This corpus-based study aims to better understand the difficulties for Swedish students regarding English pronouns and based on the result give recommendations for the teaching of English pronouns within a Swedish context. The study investigates Swedish students' usage of pronouns in English writing and the result is compared with Köhlmyr’s (2001) result.  The material is taken from the corpus ULEC (Uppsala Learner English Corpus) and consists of 18 048 words. There are 48 essays written by Swedish students in year six and 39 essays from students in year twelve. The youngest and the oldest students from ULEC are chosen to be able to make comparisons between the years. Error Analysis is the method for finding errors and analyzing them. The errors are first analyzed as addition, misinformation (also called substitution), misordering or blends and then as interlingual or intralingual. They are analyzed to better understand the reasons behind them.  The essays contain a total of 56 errors and most of them are analyzed as misinformation caused by interlingual transfer. The most erroneous pronouns are interpreted as the most problematic, which in year six are the reflexive pronouns and in year 12 genitive dependent pronouns. In both years there also occur errors of object pronouns. A similarity with the previous study by Köhlmyr is that the students have difficulties using existential there and instead use the subject pronoun it. A possible reason behind these errors could be the difference between Swedish and English grammar rules which lead to negative transfer. A recommendation for teaching is to focus more on explaining the genitive and reflexive pronouns. / Syftet med denna korpusbaserade studie är att bättre förstå svårigheterna för svenska elever gällande engelska pronomen och baserat på resultatet ge rekommendationer till undervisningen av engelska pronomen inom en svensk kontext. Studien undersöker svenska elevers användning av pronomen i engelsk skrift och jämför resultatet med Köhlmyrs (2001) resultat. Materialet är hämtat från korpuset ULEC (Uppsala Learner English Corpus) och består av 18 048 ord. Det är 48 uppsatser skrivna av svenska elever i årskurs sex och 39 uppsatser från elever i tredje året på gymnasiet. De yngsta och de äldsta eleverna från ULEC är utvalda för att kunna göra en jämförelse mellan åren. Felanalys är metoden för att hitta felen och analysera dem. Felen är först analyserade som tillägg, substitution, felordning eller blandning och sedan som interlinguala eller intralinguala. De är analyserade för att bättre förstå orsaken till att de uppstod. Uppsatserna innehåller 56 fel och de flesta av dem analyseras som substitution på grund av interlingual överföring. De mest felaktiga pronomenen tolkas som de mest problematiska, vilket i årkurs sex är reflexiva pronomen, och i år 12 genitiva pronomen. Inom båda åren förkommer även fel av objektpronomen. En likhet med den tidigare undersökningen av Köhlmyr (2001) är att eleverna i årskurs sex har svårt att använda existentiella there och i stället använder subjekt pronomenet it. En orsak bakom dessa fel kan vara skillnaden mellan svenska och engelska grammatikregler som leder till negativ överföring. En rekommendation för undervisning är att fokusera mer på att förklara possessiva och reflexiva pronomen.

Through a combination of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, this paper looks at the hidden ideological discourses surrounding sex offenders in the British media. Corpus linguistics provides an excellent framework to discover such discourse patterns and the critical discourse analysis framework helps contextualise the findings. The specific aim of the paper is to discover and compare the discourse patterns surrounding the specific nominals rapist* and paedophile* in order to see how the representations differ. The analysis uncovered that the representation of both offenders was sensationalised and full of negative and emotionally loaded words. Furthermore, it was discovered that two differing discourses were prominent for each nominal: An animalistic and bodily discourse for rapist* and a discourse of deviance and the mind for peadophile*. Lastly, it is argued that these misrepresentations are problematic as they misinform both the public and the regulation of offenders.

