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This study explored the lexical coverage of corpus-based vocabulary lists (general, academic, and content-specific) across several million tokens gathered from digital science resources (DSR) for middle school (6-8 grade) students in the United States. The goal was to estimate the extent to which a combination of well-known word lists, mostly designed for the needs of L2 learners, might help students reach text coverage that could result in reasonable comprehension of science texts. The findings of this study show that: (a) the top 570 word families in the newer Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) provide 75% more lexical coverage in the corpus than the 570 word families in the older Academic Word List (AWL), (b) a series of lists designed for second language learners, such as General Service List (GSL), Academic Word List (AWL), and the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) Science List (about 2,900 word families) offer 88.33% coverage, and (c) the GSL and the Middle School Vocabulary List (MSVL) for Science (fewer than 2,500 word families) provide 87.77% coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this exploratory study, we adopt corpus linguistic methods to quantify, contextualize and investigate race in translingual scholarship in US writing and rhetoric studies over the past decade. Results indicate that while race is mentioned minimally in the corpus, in instances where it is mentioned many scholars pay attention to intersectionality, language, colonial history, and power relations. Additionally, while there is a large representation of international students and newly-arrived immigrants in translingual scholarship in US writing and rhetoric studies over the past decade, domestic multilingual writers of color remain underrepresented. Situating translingualism in greater anti-racist initiatives, we discuss research and pedagogical implications that call for joint efforts from translingual scholars and practitioners to strive for linguistic justice and anti-racist translingual practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compared three-word move-specific lexical bundles (MLBs) in dissertation abstracts authored by linguistics doctoral students from China and the United States. Two separate corpora were constructed for analysis: (1) The China Linguistics PhD Abstracts Corpus (CLC), consisting of 700 abstracts totaling 613,713 words generated by doctoral students from China specializing in linguistics, and (2) the America Linguistics PhD Abstracts Corpus (ALC), comprising 700 abstracts totaling 247,359 words written by American doctoral students in linguistics. The identification of MLBs was based on log-likelihood values, indicating a notably higher number of instances within a specific move in contrast to the overall corpus. The study then proceeded to compare the structures, functions, and communicative purposes of MLBs in the two corpora. The findings of the analysis are as follows: (1) Chinese students employed a higher percentage of NP- and PP-based MLBs but a lower proportion of VP-based MLBs, and both groups used different words within similar structures; (2) Chinese students employed a higher percentage of research- and participant-oriented MLBs but a lower proportion of text-oriented MLBs, and the two groups used dissimilar MLBs to fulfill similar functions; and (3) the two groups employed distinct MLBs to achieve identical communicative purposes, with Chinese students utilizing MLBs specific to the CLC corpus. These findings highlight the pedagogical significance of MLBs and underscore the importance of corpus linguistics in identifying and teaching essential move-specific vocabulary to second/foreign language learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wildfires pose a growing problem in the US and elsewhere. Many US wildfires acquire a name, and the naming of such fires is what this article chronicles. The centerpiece herein is a from-scratch, thousand-fire corpus that we created, for which we can defend the provenance of each fire name and from which we have extracted a tally of how many names derive from each of 43 source classes. The corpus is wide-ranging, with fires that burned in 4 different centuries, 22 decades, and all 50 states. Stream names (hydronyms) are the leading name source for fires in the corpus, followed by summit names (oronyms) and road names (hodonyms). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the open-source English Language Learning Insight, Proficiency and Skills Evaluation (ELLIPSE) corpus. The corpus comprises ~6,500 essays written by English language learners (ELLs). All essays were written during state-wide standardized annual testing in the United States. The essays were written on 29 different independent prompts that required no background knowledge on the part of the writer. Individual difference information is made available for each essay including economic status, gender, grade level (8–12), and race/ethnicity. Each essay was scored by two trained human raters for English language proficiency including an overall score of English proficiency and analytic scores for cohesion, syntax, vocabulary, phraseology, grammar, and conventions. The paper provides reliability on the human judgments of proficiency reported for the corpus. The ELLIPSE corpus addresses many of the concerns found in existing learner corpora including unique holistic and analytic scores for each ELL essay. The corpus also includes limited demographic and individual difference data for each ELL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change has become an issue of great relevance in society in recent years, and the data provided by the scientific community recommend acting as soon as possible and forcefully. Scientists, politicians, the media, and thanks to the new media, citizens and other social agents participate in the debate on this issue. Despite the data and general consensus in the scientific community, the climate change debate is highly polarized, with skeptical voices denying or questioning climate change and using social media to amplify the reach of their message. This can encourage misinformation and polarization. This study tries to identify the key indicators of social skepticism around climate change through the analysis of users' social activism and behavioral patterns on Twitter. We analyze keywords, frequency, topics, and categories from a sample of 78,168 tweets. The results show, first, that there is an overlap of topics, with 24 of the 28 topics grouped in the intertopic distance map; second, that the size of the topics is relatively