Corpora and the new Englishes
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Christian Mair
Abstract
Contrasts between British and American usage were an important topic in computer-aided corpus linguistics from the very start. The present contribution shows how from these beginnings the scope of corpus-based research was successively extended to cover standard varieties of the New Englishes (e.g. in the International Corpus of English) and eventually also non-standard and vernacular varieties, so that today the corpus-linguistic approach has become an important complement to sociolinguistics in the study of variation in the New Englishes. From a general discussion of this development, the contribution moves on to present the ‘Corpus of Cyber-Jamaican’ (CCJ), a large web-derived corpus of diasporic Jamaican web forums, and shows in a number of exploratory studies how this new resource can be used to investigate the globalisation of vernacular features.
Abstract
Contrasts between British and American usage were an important topic in computer-aided corpus linguistics from the very start. The present contribution shows how from these beginnings the scope of corpus-based research was successively extended to cover standard varieties of the New Englishes (e.g. in the International Corpus of English) and eventually also non-standard and vernacular varieties, so that today the corpus-linguistic approach has become an important complement to sociolinguistics in the study of variation in the New Englishes. From a general discussion of this development, the contribution moves on to present the ‘Corpus of Cyber-Jamaican’ (CCJ), a large web-derived corpus of diasporic Jamaican web forums, and shows in a number of exploratory studies how this new resource can be used to investigate the globalisation of vernacular features.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements ix
- List of contributors xi
- Preface xiii
- Putting corpora to good uses 1
- Frequency, corpora and language learning 7
- Learner corpora and contrastive interlanguage analysis 33
- The use of small corpora for tracing the development of academic literacies 63
- Revisiting apprentice texts 85
- Automatic error tagging of spelling mistakes in learner corpora 109
- Data mining with learner corpora 127
- Learners and users – Who do we want corpus data from? 155
- Learner knowledge of phrasal verbs 173
- Corpora and the new Englishes 209
- Towards a new generation of corpus-derived lexical resources for language learning 237
- Automating the creation of dictionaries 257
- addendumSelect list of publications by Sylviane Granger 283
- Subject index 289
- Name index 293
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements ix
- List of contributors xi
- Preface xiii
- Putting corpora to good uses 1
- Frequency, corpora and language learning 7
- Learner corpora and contrastive interlanguage analysis 33
- The use of small corpora for tracing the development of academic literacies 63
- Revisiting apprentice texts 85
- Automatic error tagging of spelling mistakes in learner corpora 109
- Data mining with learner corpora 127
- Learners and users – Who do we want corpus data from? 155
- Learner knowledge of phrasal verbs 173
- Corpora and the new Englishes 209
- Towards a new generation of corpus-derived lexical resources for language learning 237
- Automating the creation of dictionaries 257
- addendumSelect list of publications by Sylviane Granger 283
- Subject index 289
- Name index 293
