Susan Hunston

• University of Birmingham

Pattern grammar is based on the corpus investigation of individual words, especially adjectives, nouns, and verbs. It exploits the fact that each word is regularly complemented by specific phrase or clause types and not with others. Pattern grammar has been used to give grammar information in learners' dictionaries and in reference books that list...

Corpus Linguistics has revolutionised the world of language study and is an essential component of work in Applied Linguistics. This book, now in its second edition, provides a thorough introduction to all the key research issues in Corpus Linguistics, from the point of view of Applied Linguistics. The field has progressed a great deal since the fi...

This chapter picks up a range of applications of corpus linguistics that have not been covered in Chapters 6 and 7. These are: applications of bilingual corpora in contrastive linguistics and translation; forensic linguistics, with a particular focus on authorship; the automatic extraction of information or opinion; the identification of ‘fake news...

This is a chapter about ‘applications’, specifically the application of corpus linguistics to discourse analysis. The main topics addressed are the study of academic English, corpora and critical discourse analysis, and stylistics, with an additional section on specific kinds of discourse: health discourse, legal texts, and academic disciplines out...

This is a ‘quantitative methods’ chapter. It explains the consequences of more advanced developments in quantitative corpus techniques. Two themes are developed. Firstly, some advanced measures improve the range of options available to researchers studying, for example, collocation or keyness. This shows that different measures may give different r...

This is a ‘qualitative methods’ chapter. It is about interpreting and gaining information from concordance lines, and demonstrates different interpretations of the concept of ‘pattern’. The chapter emphasises and illustrates the essential link between phraseology and meaning. It also demonstrates the non-obvious meaning that accrues from seeing cor...

This is a chapter about ‘applications’, specifically the application of corpus linguistics to language learning and teaching. The chapter highlights the input of corpus research into reference materials for learners, including a proposal for a novel ‘constructicon’. It then discusses research using learner corpora, with advice on building a learner...

Corpus Linguistics has revolutionised the world of language study and is an essential component of work in Applied Linguistics. This book, now in its second edition, provides a thorough introduction to all the key research issues in Corpus Linguistics, from the point of view of Applied Linguistics. The field has progressed a great deal since the fi...

Corpus Linguistics has revolutionised the world of language study and is an essential component of work in Applied Linguistics. This book, now in its second edition, provides a thorough introduction to all the key research issues in Corpus Linguistics, from the point of view of Applied Linguistics. The field has progressed a great deal since the fi...

This is a ‘quantitative methods’ chapter. It describes the basic quantitative concepts in corpus linguistics. These are: frequency and normalised frequency; range and dispersion; the concept of keyness; collocation; and lexical bundles. In each case research using these ideas is discussed and issues around the different available measures are prese...

This chapter considers the contribution of corpus linguistics to theories of language. It is argued that corpus linguistics aids in the identification of units of form and meaning, and these units can be used to inform other approaches to language. Two are considered in some detail: construction grammar, which takes a cognitive approach to language...

This chapter is about the design of corpora and types of corpora. Changes in the concept of a corpus are discussed, in particular the provision of metadata to allow personalised sub-corpora to be compiled on an ad hoc basis from a large corpus. The design features of size, balance, representativeness and comparability are discussed, with an emphasi...

This paper investigates the association between language patterns and attitudinal meanings, focusing specifically on adjective complementation patterns and types of attitudes as proposed in the Appraisal framework (Martin & White 2005). The investigation shows that the tripartite division of Attitude into Affect, Judgement and Appreciation can be s...

This article takes as its starting point the analysis of adjective complementation patterns and sets this in the context of other studies of phraseology, especially Construction Grammar. The article proposes that a large number of meaning–pattern combinations can be identified as constructions. This endeavour assists and is assisted by the derivati...

This paper proposes an alignment between aspects of pattern grammar ( Francis, 1993 ; Hunston & Francis, 2000 ) and construction grammar ( Goldberg, 2006 ). Pattern Grammar describes the grammatical behaviour of individual words at a specific level of generality. The paper claims that grammar patterns and the groups of words identified as occurring...

Pattern grammar is based on the corpus investigation of individual words, especially adjectives, nouns, and verbs. It exploits the fact that each word is regularly complemented by specific phrase or clause types and not with others. Phrase types include noun phrases and prepositional phrases. Clause types include that‐clauses and to‐infinitive clau...

This study takes a lexical-grammatical approach to exploring the evaluation of human behaviour and/or character. It uses adjective complementation patterns as the starting point to examine the lexical-grammatical resources at risk in the appraisal system of JUDGEMENT, aiming to explore the extent to which we can arrive at the same categorization of...

Corpus linguistics has become one of the most widely used methodologies across the different linguistic subdisciplines; especially the study of world-wide varieties of English uses corpus-based investigations as one of the chief methodologies. This volume comprises descriptions of the many new corpus initiatives both within and outside Africa that...

Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA) has been widely used to explore register variation. This paper reports on a project using MDA to explore the features of an interdisciplinary academic domain. Six dimensions of variation are identified in a corpus of 11,000 journal articles in environmental studies. We then focus on articles in one interdisciplinary...

