ISSN:0883-2919    

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-971X.1996.tb00087.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1996

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

ABSTRACT:ICE (the International Corpus of English) was initiated to provide the resources for comparative studies of the Englishes used in countries where it is either a majority first language or an official additional language. The national or regional corpora that constitute the components of ICE are expected to conform to a specified common design. Software has been created to facilitate the grammatical annotation of the corpora and to enable the retrieval of lexical and grammatical information. Various applications of the data are envisaged.

ISSN:0883-2919    

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-971X.1996.tb00088.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1996

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

ABSTRACT:In this study we focus on cohesion in discourse, and more specifically on connector usage. Acknowledging the importance of combining a top‐down and a bottom‐up approach in the study of discourse, we adopt a bottom‐up approach which is favoured by our methodology. In the first section we evaluate previous studies of learner connector usage and the literature on contrastive French‐English connector usage. We hypothesize that we will discover a general overuse of connectors by learners and use the ICLE corpus of learner English to test the hypothesis. Our study reveals no overall overuse of connectors by learners and thus contradicts the initial hypothesis. A more qualitative look shows strong evidence of overuse and underuse of individual connectors, as well as semantic, stylistic and syntactic misuse. We conclude that learners should not be presented with lists of ‘interchangeable’ connectors but instead taught the semantic, stylistic and syntactic behaviour of individual connectors, using auth

ISSN:0883-2919    

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-971X.1996.tb00089.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1996

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

ABSTRACT:Comparable samples of speech and writing in the British and American components of the International Corpus of English were examined to study certain formal and functional properties of coordinate structures in English. This analysis indicated thatandis a primary coordinator in English, and thatbutandorare more peripheral; that the concept of coordination without a coordinator (so‐calledasyndeticcoordination) should be made more precise by requiring that some other signal of coordination be present (e.g. ellipsis found only in coordinate structures); and that because coordinate structures in speech violate certain grammatical constraints on coordination, coordination is best viewed as a grammatical category whose constraints are sometimes violated in speech for purely pragmatic (i.e. communicative) reason

ISSN:0883-2919    

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-971X.1996.tb00090.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1996

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

ABSTRACT:A number of claims and counter‐claims which have been made concerningget‐passives in English are tested via interrogation of a set of written and spoken corpora.Get‐passives are shown to form a fuzzy set, with about one‐third of corpus tokens belonging to a ‘core’ whose members have an explicit or at least accessible agent‐phrase, a lexical verb with typically dynamic meaning, and which alternate with an active clause. Beyond the core there are a number of subclasses displaying progressively fewer features in common with core members. On the borderline of the set are copular constructions, withgeta ‘resulting copula’ and the participle fully adjectivalized. The data suggest thatget‐passives are very often associated with two types of pragmatic implicature: one, that the subject‐referent is responsible for initiating the process (very evident in the semantically‐related complex reflexive construction); the other, that the process is (usually) unfavourable or (less often) favourable for the subject‐referent. Finally, the corpus provides evidence of at least three types of variation withget‐passives: regional (their frequency is comparable in American English and British English, higher in Australian English than in both of these, and higher in Indian English than in Australian English); stylistic (they tend to be avoided in more formal styles); and diachronic (they are increasing in popularity over time in Australian English, and proba

ISSN:0883-2919    

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-971X.1996.tb00091.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1996

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

ABSTRACT:Using data from the British and Australian components of the ICE corpus, this paper describes and quantifies aspects of the comparative clauses conjoined with correlativethanandas.The data is compared in three ways, to show:1patterns of distribution for the two constructions;2their spread across different genres of speech and writing;3the similarity or otherwise of their use in Britain and Australia.The data is also used to comment on theoretical constructs such as the symmetrical scale proposed for scalar comparatives, and the extent to which the comparative clause expresses the yardstick for comparison. In both British and Australian data, the distribution of correlativethanandasclauses proves quite asymmetrical; and the fact that comparative clauses consist regularly of anaphoric, exophoric and elliptical constituents means that their informational content is limited. Strategic changes vested in the comparative verb phrase (e.g. in modality, aspect, polarity) and the quite frequent use of mental process verbs suggest that the role of such clauses is interpersonal rather than referential, and designed to provide alternative perspectives on the discourse. The findings show that the scalar comparative clause does not regularly work as the yardstick for comparison (in the same way as the comparative phrase), and that grammatical accounts of it need to recognize its discoursal and rhetorical functions.

ISSN:0883-2919    

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-971X.1996.tb00092.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1996

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

ABSTRACT:In this paper we report the results of our investigations into the positions of adverbial clauses in a subset of the British ICE corpus. The subset consists of 42 texts drawn from six text types, three from written English and three from spoken English. We manually marked the adverbial clauses for their positions relative to their host clause, and for their semantic types. The paper attempts to identify some of the factors which influence the choice of position for various types of adverbial clause. Focussing on if‐clauses and when‐clauses, we conclude that, contrary to our expectations, clause length is not a significant positional factor. However, the semantic type of adverbial clauses does appear to be a major factor in the choice of posit

ISSN:0883-2919    

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-971X.1996.tb00093.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1996

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

ABSTRACT:Variation studies on Englishes are slowly shifting towards the investigation of contextual parameters as avenues of pluricentric development. The role of media languages, in particular across media types and outlets, is often overlooked. This paper combines contextual parameters with media language studies. The focus is on only one segment: the sports domain, in the print and broadcast media in British, Indian and Ghanaian English. Exploiting ICE's design and text retrieval features and adding Ghanaian samples, we assembled a small‐scale special purpose corpus of reporting/commenting texts. We looked at the link between the sports register and the reported (= media) version, descriptions of actions and their spatio‐temporal coordinates, linguistic creativity, mode, and variety‐specific features. Our findings confirm that media are a considerable differentiating factor. The reporting of completed or of ongoing events turns out to result in quite distinct discourses. The press reconstructs a past event at a higher level of abstraction and evaluation than broadcast media's moment‐by‐moment commenting mode. Mode and pluricentricity were not found to be strong independent

ISSN:0883-2919    

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-971X.1996.tb00094.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1996

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

ABSTRACT:This case study looks at one important source of linguistic data ‐newspapers ‐and discusses related problems of text‐type classification and feature interpretation. With texts from the East African ICE components as a database an attempt is made to assess the influence of different production contexts on the formal composition of texts. The issue of house‐style and problems of text categorization are discussed, a distinction being made between different types of reportage (splash and brief articles) and popular informational and persuasive texts (editorials). These genre samples are analysed for the particularly polysemous and multivalued/multifunctional variable of ‐ingconstructions, ranging from obligatory and optional (adverbial) clauses to verbal progressives. The analysis exemplifies the possibilities and problems of stylistic variation studies in different sociolinguistic contexts and the importance of recording all possibly influential text‐production features during the corpus collection process for a valid interpretation

ISSN:0883-2919    

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-971X.1996.tb00095.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1996

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

ABSTRACT:This paper examines the constraints on the realizations of /t/ in New Zealand English. On the basis of a detailed examination of the speech of two similar speakers from the New Zealand ICE corpus, a series of allophonic rules is provided. It is then shown that the distribution of allophones for these speakers is not the same as for other speakers who have been previously analyzed. Part of the difference appears to be that different speakers assign /t/ to preceding or following syllables in different ways, which suggests that strategies of syllabification are not universally determined, but are sociolinguistically variable.

ISSN:0883-2919    

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-971X.1996.tb00096.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1996

数据来源: WILEY