Advances in Corpus Linguistics: Papers from the 23rd International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 23) (review)

This volume is a selection of papers presented at the annual ICAME conference in Göteborg, Sweden, in 2002. The book begins with key contributions by M. A. K. Halliday, John Sinclair, and Geoffrey Leech under the heading ‘The role of corpora in linguistic research’. Halliday stresses the primacy of spoken language and spoken language corpora, Sinclair clarifies the role of intuition and the difference between tagging and mark-up (arguing that ‘[c]orpus material should always be kept in plain text format’ (50)), and Leech proposes a hierarchy of three levels in linguistic investigations: data collection, description, and theory.

A second group of papers explores lexis, grammar, and semantics. Joybrato Mukherjee argues convincingly for the combination of corpus-linguistic methods with cognitive grammar, using a study of the patterns connected with the verb give as an illustration. Caroline David discusses the function of the verb put and other ‘putting-verbs’, Peter Willemse deals with ‘pseudo-definite’ NPs occurring in existential sentences, Peter K. W. Tan, Vincent B. Y. Ooi, and Andy K. L. Chiang look for signals of spokenness in personal ads on the Web in Southeast Asia, and Jonathan Charteris-Black compares metaphors in British and American political discourse.

Discourse and pragmatics are attracting increasing interest in corpus studies. Michael Hoey, in a very illuminating paper, outlines his theory of lexical priming as a way of making the connection between lexis and text-linguistics. Hilde Hasselgård studies adverbials in it-clefts, finding that they function as thematizing devices, and Bernard De Clerck investigates let’s utterances, showing that they frequently function as conversational regulators.

Studies of language change and language development constitute the next section. Thomas Kohnen uses historical corpora to show that ‘[d]uring the history of English directives become less explicit, less direct and less face-threatening’ (246). Lieselotte Brems investigates constructions with measure nouns like bunch, pile, and heap, establishing the present stage of their grammaticalization as quantifiers. Göran Kjellmer finds signs of a possible development of yourself to become ‘a general purpose emphatic-reflexive’ (267). From ongoing language change we move to vocabulary development in children in a paper by Clive Souter and to the under/overuse of demonstrative reference in Bulgarian learners’ English, studied by Roumiana Blagoeva.

Crosslinguistic studies is the theme of the next section. Helge Dyvik reports on preliminary results of a project aiming at deriving wordnet relations from parallel corpora, Åke Viberg also deals with the lexicon, comparing the semantic structures of physical contact verbs in English and Swedish, and Anna-Lena Fredriksson shows that parallel corpora reveal systematic differences between how languages realize thematic structure. The last two papers in this section use the Web as a source for linguistic research. Elena Tognini Bonelli and Elena Manca look for translation equivalences in English and Italian homepages advertising farm holidays, and Natalie Kübler compares the Web and finite corpora as sources of specialized dictionaries for translators.

At ICAME conferences a decade ago there were many contributions on corpus compilation and software development, but in the present volume there is only one such paper, a work-in-progress report from Antoinette Renouf, Andrew Kehoe, and David Mezquiriz on extracting linguistic information from the Web through the WebCorp program.

In all, this year’s ICAME volume includes a number of important general papers well worth reading and several interesting studies of a more limited scope.