small and linked to specific events; and, third, that there is a significant political presence, especially from the United States. This work therefore contributes to the analysis of communication on Twitter about opinions against climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading is one of the main skills to be learned and used in schools and through the entire life of an individual. Its crucial importance made reading one of the central topics in different academic disciplines such as education, psychology, linguistic and neuroscience. Advances in multidisciplinary approaches to and studies of reading gave us the reason to talk about the science of reading. Improvement in research into reading during the last century reveals the fact that different approaches emphasized the importance of partially different aspects of reading skills. Different approaches presented sound arguments for different priorities in teaching and learning of reading. For some decades ago strong dichotomic arguments were so sharp that in the United States the reading literature talked about 'the reading wars'. During the recent decades, the debate of reading and approaches to reading, reading skills and reading processes have changed. Studies of reading presented different arguments for partially different priorities. The Reading Teacher (RT) has for many decades been the one of the most important arenas for the presentation of new findings, ideas, arguments, and trends. Our present corpus-based study captured the frequent collocations and their usage in the RT publications - 952 articles comprising 3 548 008 words - during the last decade, 2012-2021. TreeTagger was used for part-of-speech tagging and CQPWeb/CWB framework was employed as the corpus interface in the analysis process. The findings clearly revealed that "reading comprehension" was the most frequently used collocation, and it has never weakened its position in the RT publications in the last decade. While instructional activities and processes like 'shared reading', 'during reading', 'while reading', and 'after reading' were given considerable attention, 'before reading' was almost forgotten. Findings also show that linguistic diversity among students, particularly in the US, also made an impact on the emerging of new topics and thus frequency of concepts like bilingual, multilingual, translanguaging, and coaching. Findings related to the ascending and descending trends reading collocations in RT publications regarding other aspects of reading, teaching of reading, and reading processes are discussed and some ideas for future research are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, a very modest number of papers on nonverbal behavior in sales and the service sector have affected the field of study. Nevertheless, a comprehensive conceptual model is missing. Very heterogenous views appear to shape the topic. Scholars have shown that empathy is a crucial factor in interpersonal interaction. In particular, this applies to salesperson-customer interaction. Additionally, researchers found that nonverbal behavior shapes 90 % of mutual understanding and verbal communication hardly has an influence. However, salespersons' nonverbal behavior has received scant attention in marketing research. This study contributes to the corpus of knowledge by evaluating how the existent research is founded on various intellectual frameworks and by identifying the most important references, authors, themes, and journals, as well as comprehending it in a conceptual model of salespersons nonverbal behavior. To achieve this objective, I examined more than 3,000 publications published between 1994 and 2021 using bibliometric methods. This is a small body of literature compared to other fields. I determined four publishing eras that affected the evolution of research in this field. Nonverbal behavior has been studied from a range of angles in the publications that have published these articles. The predominant emphasis is on the United States and empathy as a central trait, offering scholars the ability to conduct further cross-national and cross-industry research. My study not only provides intellectual and social frameworks, but integrates them in a conceptual model. Thus, it lays the foundation for future study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a computational approach to examining immigrant incorporation through shifts in the social "mainstream." Analyzing a historical corpus of American etiquette books, texts from 1922–2017 describing social norms, we identify mainstream shifts related to long-standing groups which once were and may currently still be seen as immigrant outsiders in the United States: Catholic, Chinese, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Mexican, and Muslim groups. The analysis takes a computational grounded theory approach, combining qualitative readings and computational text analyses. Using word embeddings, we operationalize the chosen groups as focal group concepts. We extract sections of text that are salient to the focal group concepts to create group-specific text corpora. Two computational approaches make it possible to examine mainstream shifts in these corpora. First, we use sentiment analysis to observe the positive sentiment in each corpus and its change over time. Second, we observe changes in each corpus's position on a semantic dimension represented by the poles of "strange" and "normal." The results indicate mainstream shifts through increases in positive sentiment and movement from strange to normal over time for most of the group-specific corpora. These research techniques can be adapted to other studies of social sentiment and symbolic inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study compares press coverage of climate change in the US, the UK and China from a longitudinal perspective, through a combination of computer-assisted quantitative linguistic analysis and critical discourse analysis. Specifically, we examine the extent to which these three countries portray climate change similarly or differently, and further explore how moral reasoning – a growing area of research in climate change communication – may shape media portrayal of the issue across different cultures. There have been few scholarly inquiries examining how moral reasoning is deployed in media discourse around climate change. This study aims to address this gap with a comparative analysis of moral reasoning in news about climate change in leading national newspapers from three countries over a 6-year period. The findings suggest that while US and UK newspapers tended to frame climate change coverage as a domestic issue, Chinese