Volume 2, Issue 1

Telicity is an important concept in the study of aspect. While the compatibility tests with completive and durative adverbials have long been in operation as a diagnostic for telicity, their validity and reliability have rarely been questioned. This article critically explores the validity and reliability of such tests and discusses such temporal expressions in English and Chinese on the basis of written and spoken corpora of the two languages and proposes a scheme of usage categories of completive and durative adverbials with their respective proportions, which is adequately explanatory of the phenomena observed in attested language use and enables compatibility tests with completive and durative adverbials to achieve improved accuracy and reliability.

This article proposes a methodology for addressing three long-standing problems of near synonym research. First, we show how the internal structure of a group of near synonyms can be revealed. Second, we deal with the problem of distinguishing the subclusters and the words in those subclusters from each other. Finally, we illustrate how these results identify the semantic properties that should be mentioned in lexicographic entries. We illustrate our methodology with a case study on nine near synonymous Russian verbs that, in combination with an infinitive, express TRY. Our approach is corpus-linguistic and quantitative: assuming a strong correlation between semantic and distributional properties, we analyze 1,585 occurrences of these verbs taken from the Amsterdam Corpus and the Russian National Corpus, supplemented where necessary with data from the Web. We code each particular instance in terms of 87 variables (a.k.a. ID tags), i. e., morphosyntactic, syntactic and semantic characteristics that form a verb's behavioral profile. The resulting co-occurrence table is evaluated by means of a hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis and additional quantitative methods. The results show that this behavioral profile approach can be used (i) to elucidate the internal structure of the group of near synonymous verbs and present it as a radial network structured around a prototypical member and (ii) to make explicit the scales of variation along which the near synonymous verbs vary.

Introduction There is little that is more completely accepted in the conventional wisdom of modern linguistics than the assumption that corpora do not contain negative evidence and that, therefore, intuition-based acceptability judgments are an indispensable part of linguistic methodology.

Rens Bod, Jennifer Hay, and Stefanie Jannedy (eds.), Probabilistic Linguistics . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003, 463 pp., $ 38.00, ISBN 0-262-52338-8.(Benedikt Szmrecsanyi.)

Hans Lindquist and Christian Mair (eds.), Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English . (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 13). Amsterdam and New York: John Benjamins, 2004, 279 pp., $ 114.00, ISBN 158811-523-2.(Anatol Stefanowitsch)

In empirical approaches to linguistics, corpus analysis has become an indispensable method for gaining insights into many areas of linguistic inquiry, from lexical semantics and grammar to psycholinguistics and discourse pragmatics. Apart from more computationally oriented tasks associated with corpora, such as lemmatization, tagging, and parsing, corpus-linguistic research revolves around a number of routine procedures such as searching a corpus for a particular phenomenon, counting, organizing, and displaying the results. Among these elementary tasks, the creation of concordances, i. e., formatted displays of all the occurrences of a particular type in a corpus, may be considered the most fundamental task. Thus reliable, fast, and user-friendly search-and-retrieval software is of great value to any researcher working in this field.