O objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar uma proposta para o ensino de colocações adverbiais em inglês, típicas da área de negócios, à luz da Linguística de Corpus. Para isso, compilamos um corpus monolíngue em inglês britânico e americano, composto de periódicos de negócios e relatórios de empresas disponíveis on-line, num total de 2.310.143 palavras. Com a ajuda do Wordsmith Tools 5.0 e de cálculos estatísticos (escores T e Informação Mútua), levantamos as vinte e cinco colocações adverbiais mais recorrentes no corpus de estudo e as analisamos quanto aos padrões léxicogramaticais. Feita a análise, selecionamos dentre essas unidades colocacionais aquelas que poderiam ser abordadas em sala de aula, segundo os critérios estabelecidos pela pesquisadora, com base na abordagem DDL de Tim Johns (1991), na modelagem de Carter (1998) e nas críticas feitas ao uso das linhas de concordância no ensino de línguas. Elaboramos, assim, exercícios que foram aplicados em três estudos-piloto, realizados com alunos de inglês para negócios de um instituto de idiomas privado, nos seguintes níveis: pré-intermediário, intermediário e intermediário superior. Nos três estudos, comprovamos a aplicabilidade dos exercícios e a importância da Linguística de Corpus como abordagem ao ensino de línguas. / The aim of this work is to put forward a proposal for teaching typical adverbial collocations in Business English, based on Corpus Linguistics principles. To accomplish that, we compiled a monolingual corpus in British and American English, composed of business press texts as well as company reports available on-line, totalling 2,310,429 words. With the use of Wordsmith Tools 5.0 and statistical scores (T-score and Mutual Information), we found the twenty-five most frequent adverbial collocations, which were lexically and grammatically analysed concerning their patterns. Next, from these collocational units we selected the ones which could be approached in class, following the criteria set by the researcher, based on Tim Johns DDL (JOHNS, 1991), Carters modelling (CARTER, 1998) and the objections raised concerning the use of concordance lines for language teaching. Thus, we planned exercises to be applied in three pilot studies, carried out with Business English students at a private language school in São Paulo, Brazil, at the following levels: preintermediate, intermediate and upper-intermediate. The three studies demonstrated that such exercises can be successfully used in Business English classes thus confirming the relevance of Corpus Linguistics as an approach to language teaching.

<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>This essay is based on an investigation carried out with the help of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Taking the system of transitivity as its theoretical base and using spoken and written discourse as its primary source, this study aspired to find out what kinds of actions Americans perceive <em>Fate</em> to perform, for example physical, mental or verbal,<em> </em>in order to control what happens to people. It also aimed to reveal what actions people are said to perform in their attempts to control <em>Fate</em>. Do Americans deem <em>Fate</em> capable of, for instance, “deciding”, “talking” or “conspiring” and do they say that people, for example, “challenge”, “defy” or “defeat” <em>Fate</em>? Furthermore, a comparison was made in terms of the actions performed by <em>Fate</em> and people between the different domains of discourse represented in the corpus: spoken, fiction, magazine, newspaper and academic.</p><p>Among other things, this investigation shows that in American discourse both <em>Fate</em> and people are perceived to resort to physical strategies rather than mental or verbal ones in their endeavor to control one another.</p><p> </p>

<p> </p><p>Variationer i svensk verbböjning: En korpusundersökning (Fredrik Smeds, D-uppsats i Svenska språket, Karlstads universitet, Institutionen för kultur och kommunikation, Avdelningen för språk 2008). I uppsatsen undersöks svensk verbböjningsvariation från första hälften av 1800-talet till våra dagar dels genom studier av facklitteratur, ordböcker och ordlistor från skilda tider, dels genom att studera korpusar med skönlitteratur och brev skrivna av August Strindberg, äldre och yngre romaner samt dagstidningar från 1965–2004. De äldre romanerna är skrivna från första halvan av 1800-talet till första halvan av 1900-talet, och de yngre runt 1980. Materialet tillhandahölls av Språkdata vid Göteborgs universitet och omfattar ca 126 miljoner ord. Efter datainsamlingen användes chi-2-testet, för att se om skillnaderna var statistiskt signifikanta. Många verb som varierar eller har varierat efter år 1800 har undersökts. Tidigare förändringar omnämns mer kortfattat. Variationerna är av skilda slag: mellan stark och svag böjning (<em>spridit </em>och <em>spritt</em>), mellan korta och långa former (<em>klär </em>och <em>kläder</em>), mellan former med och utan <em>j</em> (<em>stödjer </em>och <em>stöder</em>) samt övriga variationer (t.ex. mellan <em>tillbringade</em> och <em>tillbragte</em>).</p><p> </p>