media tended to frame it as a global issue that the world community needs to tackle. Moreover, US and UK newspapers often adopted the balanced reporting norm in communicating uncertainty and controversy, in contrast to the climate consensus that was firmly embedded in Chinese media discourse. Overall, the findings show mixed support for East and West differences in the moral rhetoric underpinning their climate change press coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Adverse events induced by drug-drug interactions are a major concern in the United States. Current research is moving toward using electronic health record (EHR) data, including for adverse drug events discovery. One of the first steps in EHR-based studies is to define a phenotype for establishing a cohort of patients. However, phenotype definitions are not readily available for all phenotypes. One of the first steps of developing automated text mining tools is building a corpus. Therefore, this study aimed to develop annotation guidelines and a gold standard corpus to facilitate building future automated approaches for mining phenotype definitions contained in the literature. Furthermore, our aim is to improve the understanding of how these published phenotype definitions are presented in the literature and how we annotate them for future text mining tasks. Results: Two annotators manually annotated the corpus on a sentence-level for the presence of evidence for phenotype definitions. Three major categories (inclusion, intermediate, and exclusion) with a total of ten dimensions were proposed characterizing major contextual patterns and cues for presenting phenotype definitions in published literature. The developed annotation guidelines were used to annotate the corpus that contained 3971 sentences: 1923 out of 3971 (48.4%) for the inclusion category, 1851 out of 3971 (46.6%) for the intermediate category, and 2273 out of 3971 (57.2%) for exclusion category. The highest number of annotated sentences was 1449 out of 3971 (36.5%) for the "Biomedical & Procedure" dimension. The lowest number of annotated sentences was 49 out of 3971 (1.2%) for "The use of NLP". The overall percent inter-annotator agreement was 97.8%. Percent and Kappa statistics also showed high inter-annotator agreement across all dimensions. Conclusions: The corpus and annotation guidelines can serve as a foundational informatics approach for annotating and mining phenotype definitions in literature, and can be used later for text mining applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most any approach to interpretation of the language of law begins with a search for ordinary meaning. Increasingly, judges, scholars, and practitioners are highlighting shortcomings in our means for assessing such meaning. With this in mind, we have proposed the use of the tools of corpus linguistics to take up the task. Our proposals have gained traction but have also seen significant pushback. The search for ordinary meaning poses a series of questions that are amenable to evaluation and analysis using evidence of language usage. And we have proposed to use the tools of corpus linguistics--tools for assessing patterns of language usage in large databases of naturally occurring language--to introduce transparent, falsifiable evidence on the questions at stake. Our critics raise a series of challenges, asserting that our methods test the wrong language community, pose notice problems, are inaccurate measures, and rest on certain fallacies. We show that the criticisms are largely in error and ultimately highlight some of the main selling points of our proposed methods. We do so in reference to two canonical Supreme Court cases that have been discussed in the literature in this field (Muscarello v. United States and Taniguchi v. Kan Pacific Saipan, Ltd.) and also a more recent case (Mont v. United States). In analyzing these cases (particularly the most recent one), we also outline a framework for some proposed refinements to the methods we have advocated previously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Hipogrifo: revista de literatura y cultura del siglo de oro is the property of Hipogrifo: revista de literatura y cultura del siglo de oro and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

With the process of economic globalization and political multi-polarization accelerating, it is especially important to predict policy change in the United States. While current research has not taken advantage of the rapid advancement in the natural language processing and the relationship between news media and policy change, we propose a BERT-based model to predict policy change in the United States, using news published by the New York Times. Specifically, we propose a large-scale news corpus from the New York Times covers the period from 2006 to 2018. Then we use the corpus to fine-tune the pre-trained BERT language model to determine whether the news is on the front page, which corresponds to the policy priority. We propose a BERT-based Policy Change Index (BPCI) for the United States to predict the policy change in the future short period of time. Experimental results in the New York Times Corpus demonstrate the validity of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the linguistic and historical analysis in an effort to discern the original public meaning of the phrase executive power as used in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. Topics include corpus linguistic methodology surrounding the phrase's Founding Era usage; history of Article II, with particular attention to the public discourse concerning the scope of the British king's powers; and Supreme Court cases of Myers v. United States and Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer.

Copyright of CIRCULO de Linguistica Aplicada a la Comunicacion is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article informs that in case "Wilson v. Safelite Group, Inc.," the Sixth Circuit debated the merits of corpus linguistics on its way to holding that Safelite's deferred compensation plan fell within the scope of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974. Topics discussed include the U.S. Supreme Court decision in cases like "Smith v. United States."

The article reexamines the U.S. Supreme Court's interpretation of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution via a corpus linguistics method in District of Columbia v. Heller. Topics discussed are meaning of the theory or originalism, scientific features of corpus linguistics, ruling of Supreme Court Justice Paul Stevens that the Second Amendment does not protect an individual's right to keep and bear firearms.

