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This corpus-assisted discourse study investigates diachronic change in a specialised corpus of seventeen American presidential debates from 2000 to 2020. The texts were tagged using the ucrel Semantic Annotation System (usas) ( Rayson, 2008 ) to facilitate the investigation of emergent and decreasing semantic trends over the period; the strength of trends was empirically evaluated through application of Kendall's Tau correlation coefficient. The analysis revealed that domains reflecting truth evaluations and matters of credibility increased alongside a more people-orientated discourse, as evidenced by increases in personal pronouns. Furthermore, instances invoking warfare and defence decreased, paralleled by a decrease in the representations of toughness. These results may reflect a shift in US political discourse generally, and American presidential discourse specifically, while also reflecting evolving contemporary social and political interests over the twenty-year span of the corpus. This study concludes with interpretations of these discursive shifts in the context of the current era of so-called ‘fake news’, intense partisanship, and social and political divisiveness. Findings indicate that the current US political climate cannot simply be attributed to an anomalous Trump administration but, rather, the discursive features contributing to and reflecting the current political environment have been present and increasing since at least the year 2000 election cycle.

Critical Language Awareness (CLA) seeks to promote social justice by explicitly calling attention to power issues in the context of literacy development and language instruction. In this article, we assert that a CLA approach to English language teaching (ELT) which does not recognize and account for the urgency of climate change and its myriad effects on present and future generations of learners is flawed. It is time ELT extends a critical lens to the role that our practices and pedagogies serve in the (re)production of attitudes, ideologies, identities, and actions which contribute to ecological degradation and climate crisis while also engaging how we may advance ecological wellbeing and sustainability. This article outlines the rationale for this ecolinguistics-informed CLA (eco-CLA) approach to English language instruction by asserting the compatibility of ecolinguistics and CLA and the intersection of social, linguistic, and environmental justice. It then presents and discusses five principles for an eco-CLA approach to ELT that can be applied to a range of language learning contexts. Finally, it demonstrates how these principles can be operationalized within ELT by presenting a series of instructional activities.

This article reports a corpus-aided analysis of stance adverbs within published judicial opinions from the 12 geographically-apportioned districts of the United States (US) Federal Courts of Appeals. The study first analyzes stance adverbs previously investigated in US Supreme Court decisions in order to more comprehensively explore these interactional features across multiple levels of the judicial system. Following this initial analysis, the study then examines variation in the use of stance adverbs between majority and dissenting opinions in Courts of Appeals opinions to identify salient similarities and differences in frequency and function in the two opinion types. The initial analysis reveals divergence in stance adverb use between the Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Court and between legal writing and other registers, indicating the prevalence and importance of stance adverbs within legal writing. Additionally, the study notes variation in stance adverbs between majority and dissenting opinions. This article details the variation of stance adverbs across these aforementioned contexts, discusses how the variation noted in the corpus analysis at times conflicts with the advice of legal writing style guides, and offers pedagogical implications of these findings for English for Legal Purposes instruction.

The present study explores the attitudes of novice teachers towards corpus-aided language learning and teaching in an undergraduate writing course for multilingual students at a large US public uni...

This paper analyzes the use of evaluative adjectives within letters to the shareholders from the top 100 corporations from the 2016 Fortune 500 list. The letter represents an important promotional genre and is published annually to report financial performance while also projecting a vision for future success and continued growth. These influential messages detail and frame institutional vision and strategy as they attempt to maintain relationships with current investors while attracting new ones. This paper adopts Thompson and Hunston's term of evaluation and its definition as “the expression of the speaker or writer's attitude or stance towards, viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or proposition” (2000, p. 5) as it investigates the semantic classes of evaluative adjectives present in the letters and their function within this ESP genre of interest. While there are many features that reflect and realize evaluation, adjectives are the focus of this inquiry because their overt evaluative quality makes them an accessible item to extract and analyze with basic corpus techniques which could be taught and applied within a classroom setting. This paper reports the use of evaluative adjectives while also displaying that little salient variation exists between a sub-corpus of only 10 letters and the full corpus collection. With little noticeable variation and numerous learning affordances, a pedagogically-downsized specialized corpus can be easily compiled, analyzed, and implemented in EBP and other ESP contexts.

This article reports a corpus-aided ecological discourse analysis (EDA) of texts from an international mining company and an environmental advocacy group regarding a proposal to build a massive open-pit copper mine in the Santa Rita Mountains of Arizona, USA. The analysis details the grammatical and semantic clusters within the controversial environmental debate and how these clusters reflect the values and beliefs of each group as well as their conceptualization of the mountains and the environment. The integration of the ecolinguistic framework with corpus linguistic methods of keyword analysis as well as part of speech (POS) and semantic tag analysis facilitated the identification of clusters of linguistic features perpetuating a dominant and ultimately destructive cultural discourse that places humans in a role of dominion and authority over the environment in the company texts. In contrast, clusters within the oppositional discourse forwarded by the environmental group promote the aesthetic value of the land and a need for responsible environmental stewardship.

This study investigates the use of epistemic stance features within a specialized, diachronic corpus of biochemical research pertaining to the motility of bacterial cells in a process referred to as chemotaxis. The corpus constructed for the investigation includes 328 open access research articles citing the seminal 1972 publication, "Chemotaxis in Escherichia coli analyzed by three-dimensional tracking" in the peer-reviewed journal Nature by Drs. Howard Berg and Douglas Brown. For the investigation, the corpus was segmented into sub-corpora representing five time periods and the trends in use of epistemic stance markers were analyzed. Over the period covered by the corpus (1972–2017), the overall use of modal auxiliaries and non-modal hedges decreased while the frequency of boosters increased. Additionally, epistemic stance markers indexing greater degrees of certainty increased while epistemic stance markers reflecting doubt and uncertainty decreased. These findings are noteworthy as they contrast with previous studies investigating diachronic change in epistemic stance use in both academic and science writing and add to our understanding of the use of epistemic stance in the formation of knowledge.

This study compares the effectiveness of online textual glosses enhanced with modified corpus-extracted sentences presented in concordance lines and textual glosses enhanced with dictionary definitions drawn from an online learner’s dictionary for academic vocabulary learning at higher proficiency levels. Particularly, the study aimed to determine which textual gloss technique would be most beneficial in helping intermediate to advanced language learners, who likely possess foundational receptive knowledge, i.e. they recognize the word and know the definition, gain productive knowledge of academic lexical items. While the usefulness of multimedia and image-based glosses are not disputed, lexical items from an academic word list may not be easily glossed through these techniques, and the development of a concordance-based modality may prove beneficial for more proficient learners seeking productive vocabulary knowledge. Also investigated were learner attitudes towards the textual annotation techniques. Participants in both experimental groups exhibited post test gains in receptive and judgment tasks, but only the concordance-based group displayed improvement on the productive assessment. Further, the concordance-based group responded that the glosses were beneficial and likely to be used for subsequent language study, while the dictionary group indicated the glosses would not be later used as the annotations were perceived as ineffective.