Overall patterns of language use variation across oral proficiency levels of 1,243 Japanese EFL learners and 20 native speakers of English using the linguistic features set from Biber (1988) were investigated in this study. The approach combined learner corpora, language processing techniques, visual inspection of descriptive statistics, and multivariate statistical analysis to identify characteristics of learner language use. The largest spoken learner corpus in Japan, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology Japanese Learner English (NICT JLE) Corpus was used for the analysis. It consists of over one million running words of L2 spoken English with oral proficiency level information. The level of the material in the corpus is approximately equal to a Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) range of 356 to 921. It also includes data gathered from 20 native speakers who performed identical speaking tasks as the learners. The 58 linguistic features (e.g., grammatical features) were taken from the original list of 67 linguistic features in Biber (1988) to explore the variation of learner language. The following research questions were addressed. First, what linguistic features characterize different oral proficiency levels? Second, to what degree do the language features appearing in the spoken production of high proficiency learners match those of native speakers who perform the same task? Third, is the oral production of Japanese EFL learners rich enough to display the full range of features used by Biber? Grammatical features alone would not be enough to comprehensively distinguish oral proficiency levels, but the results of the study show that various types of grammatical features can be used to describe differences in the levels. First, frequency change patterns (i.e., a rising, a falling, a combination of rising, falling, and a plateauing) across the oral proficiency levels were shown through linguistic features from a wide range of categories: (a) part-of-speech (noun, pronoun it, first person pronoun, demonstrative pronoun, indefinite pronoun, possibility modal, adverb, causative adverb), (b) stance markers (emphatic, hedge, amplifier), (c) reduced forms (contraction, stranded preposition), (d) specialized verb class (private verb), complementation (infinitive), (e) coordination (phrasal coordination), (f) passive (agentless passive), and (g) possibly tense and aspect markers (past tense, perfect aspect). In addition, there is a noticeable gap between native and non-native speakers of English. There are six items that native speakers of English use more frequently than the most advanced learners (perfect aspect, place adverb, pronoun it, stranded preposition, synthetic negation, emphatic) and five items that native speakers use less frequently (past tense, first person pronoun, infinitive, possibility modal, analytic negation). Other linguistic features are used with similar frequency across the levels. What is clear is that the speaking tasks and the time allowed for provided ample opportunity for most of Biber’s features to be used across the levels. The results of this study show that various linguistic features can be used to distinguish different oral proficiency levels, and to distinguish the oral language use of native and non-native speakers of English. / Teaching & Learning

<p>  </p> <p>The present thesis presents a study conducted using corpus linguistics and variationist methods in order to explore the system of intensifiers in a corpus of Middle High German. The data consisted of a sample of adjectives from different texts from the Middle High German period (1050-1350). The study of intensifiers (e.g. <em>sehr ‘</em>very<em>’, wirkick ‘</em>really<em>’, ganz ‘</em>quite<em>’</em>) has been a topic of much discussion, mainly in English. On the contrary, there is little research on the system of German intensifiers (e.g. <em>sehr, wirklich, ganz</em>). The analysis of data resulted in amplifiers being the most frequent type of intensifiers. Besides the thesis drew the distribution of the most frequent variants found in the sample, and the overall occurrence of intensifiers among different text types. Furthermore, the results suggest that the rate of intensification is relatively low and remains low throughout most of the Middle High German period, but is higher in courtly texts and religious legends than in other types of texts. These findings were comparable to the previous research done, suggesting that intensification of adjectives in German behaved similarly to what have been observed in English. </p>

The Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae (TLA; http://aaew.bbaw.de/tla) is the publication platform of the project „Structure and Transformation in the Vocabulary of the Egyptian Language: Texts and Knowledge in the Culture of Ancient Egypt“ (formerly known as “Altägyptisches Wörterbuch”) located in Berlin and Leipzig. It contains the largest corpus of Egyptian texts (ca. 1.4 million text words) and it is a very important tool for linguistic, philological, lexicographical, and cultural research. My paper introduces you to the software behind the TLA. I will show how easy it is to add a new text to the corpus with transcription, translation, Hieroglyphic codes, and metadata and how easy you can add any annotations of different types like rubra, citations from other texts, comments, direct speech. The software itself is freely available and platform independent. You are welcome to use our software to edit your texts and to cooperate with us!

This thesis examines the scientific language in different subjects by analysing all grade 8 science items from TIMSS 2011, using four characteristic meaning dimensions of scientific language – Packing, Precision and Presentation of information, and the level of Personification in a text. The results, as well as results from established readability measures, are correlated with test performances of different student groups. The TIMSS vocabulary is compared with three Swedish corpora where low frequency words are identified and further analysed. The thesis challenges the notion that there is a single scientific language, as results show that the language use varies between subjects. Physics uses more words, biology shows higher Packing and lower Precision, while physics shows the opposite pattern. Items are generally low in Personification but physics has higher levels, earth science lower. Chemistry often presents information in more complex ways. The use of meaning dimensions manages to connect the language use in science items to student performance, while established measures do not. For each subject, one or more of the meaning dimensions shows significant correlations with small to medium effect sizes. Higher Packing is positively correlated with students’ results in earth science, negatively correlated in physics, and has no significant correlations in biology or chemistry. Students’ performances decrease when placing items in everyday contexts, and skilled readers are aided by higher precision, while less-skilled seem unaffected. Many meaning dimensions that influence low performers’ results do not influence those of high performers, and vice versa. The vocabulary of TIMSS and school textbooks are closely matched, but compared with more general written Swedish and a more limited vocabulary, the coverage drops significantly. Of the low frequency words 78% are nouns, where also most compound–, extra long– and made-up words are found. These categories and nominalisations are more common in biology and, except for made-up words, rare in chemistry. Abstract and generalizing nouns are frequent in biology and earth science, concrete nouns in chemistry and physics.