The term diversity can be operationalized demographically (in terms of physical or external characteristics such as race, gender, ethnicity and nationality) or intellectually (in terms of mental phenomena such as viewpoints, beliefs, ideas and political opinion). This work examines the context in which the concept of diversity is used by 50 US elite universities in their online institutional presence. Distributional semantics theory is leveraged to quantify semantic similarity between linguistic items based on their distributional properties in a large sample of language data taken from universities online profiles. The language modelling is carried out using Word2vec, a state-of-the-art machine learning model widely used by the natural language processing community to create vector representations of words (i.e. word embeddings). The model uses a neural network trained to reconstruct the linguistic context of words in the training corpus. As a by-product of the training objective, word2vec embeds words into a learned vector space where words that share common contexts and thus semantic meaning according to the distributional hypotheses, are located in close proximity to one another. A quantitative analysis of cosine similarities between word vectors derived from the corpus of text retrieved from universities online institutional profiles shows that the diversity concept is much closer to demographic operationalisations of diversity such as race, gender, ethnicity or nationality than to intellectual ones such as viewpoints, values, beliefs or political orientation. That is, the universities studied tend to use the word diversity predominantly in its demographic denotation to refer to variety of external appearance instead of to variety of mental phenomena. This is significant in light of the severe lack of ideological diversity in universities across the US, with the vast majority of faculty leaning left of center. Universities emphasis on the usage of the term diversity to denote demographic subtypes of diversity could be indicative of a majority power structure in the Academy which tries to hinder the fostering of viewpoint diversity by steering diversity efforts towards demographic interpretations of the word. At the very least, the results of this work suggest that universities, as judged from the way they use language in their own online institutional profiles, prioritize demographic types of diversity around variety of external appearance cues over intellectual heterogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study assesses the potential of topic models coupled with machine translation for comparative communication research across language barriers. From a methodological point of view, the robustness of a combined approach is examined. For this purpose the results of different machine translation services (Google Translate vs. DeepL) as well as methods (full-text vs. term-by-term) are compared. From a substantive point of view, the integratability of the approach into comparative study designs is tested. For this, the online discourses about climate change in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States are compared. First, the results show that the approach is relatively robust and second, that integration in comparative study designs is not a problem. It is concluded that this as well as the relatively moderate costs in terms of time and money makes the strategy to couple topic models with machine translation a valuable addition to the toolbox of comparative communication researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Statutory interpretation involves an interpreter determining the meaning of the text on the basis of various interpretive tools, all of which relate to the meaning of the words and their composition in light of the relevant context. Recently, with the increasing availability of scientific research tools such as corpus linguistics, advocates of such methods have stressed that statutory interpretation is an 'empirical' inquiry. These claims fail to appreciate the contribution that context makes to meaning, both within and outside of law. Determinants of legal meaning must all relate in some way to the context of the relevant statute, whether the connection is to its language or the circumstances surrounding its enactment. Courts give (sometimes conclusive) weight to the statutory text, which implicates the systematicities of language and constrains the interpretations available to judges. Nevertheless, the ineliminably contextual nature of language, along with such legal features as the necessity of framing the interpretive inquiry in terms of an idealized interpreter, reveal legal interpretation to be a discretionary process, which should negate any claim that the determination of the meaning of a statute is primarily, or even largely, an empirical issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate on opioid addiction has become increasingly topical, especially in the United States of America. This study sets out to investigate the representation of opioid abuse in American newspapers with a view to identifying whether it is mainly framed within a criminal-legal or a health-medical paradigm. To this aim, an ad hoc corpus consisting of newspaper articles was collected over a two-year period (Oct 2016-Oct 2018) and analyzed adopting a hybrid methodological toolkit comprising Critical Discourse Analysis as well as Corpus Linguistics. Results indicate that the American newspaper discourse on opioid use primarily adopts a medicalization framework of the issue, which represents people suffering from addiction as 'sick' and therefore not accountable for their condition. Such an approach thus contributes to lifting the stigma from substance users and typically attributes much prominence to the members of the medical community, considered as the legitimate agents of control of the situation. However, the analysis reveals that a medicalization frame, although prevailing in the press, is merging with a legal-criminal one, as police officers and not doctors are portrayed as the legitimate and desirable agents of institutional intervention to tackle the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aims to characterize the ways in which specialized knowledge is disseminated and adapted in the discourse of American think tanks whose specificity lies in their objective to influence public policy. It offers a comparative rhetorical analysis of an exploratory corpus composed of blog posts and their corresponding expert reports published by six think tanks between 2014 and 2017. The following hypothesis is explored: blog posts are characterized by distinctive rhetorical strategies in the discursive space of think tanks and may thus be seen as a means for these organizations to carry out their programmatic aim. Results show that the format of the genre, as evidenced by the use of journalistic techniques such as titles and hooks, is particularly tailored to meet the needs and draw the attention of a wide audience on experts' work. An analysis of argumentative choices and hedging in the corpus further suggests that blogs may also represent a way for think tank experts to position themselves in the political arena. These overlapping communicative purposes more generally testify to the specialized nature of a new genre in think tanks' outreach strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study reports on the preliminary stages of a project concerned with presenting a systematic framework for annotating and analysing film dialogue which blends corpus annotation with adjacency pair theory (Schegloff, Sacks 1973). The adjacency pair model, which consists of closed sets of pairs, is applied to a searchable online corpus in which all the episodes of the U.S. medical drama House M.D. are transcribed and divided