<p>The thesis explores the form, function and sociolinguistic distribution of explicit apologies in the spoken part of the British National Corpus. The sub-corpus used for the study comprises a spoken text mass of about five million words and represents dialogue produced by more than 1700 speakers, acting in a number of different conversational settings. More than 3000 examples of apologising are included in the analysis.</p><p>Primarily, the form and function of the apologies are examined in relation to the type of offence leading up to the speech act. Aspects such as the sincerity of the apologies and the use of additional remedial strategies other than explicit apologising are also considered. Variations in the distributions of the different types of apologies found are subsequently investigated for the two independent variables speaker social identity (gender, social class and age) and conversational setting (genre, formality and group size). The effect of the speaker-addressee relationship on the apology rate and the types of apologies produced is also examined.</p><p>In this study, the prototypical apology, a speech act used to remedy a real or perceived offence, is only one of a number of uses of the apology form in the corpus. Other common functions of the form include discourse-managing devices such as request cues for repetition and markers of hesitation, as well as disarming devices uttered before expressing disagreement and controversial opinions.</p><p>Among the speaker social variables investigated, age and social class are particularly important in affecting apologetic behaviour. Young and middle-class speakers favour the use of the apology form. No substantial gender differences in apologising are apparent in the corpus. I have also been able to show that large conversational groups result in frequent use of the form. Finally, analysis of the effects of the speaker-addressee relationship on the use of the speech act shows that, contrary to expectations based on Brown & Levinson’s theory of politeness, it is the powerful who tend to apologise to the powerless rather than vice versa.</p><p>The study implies that formulaic politeness is an important linguistic marker of social class and that its use often involves control of the addressee. </p>

<p>The present study deals with the use of two Irish verb constructions, the autonomous (e.g. <i>cuireadh litreacha chun bealaigh</i>, ‘letters were dispatched’)<i> </i>and the passive progressive (e.g. <i>bhí m’athair á leigheas acu</i>, ‘my father was being cured by them’), in a corpus of 20th-century texts. From this corpus, 2,956 instances of the autonomous and 467 instances of the passive progressive were extracted and included in the analysis. Dialectal variation concerning the use of these two constructions is also surveyed.</p><p>The study explores and compares the use of the autonomous and the passive progressive. The main aim of the study is to investigate the two constructions with regard to their textual functions. The features studied relate to verb and clause type, as well as the measuring of topicality of patients, implicit agents, and – in the passive progressive only – overt agents. </p><p>The autonomous tends to be used when the patient is topical, or central, in the text. The passive progressive, on the other hand, is mainly used with an overt agent that is considerably more topical than the patient. In agent-less passive progressives, patients and implicit agents are equally low in topicality. The autonomous occurs about equally often in main and subclauses, while the passive progressive is used primarily in subclauses, mainly non-finite ones. This difference is connected to the finding that 24% of the clauses containing the autonomous denote events as part of a sequentially ordered chain of events, compared to 4% of those containing the passive progressive.</p><p>The most salient dialectal variation concerns the frequency of the passive progressive: 73% of the instances of the passive progressive in the database occur in the Munster texts, compared to 22% in Connacht 5% in Ulster. The autonomous, in contrast, is fairly evenly distributed across the dialects.</p>