This paper introduces topic modelling, a machine learning technique that automatically identifies 'topics' in a given corpus. The paper illustrates its use in the exploration of a corpus of academic English. It first offers the intuitive explanation of the underlying mechanism of topic modelling and describes the procedure for building a model, inc...

div class="title">John Flowerdew and Richard W. Forest , Signalling nouns in English: A corpus-based discourse approach (Studies in English Language). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii + 286. ISBN 978117022119. - Susan Hunston

The work of Geoff Thompson, who until his death was an editor of Functions of Language , has had an international reach for over 40 years. He has contributed to advances in Systemic-Functional Linguistics, in particular extending theories of interaction and evaluation in discourse. His Introducing Functional Grammar is an indispensable guide to the...

From a corpus consisting of free text comments submitted to the website RateMyProfessors.com, adjectives describing people have been identified and clustered using Principal Components Analysis. This follows the Meaning Extraction method used by Chung & Pennebaker (2007). The outcome is a set of seven factors, each of which is interpretable as repr...

This paper considers the relationship between research using systemic functional linguistics and research of the kind referred to as corpus linguistics, specifically in a study of ideology in a popular science text. The paper argues that ideas in SFL and corpus linguistics may be regarded as parallel (register), divergent (grammar and phraseology),...

Pattern grammar is based on corpus investigation, which encourages the observation of items that regularly occur together.

This chapter introduces the relevance of corpus linguistics to applied linguistics and comments on some of the major changes in the field since the first edition of the book. The most essential terminology used in the rest of the book is explained, and some commonly used resources are described. The chapter ends on a personal note and provides an i...

This book applies a set of corpus investigation techniques to the study of evaluation, or stance, or affect, in naturally-occurring discourse. Evaluative language indicates opinions, attitudes, and judgments. It is an important part of activities such as persuading someone that a particular viewpoint is correct, or in constructing knowledge from a...

This paper compares two approaches to consistency of form and meaning in naturally- occurring text. Framenet begins with groups of words that share meaning, examines their recurrent co-text, identifies frame elements and notes the mapping of element on to co- text. Pattern Grammar begins with recurring co-occurrences (colligation) and identifies sh...

This paper proposes a concept of ‘semantic sequences’, that is, series of meaning elements that can be demonstrated to occur regularly either in a general corpus or in one comprising specific types of text. Semantic sequences may be identified by examining the co-text of a lexical item such as make sure , but are also recognisable if grammatical wo...

This paper reconsiders the concept of 'evaluation of status' and applies it to visual as well as to verbal texts. The paper explores the relationship between 'status' and other related concepts such as epistemic modality. It is argued that a conceptual notion of status is useful in analysing texts, particularly those which construe knowledge. Examp...

This paper considers the contentious term 'semantic prosody' and discusses a number of aspects of the concept described by the term. It is pointed out that although many writers use it to refer to the implied attitudinal meaning of a word, Sinclair uses the term to refer to the discourse function of a unit of meaning. Problems of apparent counter-e...

This volume contributes to the burgeoning field of research on stance by offering a variety of studies based in natural discourse. These collected papers explore the situated, pragmatic, and interactional character of stancetaking, and present new models and conceptions of stance to spark future research. Central to the volume is the claim that sta...

Evaluation is a central resource for meaning-making in text, but it is extremely complex. It is multifunctional and realized in ways whose systematicity is only beginning to be understood, and thus it defies easy identification and categorization. This article explores the different functions and surveys a range of approaches to the phenomenon, out...

Patterns describe the syntactic behaviour of lexical items by specifying their local environment. This paper reports on a pilot study to automatically recognise those patterns in text. This study has been successful in producing a system that identifies patterns using only limited linguistic knowledge. It also has raised several issues which will h...

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This paper examines the comparative frequency of two complementation patterns ( that- clause and wh- clause) with the different wordforms of twenty-six verb lemmas. It is found that in the majority of cases the patterns co-occur differentially with the different word forms. In particular, the wh- clause tends to occur most frequently with the base...

scription and is intended largely for an applied-linguistics audience (e.g., teachers of English as a second language). Computational linguists who want a source of pattern descriptions for help in designing and implementing NLP applications would be better served by the reference works cited above (but should not expect to find formal descriptions...

This is an accessible and wide-ranging account of current research in one of the most central aspects of discourse analsysis: evalution in and of written and spoken language. Evalution is the broad cover term for the expression of a speakers - or writers - attitudes, feelings, and values. It covers areas sometimes referred to as stance, modality, a...

This paper describes the outcome of a project to code the complementation patterns of all the verbs in Collins COBUILD English Dictionary (1995) COBUILD stands for ‘Collins and Birmingham University International Language Database’ The coding is based on the Bank of English corpus at COBUILD and uses a simple notation based on words and word-classe...

Although grammar and vocabulary are traditionally thought of as separate areas of language teaching, new work on word patterns suggests that they can usefully be combined. All words can be shown to have patterns, and words which have the same pattern tend to share aspects of meaning. The patterns ‘V by -ing’ and ‘V as n’ illustrate this. We suggest...

With some verbs of attribution, a typical usage can be identified which indicates a particular evaluation. This typical usage can be exploited to implicate evaluation in non-typical cases, a phenomenon which is analogous to that of semantic prosody. ACKNOWLEDGE and INSIST are examples of verbs of this type. With other verbs, there is no consistentl...

Text and Technology focuses on three major areas of modern linguistics: discourse analysis, corpus-driven analysis of language, and computational linguistics. The volume starts off with a description of the various British traditions in text analysis by Michael Stubbs. The first section “Spoken and Written Discourse” contains contributions by Marti...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Birmingham, 1989. Thesis (Multivolume)--University of Birmingham, 1989.