into scenes, the basic search unit. The article describes the modifications and adjustments to the original adjacency-pair model in order to accommodate the highly specialized dialogue of medical settings not envisaged by Schegloff and Sacks (1973) and the different interpersonal relationships between the characters, as well as the complex intersemiotic interactions characterizing TV film series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Judges interpreting statutes sometimes seem eager to outsource the work. They quote ordinary speakers to define a statutory term, point to how an audience understands it, or pin it down with interpretive canons. But sometimes conduct that appears to diminish someone's power instead sneakily enhances it. So it is with these forms of interpretive outsourcing. Each seems to constrain judges' authority by handing the reins to someone else, giving interpretation a democratized veneer. But in fact, each funnels power right back to the judge. These outsourcing approaches show a disconnect between the questions judges pose and the methods they use to seek answers. That disconnect allows judges to avoid normative and empirical decisions that are central to interpretation. Rather than taking a stand on which community's speech matters in a democracy, judges pick quotations they like or use empirical techniques like corpus linguistics without acknowledging the underlying choices they entail. Rather than identifying whom statutes address and considering their attitudes, judges speak for an audience to whom they do not listen. Rather than articulating what purposes canons serve, judges choose a rule that appeals. Outsourcing seems to alleviate countermajoritarian difficulties by democratizing interpretation and yielding interpretive certainty. But our common law adjudication system empowers judges to maintain indeterminacy, creating moments of provisional closure always subject to reinterpretation. Rather than evaluating how well judges resist the authority our system gives them, we should ask how well they justify the way they wield it. Really democratizing interpretation involves both considering methods to yield answers to judges' questions and recognizing any method's limitations. It also means acknowledging that interpretation remains presumptively open to contestation. Such openness and humility is implicit in the requirement of judicial reason-giving, and it democratizes interpretation more than outsourcing can. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study compares the responses to the greeting "How are you?" ("HAY?") in Britain and America. By using a database derived from the spoken corpora of BNC and COCA, this study aims to explore the universal and regional-specific features of people's response to "HAY?", including their wording and pattern choosing. Adopting Sacks' (1975) notion of "value states", the result shows that responding with "value states" is the commonest pattern to answer "HAY?", and neutral responses are most frequently used. In terms of regional differences, British people respond to "HAY?" conservatively, using "not bad" to express "good", while Americans directly use "good". What's more, British like to combine "value states" with thankings, while Americans use more reciprocity questions, reflecting British's gentleness and American's openness. Other response patterns and register differences are discussed in the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the words pain, hurt, religion, and God in American English. Despite the linguistic struggle to describe pain, sufferers discuss pain a great deal; they feel compelled to articulate their pain to engender sympathy or to seek medical treatment. But pain sufferers have not always articulated their pain experiences with the same frequency through time. There is variation in the frequency of pain language in American English. This article analyzes the frequency of the words pain and hurt since the year 1800 in four linguistic corpora: Google Books Corpus, Corpus of Contemporary American English, Corpus of Historical American English, and Time Magazine Corpus. In addition, this study includes a unique perspective in that it does not simply examine the frequency of pain words, but the frequency examination is done in light of the increasing secularization of American society. The principal question is this one: does the increase of pain language correspond with the decrease of language dealing with the divine in American English? The data presented show a substantial increase in pain language in American English, particularly since the 1960s, and this growth parallels the era when language related to the divine was in sharp decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the construction process involved in creating a robust local learner corpus of texts produced by international students in a first-year writing course at a large public, mid-western university in the U.S. We show how involving faculty members and graduate students of our local writing program in the process of learner corpus analysis provides them with opportunities to develop their skills and knowledge as writing instructors, course designers, and, ultimately, knowledge producers. An additional benefit of such an undertaking is that the corpus can become part of the infrastructure of a research community that allows continued contributions by others individually and collaboratively. We also illustrate the usefulness of our local learner corpus for research, teaching, mentoring, and collaboration within our writing program with examples of the research projects and teaching interventions we have developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article exploits the synergy of critical discourse studies and Corpus Linguistics to study the pervasive representation of Islam and Muslims in an approximate 670,000-word corpus of US news media stories published between 2001 and 2015. Following collocation and concordance analysis of the most frequent topics or categories which revolve around the representation of Islam and Muslims in US news stories, the Discourse-Historical Approach to critical discourse analysis was adopted to investigate how the discursive strategies of nomination (construction of in-groups and out-groups) and predication (labeling social actors more or less positively or negatively) are used in US news media stories. The findings indicated that, in general, Islam and Muslims are associated with violence, religious radicalism, and Islamic extremist militants. Finally, the article discusses the discursive themes resulting from the analysis of personal pronouns as well as the educational implications of the findings for social studies and multicultural education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

