronic trends, and more importantly significant outliers, in corpora which permit an investigation of a feature at many sampling points over time. Secondly, we consider how best to combine more qualitatively oriented approaches to corpus data with the type of trends that c...
In this paper we examine the definitions of two widely-used interrelated constructs in corpus linguistics,
keyness and keywords, as presented in the literature and corpussoftware manuals. In particular, we focus on
• the consistency of definitions given in different sources;
• the metrics used to calculate the level of keyness;
• the compatibility...
This paper aims to contribute to the methodological toolbox of "pedagogy-driven corpus-based research" (Gabrielatos, 2006), that is, research which is situated at the intersection of language description, pedagogical lexicogrammar, and pedagogical materials evaluation (e.g. Harwood, 2005; Hunston & Francis, 1998; Kennedy, 1992; Owen, 1993; Römer, 2...
A number of studies on modality and/or conditionals have presented the claim that conditionals are intimately connected to modality (Comrie, 1986: 89; Dancygier, 1998: 72; Huddleston & Pullum, 2002: 741; Nuyts, 2001: 352; Palmer, 1986: 189; Sweetser, 1990: 141); however, the nature of that connection has not been investigated empirically. This pape...
This article analyses the use of particular pragmatic markers in two corpora of spoken London English: the Linguistic Innovators Corpus (LIC) and the Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT). We found variation according to sex, ethnicity and geographical location, with a different distribution for each pragmatic marker. The innovative pragmatic ma...
En este artículo se discute el grado en que los analistas críticos del discurso pueden utilizar eficazmente los métodos normalmente empleados en la lingüística de corpus.
Nuestra investigación se basa en el análisis de un corpus de 140 millones de palabras que se compone de noticias de la prensa británica que tratan sobre refugiados, solicitantes d...
This article reports on work carried out as part of the project Analysis of Spoken London English Using Corpus Tools, namely, an analysis of the use of indefinite article forms in spoken London English in a corpus of transcribed interviews, combining methodologies from sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics.The authors find a relatively high frequ...
The presentation reports on the outcomes of the ESRC-funded project, Presentation of Islam and Muslims in the UK press, 1998-2009. The project used a corpus-based approach, while also being informed by moral panic theory (Cohen, 1972), and notions central to Critical Discourse Analysis (e.g. Reisigl & Wodak, 2001). The project used a corpus of 143...
This paper reports on the analysis of the use of indefinite article forms (a/an) in front of vowel sounds in spoken London English, which formed a part of the completed project Analysis of spoken London English using corpus tools (funded by the British Academy). The study used the Linguistic Innovators Corpus (LIC), a 1.4 million word corpus compri...
This paper reports on the analysis of the use of a number of invariant tags in spoken London English, which formed part of the completed project Analysis of spoken London English using corpus tools (funded by the British Academy). The tags examined were: innit, okay, right, yeah, you get me and you know, as well as three semi-fixed expressions cont...
This article discusses the extent to which methods normally associated with corpus linguistics can be effectively used by critical discourse analysts. Our research is based on the analysis of a 140-million-word corpus of British news articles about refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (collectively RASIM). We discuss how processes such...
This paper presents an analysis of discourses surrounding the representation of minority groups in newspapers and demonstrates how this discourse in turn constructs these groups” identity. The analysis took place in the context of a project looking at the representation of refugees and asylum seekers in UK newspapers. A corpus was built for the pur...
This paper examines the discursive construction of refugees and asylum seekers (and to a lesser extent immigrants and migrants) in a 140-million-word corpus of UK press articles published between 1996 and 2005. Taking a corpus-based approach, the data were analyzed not only as a whole, but also with regard to synchronic variation, by carrying out c...
Presentation at research group meeting
This talk addresses the modal nature of if-conditionals. If-conditionals are seen as bipartite constructions (Fillmore 1986: 196, 1998: 36) which (a) attract modality statistically significantly above average, and (b) show a markedly higher degree of modal density than non-conditional sentences and when-constructions. The discussion will also draw...
Refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants (henceforth RASIM) coming into the UK have attracted increased press attention (Greenslade, 2005). As their representation in the press can construct their identity (Duffy and Rowden, 2005: 6, in Greenslade, 2005: 7), the discourses surrounding these groups have been the focus of linguistic studies (e.g. ter...
The weak claim motivating this study is that if-conditionals2 are strong modality attractors, due to the conditional (i.e. modal) meaning of if, with modality appearing in the if-clause, the main clause, or both. The strong claim is that if-conditionals can be regarded as modal colligations. The weak claim can be supported if it is shown that if-co...
This paper proposes an accessible measure of the relevance of additional terms to a given query, describes and comments on the steps leading to its develop- ment, and discusses its utility. The measure, termed relative query term rele- vance (RQTR), draws on techniques used in information retrieval, and can be combined with a technique used in crea...
This paper aims to contribute to the growing body of what may be termed pedagogy-driven corpus-based research; that is, research which is situated at the intersection of language description, pedagogical grammar, and pedagogical materials evaluation (e.g. Kennedy, 1992; Owen, 1993; Hunston & Francis, 1998; Harwood, 2005; Römer, 2004, 2005). The pap...
IntroductionThe Nature of Corpus LinguisticsDebates in Corpus LinguisticsLexicogrammar and Lexical GrammarCorpus StudiesReference WorksLanguage TeachingLanguage ChangeConclusion
Corpus research depends on what is 'physically there'. The classification of conditionals hinges on the semantic marking of their verb phrases, particularly time reference and modality, which is established by examining formal properties in context. Elliptical if- conditionals require the analyst to infer the elided elements. This may be straightfo...
Electronic language corpora, and their attendant computer software, are proving increasingly influential in language teaching as sources of language descriptions and pedagogical materials. However, few teachers are clear about their nature or their relevance to language teaching. This paper defines corpora and their types, discusses their contribut...
This paper reports on the compilation, and ongoing mark up and annotation,of a corpus of MA dissertations written by students at the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University. The main focus of the paper is a preliminary investigation comparing the use of epistemic modality bynative and advanced non-native speakers of Eng...
Two problematic aspects of observation T he observation of lessons, a central aspect of teacher preparation and development, is a sensitive issue for both observers and observed, all the more so when the observations are carried out for the purpose of evaluation or assessment. Observing lessons in order to make any type of evaluative comment poses...
This paper discusses whether there is a place for reading aloud (RA) in the modern foreign language classroom, and if so, when and how it should be used. It concentrates on English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners of elementary level and upward who have mastered the skill of assigning sounds to letter-combinations in English. The article asserts...
This paper presents a cyclical framework of teaching procedures for a comprehensive English-as-a-Foreign Language writing program. It begins by providing examples of Greek students' writing and identifying common programs. Next, it outlines two aspects of good writing: product (language, layout and organization, relevance to the task, regard for th...
This article reflects the ongoing development of a principled and flexible methodological framework for English language teaching (ELT) that is free from traditional or dogmatic constraints, flexible enough to take into account new ideas and insights, and critical of current trends and the claims of authorities and experts. It begins by examining c...
Ongoing development is essential in any professional field, but so are appropriate standards for entrance to the profession. It is detrimental to the status of the ELT community to accept someone as a colleague merely on the strength of their language competence, their willingness to become a teacher, and their expressed commitment to ‘development’...
Questions
Questions (4)
I am looking for an e-copy of this paper:
Bolinger, D. (1968) Entailment and the meaning of structures. Glossa, 2(2), 119-127.
I'm not sure if the journal is still active, as there's a fairly recent one with the same title.
I am looking for a corpus of UK newspapers that is not topic-specific, contains tabloids and broadsheets, spans the last ten years, and is free to download. (So, not SiBol or NOW.) Any suggestions will be much appreciated.
Analyses of press/media discourses tend to assume that their reporting (and its frequency) influences the public's views and attitudes. I would like to find out if there is any empirical evidence for this.
I am looking for papers (articles / chapters / presentations) which report on studies that examined the grammatical knowledge/awareness of teachers of English as a foreign/second language (ELT / TESOL) or teachers of English to L1 primary/secondary students. Please note that I am interested in the grammatical knowledge of *practising* teachers -- not trainee teachers.