This study investigates, theoretically and empirically, the role of animacy in the development of gender systems. The theoretical background is a grammaticalisation approach to language change. Concerning gender, this presupposes that classifications begin as semantic distinctions in the realm of animacy with flexible, contextually based agreement between the gender-marking elements. This kind of gender is called contextual gender. In the course of time, these classifications will spread into other areas, they become desemanticized and the agreement relation grammaticalizes into one of government where the inherent gender of the head noun controls the gender of the agreeing elements, irrespective of contextual factors When this leads to a great number of violations of the principles of contextual agreement in the realm of animacy, a new cycle of semantic classification will begin, creating layers of classifications. For German and Swedish two different layers are discerned respectively. The empirical starting point of this project was the observation of two opposite developments in the area of female person reference in Germany and Sweden. As a consequence of feminist critique of language, mainly targeted at the use of socalled masculine generics, in Germany the use of female gender-specific nouns increased substantially, the major means being female derivation with –in, so-called motion. Although similar means for female derivation exist in Swedish, i.e. -inna and -ska, the number of derivations used is decreasing. In order to isolate socio-cultural and historical facts from language-internal mechanisms behind the diverging tendencies, a historical sketch of the development of equal rights, of language criticism and of the development of the female suffixes is drawn for the respective countries. It is obvious, that the German strategy to achieve gender-fair language use is established by making women visible by means of motion, while in Sweden the use of gender-neutral forms for a long period of time has been regarded as a sign of equality. This ‘neutral’ use of former masculine and male-specific forms has been made possible by the merging of the two nominal genders masculine and feminine into uter (Sw. utrum). A contrastive study of comparable German and Swedish newspaper texts shows that the lack of motion in Swedish is partly compensated by composition and attribution with gender-specific lexemes. Still, the 64% gender-specific noun phrases in Swedish cannot compare with the 95% in German. But the use of gender-specific forms for well over half of the person references calls into doubt the general opinion shared by most Swedes that Swedish has a gender-neutral person reference system. Linguistic asymmetry persists as long as gender-specification is restricted to one half of the gendered population, whatever the means for specification. The almost exclusive use of gender-specific forms in German is seen as indicative of a grammaticalisation process. Haspelmaths invisible hand explanation of grammaticalisation is used to show how the development of -in in German fulfils just about every requirement on a grammaticalisation process – language-external as well as -internal – while -inna and -ska neither are promoted sufficiently by the speech community nor does there exist a paradigm that could accommodate them. In contrast to Swedish, where the suffixes remain strictly derivational, it is demonstrated that -in is turning into an inflectional marker. The German gender sub-system for person reference is developing into a semantically based system with genderflexible person denominations. A study of the pronouns agreeing with non-personal-agents in a parallel corpus of EU-documents shows that other aspects than purely referential or formal ones impinge on the choice of agreement forms. Non-personal-agents in certain contexts expose both agency and intentionality, which turns them into suitable agreement partners for animate pronouns. In Swedish, all animate pronouns are sexed, leaving a “Leerstelle” for these inanimate but agentive and intentional referents. In German, this problem is covered by the polysemy of the personal pronouns. Non-personal-agents are shown to be one possiblesource for the spreading of a linguistic innovation from the realm of animacy into inanimate contexts via semantic and thematic roles that share important features with animates proper. The last study makes use of different types of German monolingual corpora in order to investigate the agreement between inanimate nouns with female inherent gender – from non-personal-agents and abstracts to concrete nouns – and agent nouns which can potentially expose agreement by female derivation. Although the results are rather heterogeneous, they allow the formulation of the hypothesis that agreement is more likely to occur with nouns for which a metaphorical bridge to stereotypical conceptions of femininity can be constructed and that key collocations with high frequency such as die Kirche als Trägerin or die DNA als Trägerin der Erbinformation contribute significantly to the spread of the agreement pattern.

This study aims at examining in detail the linguistic characteristics of sentential idioms (‘idiomatische Sätze’, IS) in German, e.g. Das kannst du dir an den Hut stecken.; Du hast wohl Tomaten auf den Augen!; Da lachen ja die Hühner!. In theoretically and empirically investigating their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features and productive potential, it is shown that IS can only be described properly by looking at the interfaces between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and by systematically investigating pattern formation. In this respect, the study goes far beyond traditional phraseological research. As a theoretical background, the study refers to research on phraseology, sentence types and sentence mood, linguistic evaluation, morphological productivity, and the frameworks of Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory. Empirical evidence comes from a large corpus of written German, a linguistic experiment on productivity, and introspective data. With respect to syntax, the study shows that IS are bound to one or a few different sentence types, varying according to the degree of restriction of their speech act potential. The complex semantics of IS is shown to consist not only of a literal and an idiomatic, but also of a third, mediating representational level. The idiomatic meaning of IS is described as evaluative meaning. Pragmatically, IS are dependent on special contextual environments to obtain a proper interpretation. A context model is developed which makes use of certain categories of evaluation. Moreover, a relevance-theoretic approach is sketched in order to explain which functional advantages IS might have compared to non-idiomatic utterances. With respect to productivity, ten different idiomatic patterns of construction are identified and described in detail. It is experimentally demonstrated that these patterns are productive to a greater or lesser degree dependent on their internal syntactic, lexical, semantic and pragmatic features.