methodology by making the case for an approach that employs three distinct methods, each of which serves as a basis for confirming or questioning the results reached by the other two. This approach will be called the Method of Triangulation. The three component techniques are as follows: 1. The Method of Corpus Linguistics: The method of corpus linguistics employs large-scale data sets (corpora) that provide evidence of linguistic practice. 2. The Originalist Method of Immersion: The method of immersion requires researchers to immerse themselves in the linguistic and conceptual world of the authors and readers of the constitutional provision being studied. 3. The Method of Studying the Constitutional Record: The method of studying the record framing, ratification, and implementation requires the researcher to examine the drafting process, including sources upon which the drafters relied, debates during the drafting and ratification process, and the early history of implementation of the constitutional provision. These three methods each provide different inputs into the process of constitutional interpretation and construction. Because each method can be checked against the others, the combination of the three methods results in what can be called "triangulation." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Originalism is the theory of constitutional interpretation that identifies the constitutional text's public meaning when it was ratified as its authoritative meaning. Corpus linguistics is the study of word-use regularities and patterns, primarily in written texts. In a prior article, I argued that originalists should utilize corpus linguistics to facilitate originalism's capacity to accurately uncover this original meaning. However, my arguments there were theoretical; this Essay provides a "test case" of corpus linguistics' capacity to increase originalism's methodological accuracy. This Essay accomplishes three modest goals. First, it provides a practical example of the application of corpus linguistics to originalism. This affords a first-cut illustration of the extent to which corpus linguistics can make originalism's methodology more rigorous. Second, this Essay utilizes the tools of corpus linguistics to provide additional evidence of the original meaning of "religion" in the First Amendment. Third, based on this experience, it describes some of the challenges originalist scholars will likely face employing corpus linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief response to Ordinary Meaning and Corpus Linguistics, an article by Stefan Gries and Brian Slocum, explains why corpus linguistics represents a radical break from current statutory interpretation practice, and it argues that corpus linguistics ought not be adopted as an interpretive theory for criminal laws. Corpus linguistics has superficial appeal because it promises to increase predictability and to decrease the role of judges' personal preferences in statutory interpretation. But there are reasons to doubt that corpus linguistics can achieve these goals. More importantly, corpus linguistics sacrifices other, more important values, including notice and accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars and judges have heralded corpus linguistics—the study of language through collections of spoken or written texts—as a novel tool for statutory interpretation that will help provide an answer in the occasionally ambiguous search for “ordinary meaning” using dictionaries. In the spring of 2016, the Michigan Supreme Court became the first to use corpus linguistics in a majority opinion. The dissent also used it, however, and the two opinions reached different conclusions. In the first true test for corpus linguistics, the answer seemed to be just as ambiguous as before. This result calls into question the utility of corpus linguistics. If the Michigan Supreme Court could reach opposite conclusions about the ordinary meaning of a word when both opinions used the same database, can one really consider corpus linguistics an effective aid to statutory interpretation? This Note first argues that the Michigan Supreme Court’s majority opinion conducted a flawed search of the database and that the dissent’s contrary conclusion was correct. In addition, this Note contends that transparency—the greatest strength of corpus linguistics—outweighs the risk that judges may fail to use a corpuslinguistics database accurately because that transparency permits advocates, other judges, and legal scholars to review the court’s analysis, aiding appellate review. Lastly, this Note includes recommended steps to guide the use of a corpus-linguistics database in the search for ordinary meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study details a comparative, corpus-based discourse analysis of corpora containing educational documents distributed to parents and guardians of K-12 children in public schools in the United States (US). The exploratory local corpus (n=152,934) contains parent-directed educational documents collected from four public schools in a city located in the south-eastern US with an unusually high percentage of foreign-born residents. The comparison corpus (n=147,796) contains parent-directed documents collected from a sampling of K-12 schools across the US. Following Baker et al. (2008), keyness and collocations were utilised as central theoretical notions and tools of analysis, in addition to a lexical sophistication comparison, in order to investigate text simplification across corpora. Results show that while the first corpus used labels for students that were superficially inclusive, English language learners themselves were discursively represented as outsiders facing barriers to inclusion that native-English speaking monolingual students do not face. Furthermore, the first corpus revealed an emphasis on identifying and categorising language learners so as to provide them with immediate services, while the non-geographically specific corpus focussed more on the long-term development of learners and on preparation for post-secondary education. We discuss the implications for language policy in public education and for policies related to K-12 school-to-home correspondence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Big Data is everywhere. The Big Data revolution is not only the collection of information; it is also the use of that data to disclose new, previously unknown information about us and our lives. Originalism is on the cusp of its own Big Data revolution. For the first time, both a body of data of the Constitution's original meaning and the technology to effectively utilize that data are available. In this Article, I argue that originalism should embrace its own Big Data transformation and that doing so will help originalism achieve greater methodological rigor. I argue that originalists who embrace a Big Data transformation will be able to reliably and accurately reveal original language conventions. In this Article, I bring together a widely observed phenomenon--the theoretical move toward original meaning originalism--with an emergent phenomenon--the use of computer-assisted research technologies and techniques ("CART") in originalism. I argue that originalists' conceptual move toward original meaning originalism, when coupled with their adoption of CART, will reduce the force of the Inaccuracy Critique--the claim that originalism's reliance on history makes any resulting constitutional law inaccurate. Originalism rests on the premise that it is able to ascertain the Constitution's meaning with reasonable accuracy. A recurring criticism of originalism is that, on the contrary, originalism leads to inaccuracy in constitutional law. Originalism leads to inaccuracy because it depends on an activity--the recovery of the Constitution's meaning via the methods of history--that cannot bear the weight. Unlike criticisms that originalism leads to normatively bad constitutional interpretations, the Inaccuracy Critique contends that originalism fails on its own terms--that its methodology is flawed. In response to this criticism, many originalists made a major conceptual move: they rearticulated originalism as original meaning originalism in place of original intent originalism. In this Article, I build on that conceptual move, and I tie it to a modification to the method of historical research for originalism that will make the process more accurate. In particular, I argue that original meaning originalism's focus on the text's original conventional meaning, coupled with now-widely available CART, blunts the Inaccuracy Critique. By harnessing the power of Big Data, originalism moves toward a more rigorous methodology. Computer-assisted research techniques will increase originalism's methodological rigor by introducing the techniques of the empirical sciences and producing testable and reproducible