Corpus linguistics is the study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus,its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora collected in the field—the natural context ("realia") of that language—with minimal experimental interference. The large collections of text allow linguistics to run quantitative analyses on linguistic concepts,otherwise harder to quantify.
Stylistics,a branch of applied linguistics,is the study and interpretation of texts of all types,but particularly literary texts,and/or spoken language in regard to their linguistic and tonal style,where style is the particular variety of language used by different individuals and/or in different situations or settings. For example,the vernacular,or everyday language may be used among casual friends,whereas more formal language,with respect to grammar,pronunciation or accent,and lexicon or choice of words,is often used in a cover letter and résuméand while speaking during a job interview.
The Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English,better known as simply the Brown Corpus,is an electronic collection of text samples of American English,the first major structured corpus of varied genres. This corpus first set the bar for the scientific study of the frequency and distribution of word categories in everyday language use. Compiled by Henry Kučera and W. Nelson Francis at Brown University,in Rhode Island,it is a general language corpus containing 500 samples of English,totaling roughly one million words,compiled from works published in the United States in 1961.
Cognitive poetics is a school of literary criticism that applies the principles of cognitive science,particularly cognitive psychology,to the interpretation of literary texts. It has ties to reader-response criticism,and also has a grounding in modern principles of cognitive linguistics. The research and focus on cognitive poetics paves way for psychological,sociocultural and indeed linguistic dimensions to develop in relation to stylistics.
Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA was a specialist in English language and linguistics. He was the author,co-author,or editor of more than 30 books and more than 120 published papers. His main academic interests were English grammar,corpus linguistics,stylistics,pragmatics,and semantics.
The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100-million-word text corpus of samples of written and spoken English from a wide range of sources. The corpus covers British English of the late 20th century from a wide variety of genres,with the intention that it be a representative sample of spoken and written British English of that time. It is used in corpus linguistics for analysis of corpora.
Internet linguistics is a domain of linguistics advocated by the English linguist David Crystal. It studies new language styles and forms that have arisen under the influence of the Internet and of other new media,such as Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging. Since the beginning of human–computer interaction (HCI) leading to computer-mediated communication (CMC) and Internet-mediated communication (IMC),experts,such as Gretchen McCulloch have acknowledged that linguistics has a contributing role in it,in terms of web interface and usability. Studying the emerging language on the Internet can help improve conceptual organization,translation and web usability. Such study aims to benefit both linguists and web users combined.
The Poetics and Linguistics Association is an international academic association which exists to promote the research,teaching and learning in the study of linguistic style and the language of literature. The Poetics and Linguistics Association is usually known by the acronym PALA. The main activities of PALA are the publication of the journal Language and Literature,and an annual conference.
The Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System (CLAWS) is a program that performs part-of-speech tagging. It was developed in the 1980s at Lancaster University by the University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language. It has an overall accuracy rate of 96-97% with the latest version (CLAWS4) tagging around 100 million words of the British National Corpus.
Sidney Greenbaum was a British scholar of the English language and of linguistics. He was Quain Professor of English language and literature at the University College London from 1983 to 1990 and Director of the Survey of English Usage,1983–96. With Randolph Quirk and others,he wrote A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. He also wrote Oxford English Grammar.
Foregrounding is a concept in literary studies that concerns making a linguistic utterance stand out from the surrounding linguistic context,from given literary traditions,or from more general world knowledge. It is "the 'throwing into relief' of the linguistic sign against the background of the norms of ordinary language." There are two main types of foregrounding:parallelism and deviation. Parallelism can be described as unexpected regularity,while deviation can be seen as unexpected irregularity. As the definition of foregrounding indicates,these are relative concepts. Something can only be unexpectedly regular or irregular within a particular context. This context can be relatively narrow,such as the immediate textual surroundings,or wider such as an entire genre. Foregrounding can occur on all levels of language. It is generally used to highlight important parts of a text,aid memorability,and/or invite interpretation.
Quantitative linguistics (QL) is a sub-discipline of general linguistics and,more specifically,of mathematical linguistics. Quantitative linguistics deals with language learning,language change,and application as well as structure of natural languages. QL investigates languages using statistical methods;its most demanding objective is the formulation of language laws and,ultimately,of a general theory of language in the sense of a set of interrelated languages laws. Synergetic linguistics was from its very beginning specifically designed for this purpose. QL is empirically based on the results of language statistics,a field which can be interpreted as statistics of languages or as statistics of any linguistic object. This field is not necessarily connected to substantial theoretical ambitions. Corpus linguistics and computational linguistics are other fields which contribute important empirical evidence.
Language and Literature is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes articles in the field of stylistics. The journal's editor is Dan McIntyre. It has been published since 1992,first by Longman and then by SAGE Publications in association with the Poetics and Linguistics Association.
The Spoken English Corpus (SEC) is a speech corpus collection of recordings of spoken British English compiled during 1984–1987. The corpus manual can be found on ICAME.
Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LGSWE) is a descriptive grammar of English written by Douglas Biber,Stig Johansson,Geoffrey Leech,Susan Conrad,and Edward Finegan,first published by Longman in 1999. It is an authoritative description of modern English,a successor to A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (ComGEL) published in 1985 and a predecessor of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CamGEL) published in 2002. The authors and some reviewers consider it a complement rather than a replacement of the former since it follows –with few exceptions –the grammatical framework and concepts from ComGEL,which is also corroborated by the fact that one of LGSWE's authors,Geoffrey Leech,is also a co-author of ComGEL.
The International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME) is an international group of linguists and data scientists working in corpus linguistics to digitise English texts. The organisation was founded in Oslo,Norway in 1977 as the International Computer Archive of Modern English,before being renamed to its current title.
Elena Semino is an Italian-born British linguist whose research involves stylistics and metaphor theory. Focusing on figurative language in a range of poetic and prose works,most recently she has worked on topics from the domains of medical humanities and health communication. Her projects use corpus linguistic methods as well as qualitative analysis.
Stig Johansson was a Swedish-Norwegian linguist.
Monika Bednarek is a German-born Australian linguist. She is a professor in linguistics at the University of Sydney and director of the Sydney Corpus Lab. She is one of the co-developers of Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA),which is a framework for analyzing how events are constructed as newsworthy through language and images. Her work ranges across various linguistic sub-disciplines,including corpus linguistics,media linguistics,sociolinguistics,discourse analysis,stylistics,and applied linguistics.
Beatrix Busse is Professor of English Linguistics and the Vice-Rector for Student Affairs and Teaching at the University of Cologne.