This thesis explores the ideological role of metaphor in British governmental discourses on 'social exclusion'. A hybrid methodology, combining approaches from Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and cognitive theories of metaphor, is used to address how social exclusion and other metaphors are deployed to create an ideologically vested representation of society. The data consists of linguistic metaphors identified from a 400,000+ word machine-readable corpus of British governmental texts on social exclusion covering a ten year period (1997- 2007). From these surface level features of text, underlying systematic and conceptual metaphors are then inferred. The analysis reveals how the interrelation between social exclusion and a range of other metaphors creates a dichotomous representation of society in which social problems are discursively placed outside society, glossing inequalities within the included mainstream and placing the blame for exclusion on the cultural deficiencies of the excluded. The solution to the problem of exclusion is implicit within the logic of its conceptual structure and involves moving the excluded across the 'boundary' to join the 'insiders'. The welfare state has a key role to play in this and is underpinned by a range of metaphors which anticipate movement on the part of the excluded away from a position of dependence on the state. This expectation of movement is itself metaphorically structured by the notion of a social contract in which the socially excluded have a responsibility to try and include themselves in society in return for the right of (temporary) state support. Key systematic metaphors are explained by reference to a discourse-historical view of ideological change in processes of political party transformation.

In English the personal pronouns are morphologically marked for grammatical number, whilst the third-person singular pronouns are also obligatorily marked for gender. As a result, the use of any singular animate antecedent coindexed with a third-person pronoun forces a choice between he and she, whether or not the biological sex of the intended referent is known. This forced choice of gender, and the corresponding lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun where gender is not formally marked, is the primary focus of this thesis. I compare and contrast the use of the two main candidates for epicene status, singular they and generic he, which are found consistently opposed in the wider literature. Using corpus-based methods I analyse current epicene usage in written British English, and investigate which epicene pronouns are given to language-acquiring children in their L1 input. I also consider current prescriptions on epicene usage in grammar texts published post-2000 and investigate whether there is any evidence that language-external factors impact upon epicene choice. The synthesis of my findings with the wider literature on epicene pronouns leads me to the conclusion that, despite the restrictions imposed on the written pronoun paradigm evident in grammatical prescriptivism, singular they is the epicene pronoun of British English.

The present compilation thesis investigates the use of a pattern that is commonly found in academic writing, namely the introductory it pattern (e.g. it is interesting to note the difference). The main aim is to shed further light on the formal and functional characteristics of the pattern in academic writing. When relevant, the thesis also investigates functionally related constructions. The focus is on learner use, but reference corpora of published writing and non-native-speaker student writing have also been utilized for comparison. The thesis encompasses an introductory survey (a “kappa”) and four articles. The material comes from six different corpora: ALEC, BATMAT, BAWE, LOCRA, MICUSP and VESPA. Factors such as native-speaker status, discipline, level of achievement (lower-graded vs. higher-graded texts) and level of expertise in academic writing are investigated in the articles. In more detail, Articles 1 and 2 examine the formal (syntactic) characteristics of the introductory it pattern. The pattern is studied using modified versions of two previous syntactic classifications. Articles 3 and 4 investigate the functional characteristics of the pattern. In Article 3, a functional classification is developed and used to categorize the instances. Article 4 examines the stance-marking function of the pattern in relation to functionally related constructions (e.g. stance adverbs such as possibly and stance noun + prepositional phrase combinations like the possibility of). The introductory it pattern was found to be relatively invariable in the sense that a small set of formal and functional realizations made up the bulk of the tokens. The learners, especially those whose texts received a lower grade, made particularly frequent use of high-frequency realizations of the pattern. The thesis highlights the importance of not limiting investigations of this kind to comparisons across native-speaker status, as this is only one of the several factors that can influence the distribution. By exploring the potential importance of many different factors from both a formal and a functional perspective, the thesis paints a more complete picture of the introductory it pattern in academic writing, of use in, for instance, second-language instruction.

This thesis analyses the nine main tense–aspect constructions in Old Japanese in more detail than ever before, exploiting the research possibilities created by the Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese. The commitment to close textual reading and the interpretation of examples in context that is characteristic of traditional Japanese scholarship is combined with a determination to explain the distributional data revealed by the Corpus. Large samples are used to produce quantitative semantic analyses, allowing a new perspective on multifunctional constructions from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. All findings are placed within the wider perspective of cross-linguistic studies of tense and aspect, an approach often missing in Old Japanese scholarship. This thesis is the most comprehensive analysis of Old Japanese tense and aspect to date. Some traditional conclusions are challenged, and light is shed on many previously unexplained phenomena. Resultative constructions are discovered to be even more pervasive in Japanese than previously thought, with at least five of the nine con-structions I look at hypothesized to have begun as resultative constructions. In most cases these constructions have broadened to also denote ongoing activities, another characteristic of Japanese. This thesis thereby contributes to the cross-linguistic understanding of resultative constructions, and to the question of the validity and nature of the distinction between activities and states. It also shows the potential of an exemplar-based model of linguistic storage, which is seen to be a powerful tool for explaining both the multifunctionality of grammatical constructions and semantic change.