results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corpus linguistics identifies the qualitative difference in the characteristics of spoken discourse vs. written academic discourse. Whereas spoken discourse makes greater use of finite dependent clauses functioning as constituents in other clauses, written academic discourse incorporates noun phrase constituents and complex phrases. This claim can be extended to the contrast between academic written texts and more informal oral-like written texts. This study examined whether this qualitative difference in syntactic structures affects second language learners' syntactic parsing in a written academic text. For the purpose of this research, a think-aloud protocol of reading a typical written academic text was carried out with 31 undergraduate students at a U.S. university who demonstrated near-passing scores and above on the Japanese language proficiency test level 2. The statistical analysis, using Kendall's tau, revealed that advanced proficiency in terms of oral-like written texts does not guarantee the ability to parse syntactic structures in written academic texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonnative English speakers (NNESs) who teach at English-medium institutions in the United States (US) have frequently been the subject of student complaints. Research into language ideologies concerning NNESs in the US suggests that such complaints can be understood as manifestations of a broader project of social exclusion operating, in part, through the ideological construction of the NNES as incomprehensible Other. The present study explores the extent to which such ideological presuppositions and exaggerative performances are observable in students' evaluations of ‘Asian’ mathematics instructors on the website RateMyProfessors.com (RMP). A mixed methodological approach combining statistical analysis of numeric RMP ratings, quantitative corpus linguistic techniques, and critical discourse analysis was employed. Findings confirm the presence of disadvantages related to ‘Asian’ instructors' race and language. However, RMP users' discourse is shown to be less overtly discriminatory and instead to reproduce dominant language ideology in subtle, previously undescribed ways.(Student evaluations, higher education, university teaching, nonnative speakers, second language users, ethnicity, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, formulaic language)* [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study is an overview of the Jespersen cycle in casual spoken Australian English. The phenomenon of the Jespersen cycle of negation is well known: negative polarity items (NPIs) such as Frenchpas‘step’ are recruited for emphasis and subsequently reanalysed as the negator, eventually triggering the old negator's omission. Recently, efforts have been made to align developments in British and American English negation with this model, such as Cheshire's description of the punctualnever(e.g.I never went to school today) and Hoeksema's investigation of the reanalysis of taboo NPIs such asjack allas negators. Some 4,982 tokens of negation in the Australian English corpora were examined to evaluate the tug-of-war between speakers' pragmatic desires to avoid face-threatening negation and the necessity of maintaining functionality in the negator. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A quantitative, corpus-based approach is most illuminating for describing collocational and other recurrent patterns associated with specific lexical items across an entire corpus, while a qualitative, critical discourse analysis approach is best suited for scrutinising specific stretches of text at various levels. By incorporating both approaches, this study examines US news stories published in mainstream media with an attempt to identify specific discursive practices relating to North Korea. The analysis reveals that three US media outlets (CNN, Newsweek and The New York Times) divide the world into certain sets of countries, and that being pro- or anti-USA might have an impact on which country is associated with North Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since usage-based theories such as cognitive grammar assume an intimate relationship between mental representations of grammar and the processing of instances of language (usage events), corpora have an important role in the development of grammatical analyses. One consequence of relying on corpus data is that individual differences in usage tend to be obscured. To overcome this problem and investigate individual differences in spoken usage, we examine a large corpus consisting of the spoken output of six White House press secretaries. The results provide strong evidence that within this one particular discourse context the patterns of speech of each individual are clearly recognisable. Furthermore, these idiolectal preferences are consistent and are maintained over a period of at least a year or two. In addition, we briefly explore some theoretical consequences and possible explanations for the disparity found between the speech of the individual and that of the discourse community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the role of discourse in re-establishing the hegemony of free market capitalism during and immediately after the global financial crisis in the United States, colloquially referred to as the Great Recession. Theoretically, we employ post-Marxism and particularly the work of Ernesto Laclau, but also draw insights from poststi-uctural feminism and critical theory. Methodologically, we use a corpus linguistics approach to critical discourse analysis. This methodology allows us to examine, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the discursive strategies used during 2008-2010 in a random sample of daily newspapers throughout the United States. Our findings include identifying the discursive chains of equivalence used to obscure counter-hegemonic discourses of alternative forms of economic relations that are locally based. Contributions of this study include furthering our understanding of the role discourse plays in current economic relations and demonstrating how a corpus linguistics approach to critical discourse analysis can be used empirically to examine post-Marxist theoretical assertions both quantitatively and qualitatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we explore linguistic constructions of gender in US sports reportage concerning two related basketball altercations: the Pacers-Pistons NBA fight in 2004 and the Shock-Sparks WNBA fight in 2008. We use a combined corpus and qualitative textual analysis to investigate coverage from the days immediately following the fights and to compare that coverage to sports reportage more generally. Our analysis reveals key differences in narrative focus; for example, that NBA coverage is most interested in blame assignation in the isolated event, while WNBA coverage concerns gender and the league writ large. Such patterns, which are realised linguistically in both explicit and implicit ways, contribute to the 'othering' of women and women athletes in the increasingly important sports-media-commercial complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilizing a combination of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, the article describes ideologies of United States (U.S.) national identity based in civic and ethnic nationalisms. These ideologies circulated during debates and hearings in the U.S. Congress concerning the 2006 reauthorization of provisions of the Voting Rights Act requiring that multilingual voting materials be made available for language minorities in certain jurisdictions. The article argues that although those legislators supporting the use of multilingual voting materials construct an ideology of civic