The present study deals with the use of two Irish verb constructions, the autonomous (e.g. cuireadh litreacha chun bealaigh, ‘letters were dispatched’) and the passive progressive (e.g. bhí m’athair á leigheas acu, ‘my father was being cured by them’), in a corpus of 20th-century texts. From this corpus, 2,956 instances of the autonomous and 467 instances of the passive progressive were extracted and included in the analysis. Dialectal variation concerning the use of these two constructions is also surveyed. The study explores and compares the use of the autonomous and the passive progressive. The main aim of the study is to investigate the two constructions with regard to their textual functions. The features studied relate to verb and clause type, as well as the measuring of topicality of patients, implicit agents, and – in the passive progressive only – overt agents. The autonomous tends to be used when the patient is topical, or central, in the text. The passive progressive, on the other hand, is mainly used with an overt agent that is considerably more topical than the patient. In agent-less passive progressives, patients and implicit agents are equally low in topicality. The autonomous occurs about equally often in main and subclauses, while the passive progressive is used primarily in subclauses, mainly non-finite ones. This difference is connected to the finding that 24% of the clauses containing the autonomous denote events as part of a sequentially ordered chain of events, compared to 4% of those containing the passive progressive. The most salient dialectal variation concerns the frequency of the passive progressive: 73% of the instances of the passive progressive in the database occur in the Munster texts, compared to 22% in Connacht 5% in Ulster. The autonomous, in contrast, is fairly evenly distributed across the dialects.

<p>The present paper examines the N₁ by N₁ construction using corpus linguistic methodology.The distribution of types of the construction that occur more than once either unhyphenated or hyphenated in any subcorpus of the British National Corpus accessed through the BrighamYoung University interface is examined. Written and spoken language as well as variousgenres are compared. Hyphenation is also investigated. A collocation analysis of some typesof the construction is further carried out and it is concluded that the N₁ by N₁ construction canbe part of the on a N₁ by N₁ basis construction. Results from the quantitative analysis as wellas the qualitative discussion suggest that the N P N construction may be undergoinglexicalisation starting as an adverbial and moving to functioning as a premodifier. Thissuggestion is indicated through complementary diachronic searches in the Oxford EnglishDictionary. It is also indicated that the construction may follow a development pattern similarto that of N₁to N₁. The notion of construction is discussed in relation to the N₁ by N₁ construction, and a hierarchical view of constructions is proposed as a solution to some of theproblems with the term.</p>

Idiolect refers to an individual’s unique use of language. Therefore, the author of a text can be identified by his/her use of language. This study is focused on Joan Hambidge’s recognisable idiolect across the boundaries of genres. It is expected that Hambidge will have a unique and recognisable idiolect, regardless of the genre she writes in. By making use of forensic linguistic principles, methods and applications, it has been shown that it is possible to determine an individual’s idiolect. Even though forensic principles are specifically focused on identifying an author, the methodology used in the research field can be applied to a corpus linguistic study to determine how clearly an individual’s idiolect features across the boundaries of genres. By researching the research subject, explaining her oeuvre, creating a literary background, as well as discussing the literary approaches that Hambidge uses in her respective genres, and what she writes about, the necessary literary background was created, which contributes to the complete image of Hambidge and her influences. By creating this background, it is possible to determine which external factors have an influence on Hambidge's idiolect. Linguistic research was done to determine the origin and background of sociolinguistics; as well as factors that can influence an individual’s idiolect. The background of forensic linguistics was provided, as well as the various corpus linguistic methods that can be used in a study such as this one. After the background was provided, the empirical analysis was executed, in which both stylistic and stylometric analyses were performed by making use of inter- and intra-corpus linguistic research, according to which Hambidge’s idiolect was identified. To identify Hambidge’s idiolect, the Taalkommissie corpus was used as a reference corpus to determine whether the idiosyncratic characteristics that were found in the Hambidge corpus truly are a unique feature or whether they can also be found in the Taalkommissie corpus. The application and execution of the methods made it possible to determine to which extent, if at all, Hambidge has a unique idiolect, and how this idiolect features across the boundaries of genres. The research has determined that Joan Hambidge has a unique idiolect and that the idiolect is especially clear when research is done about her corpus in its entirety. When Hambidge’s separate genres were compared to each other, it was clear that genre influences idiolect, but also that Hambidge did not follow the prescribed genre conventions. Even though the two novels that were compared, did not match as was expected, the other, various genres did agree. Various categories were identified, from which it is clear that distinguishing characteristics can be found in Hambidge’s corpus. It can therefore be said without a doubt that Hambidge has a unique idiolect across the boundaries of genres. / MA (Afrikaans and Dutch), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014