nationalism that promotes inclusion of language minorities, they are still greatly influenced by the dominant language ideology. Those opposing multilingual voting materials construct a U.S. national identity that places stringent requirements on newcomers to assimilate and learn English. These legislators simultaneously attempt to avoid the suspicion of ethnic nationalist ideologies by arguing that English is a neutral entity, detaching it from its dominant linguistic community. The findings suggest that despite Congressional support for multilingual voting materials, the language ideologies present in Congress are not necessarily favorable to the rights of language minorities. These findings have language policy implications in that they suggest opposition to a right to language for linguistic minorities in the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has described the key role of formulaic language use in both written and spoken communication (Schmitt, 2004; Wray, 2002), as well as in relation to L2 learning (Ellis, Simpson-Vlach, & Maynard, 2008). Relatively few studies have examined related fixed and semifixed multi-word units (MWUs), which comprise fixed parts with the potential for flexible slots in L2 learners' language use over time. Building upon the corpus linguistic methodology of concgramming and usage-based linguistic research on a construction-based developmental sequence in language acquisition, this article describes learners' multi-word inventories through the analysis of a learner corpus of out-of-class instant messaging and blog use in a U.S. high school advanced placement Spanish language course. We examined this corpus using concgram analysis of phraseological tendencies to document related MWUs used in fixed and schematic fashion. Patterns in student language use are described in terms of meaningful permutations of constituency variation over time. Related patterns used by different learners are analyzed and discussed in light of methodological considerations in tracking second language use and the pedagogical implications of the concgramming approach to MWUs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares and analyzes the use of connectors, linking adverbials (LAs--therefore, however, instead) and coordinating conjunctions (CCs--and, but, or) in the editorials of Korean and American English newspapers. The purpose of the research was to see whether there are any significant differences in their use of connectors with regard to their semantic categories and their two formal types. The analyses have shown that LAs are more prevalent in K(orean)-corpora (61.7%/38.5%), while CCs are used more often (38.5%/61.5%) in A(merican)-corpora. The position-wise analyses have also shown that K-writers seem to prefer additive LAs such as also, which functions as a reinforcing linker, unlike A-writers who use and far more frequently. Furthermore, K-writers are shown to choose a relatively higher ratio of however, an emphatic adverb, and a lower ratio of but. This study claims that K-writers' such preference for expressions of emphasis and certainty is a case of L1 transfer of stylistics (or rhetoric) into English writing, and that it originates ultimately from the Korean culture of medial power distance. Its educational implications include that English connectors should be taught along with their stylistic imports, and that a curriculum-integrative instruction is needed which involves Korean and English teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) contains 400 million words in more than 100,000 texts which date from the 1810s to the 2000s. The corpus contains texts from fiction, popular magazines, newspapers and non-fiction books, and is balanced by genre from decade to decade. It has been carefully lemmatised and tagged for part-of-speech, and uses the same architecture as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), BYU-BNC, the TIME Corpus and other corpora. COHA allows for a wide range of research on changes in lexis, morphology, syntax, semantics, and American culture and society (as viewed through language change), in ways that are probably not possible with any text archive (e.g., Google Books) or any other corpus of historical American English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether the position of adverb phrases in sentences is regionally patterned in written Standard American English, based on an analysis of a 25 million word corpus of letters to the editor representing the language of 200 cities from across the United States. Seven measures of adverb position were tested for regional patterns using the global spatial autocorrelation statistic Moran's I and the local spatial autocorrelation statistic Getis-Ord Gi*. Three of these seven measures were indentified as exhibiting significant levels of spatial autocorrelation, contrasting the language of the Northeast with language of the Southeast and the South Central states. These results demonstrate that continuous regional grammatical variation exists in American English and that regional linguistic variation exists in written Standard English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Affixation is one of the most common and productive ways to form new words in English and forming words through suffix, an affix that is placed after a base, and is a significant component of affixation. Although numerous studies on common suffixes have been conducted, relatively little attention has been paid to the seemingly less used affixes, say the suffix --esque. A thorough analysis is conducted of the properties of the suffix --esque, specifically the etymology, the semantic meaning, the formation rules, the orthographic properties, the productivity and the stylistic tendency with the help of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings are helpful in English teaching or learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Using the academic writing sub-corpora of the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus as data and building on previous research, this study strives to identify the most frequently-used multi-word constructions (MWCs) of various types (e.g., idioms, lexical bundles, and phrasal/prepositional verbs) in general academic writing across the academic divisions of the corpora and to examine their usage patterns. The study produces: (1) a list of the 228 most common MWCs in general academic written English across the academic divisions in the corpora, organized by frequency and semantic function respectively, (2) new findings regarding the usage patterns of academic written MWCs, and (3) results about differences in the use of MWCs between American and British English. The study also demonstrates the critical importance of using large corpora in the study of MWCs in general academic writing. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This study investigates the metaphorical uses of blood in American English and Hungarian, using large corpora. The study aims at identifying the target themes of metaphorical expressions containing blood in the two languages as well as unearthing details of patterns of usage in a case-study analysis of four selected expressions. Findings show that the two languages mostly share the range of phenomena that their extensive metaphorical uses of blood depict. At the same time, the case studies reveal a remarkable difference in the frequency, connotation, and usage patterns of the expressions that underwent a detailed analysis. The expressions also display substantial within-language variation in their connotations. The findings provide support for the usage of mixed corpora, and imply a vital need to investigate the context of metaphorical expressions in order to bring to light the conceptualizations inherent in them. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]