journal: Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

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Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

Edited by: Stefanie Wulff and Stefan Th. Gries
Founded by: Anatol Stefanowitsch and Stefan Th. Gries

Language: English

First published: May 20, 2005

Publication Frequency: 3 issues per year

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Starting 2025, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory will be transferred to Gold Open Access on a year-by-year basis. All articles will thus immediately appear under the Creative Commons license CC-BY. There will be no publication costs for the authors. The Open Access transformation is based on Subscribe-to-Open, an alternative model that enables the full Open Access transformation of journals through the continuation of existing subscriptions. The prerequisite for successful transformation is that subscriptions are continued to the same extent as before. The editors of　Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory and the publisher De Gruyter would therefore like to thank all subscribers for their support, which has made the transformation to Open Access possible.　

Objective
Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (CLLT) is a peer-reviewed journal publishing high-quality original corpus-based research focusing on theoretically relevant issues in all core areas of linguistic research, or other recognized topic areas. It provides a forum for researchers from different theoretical backgrounds and different areas of interest that share a commitment to the systematic and exhaustive analysis of naturally occurring language. Contributions from all theoretical frameworks are welcome but they should be addressed at a general audience and thus be explicit about their assumptions and discovery procedures and provide sufficient theoretical background to be accessible to researchers from different frameworks.

Topics

Corpus Linguistics
Quantitative Linguistics
Phonology
Morphology
Semantics
Syntax
Pragmatics

Article formats
Research Articles

Your Benefits

Your benefits:

Original corpus-based research
In-depth comparison of corpus data to other kinds of empirical data
Many studies featuring high degrees of statistical sophistication
Rigorous peer-review
International and renowned editorial board

History

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory was founded in 2005 by Stefan Th. Gries and Anatol Stefanowitsch together with the publisher De Gruyter Mouton.

Other publications in the field

Open Access
The English dative alternation in vector space: how much does meaning matter?

August 25, 2025

Chiara Paolini, Hubert Cuyckens, Dirk Speelman, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi

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Variationist linguists study alternations between different ways of saying the same thing (Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns . Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press: 188). Some linguists tend to believe that this sort of optionality is not predicted by theory and dysfunctional. We empirically explore if the two positions can be reconciled by assuming interchangeability between grammatical variants but admitting semantic information about the material in argument slots of competing constructions into variationist modeling. As a test case, we marshal corpus-based methods to study the well-known dative alternation after the verb to give in English. We specifically reanalyze the dataset investigated in Bresnan et al.’s seminal (2007) study. To assess the lexical semantics of the dative constituents, we rely on Semantic Vector Space modeling (Lenci, Alessandro. 2018. Distributional models of word meaning. Annual Review of Linguistics 4(1). 151–171). The meaning distinctions that we thus establish are subsequently submitted to variationist modeling. The distributional-semantic dative alternation model is then benchmarked against a traditional dative alternation model considering mostly higher-level, i.e., fairly abstract formal predictors (e.g., end-weight, definiteness) à la Bresnan (2007). The analysis shows that traditional variationist modeling à la Bresnan (2007) outperforms distributional-semantic modeling.
Open Access
Grammaticalisation of habitual aspect in World Englishes: assessing trajectories, areal patterns and rates of change with synchronic corpora

August 15, 2025

Jakob Neels, Sven Leuckert, Arne Lohmann

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This paper presents a geographically large-scale, yet structurally fine-grained study on grammaticalisation in World Englishes. Attending to the relatively neglected domain of habitual aspect, we explore structural and areal patterns of innovation or conservatism regarding grammaticalisation and its synchronic reflexes in 13 varieties. Drawing on the International Corpus of English , we quantify usage profiles of the habitual auxiliary [ use ( d ) to V], taking into account semantic, morphosyntactic and text-linguistic features. Properties of use ( d ) to are compared across varieties by means of a behavioural profile analysis employing hierarchical cluster analysis. The corpus results are mixed in that variation and cross-linguistic similarities do not seem to follow one single phylogenetic or areal trend but reveal more individual patterns, which can be partly explained by specific contact situations. The case study illustrates that one and the same synchronic grammatical variant may qualify both as a conservative relic and as an innovation as long as earlier colonial stages remain unknown. This leads us to problematise how, owing to the shortage of corresponding diachronic corpora, even instances of strongly directional types of change like grammaticalisation are open to different interpretations within competing narratives such as colonial lag, contact-induced change and the epicentre hypothesis.
Open Access
Contextualizing the variation in causal clause ordering in Mandarin Chinese: a multifactorial analysis

August 11, 2025

Qiao Gan, Jingyuan Ye

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The sequential ordering of causal clauses in Mandarin Chinese displays variation, with reason connectives (e.g., yīnwèi , yóuyú ) appearing either before or after the main clause (sentence-initial vs. sentence-medial positions). However, the interplay of syntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic factors shaping causal clause ordering remains underexplored. This study addresses the gap through a corpus-based multifactorial analysis of spoken Mandarin, employing mixed-effects regression modeling. Our findings reveal that syntactic parsing factors, including clause length and complexity, influence clause positioning. Longer subordinate clauses favor sentence-medial ordering of reason connectives, while the interaction between main clause length and its complexity shows that simpler but longer main clauses favor sentence-medial placement. Semantically, emotional valence plays a role: positive subordinate clauses prefer sentence-medial positioning, while the emotional valence of main clauses interacts with genre. Specifically, neutral valence in dialogues and positive valence in monologues favor sentence-medial positioning, whereas negative valence in dialogues least favors it. Discourse-pragmatic factors further condition causal clause ordering. The presence of yīnwèi and the absence of suǒyǐ jointly favor sentence-medial positioning of reason connectives. This study provides novel insights into the multifaceted factors influencing causal clause ordering in Mandarin Chinese, thereby enhancing our understanding of sentence structure and discourse cohesion in the language.
Open Access
Prosody and co-speech gestures in a Brazilian audiovisual spontaneous speech corpus: the case of Parentheticals

July 23, 2025

Camila Antônio Barros, Heliana Mello, Tommaso Raso

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This study analyses co-speech gestures accompanying prosodic and information Parenthetical (PAR) Units in Brazilian Portuguese. It introduces the BGEST corpus, a multimodal dataset of spontaneous speech, and explores how PARs function as distinct discourse levels within utterances. Initially, we provide a brief ov\erview of the corpus. Subsequently, we delve into the concept of PAR and how it can be understood as a different discourse level in relation to the utterance. Our findings reveal that PARs are consistently marked by gestural patterns, particularly at the illocutionary level, where gestures exhibit disruption at PAR boundaries. These disruptions manifest in varied forms but consistently involve alterations in gestural patterns.
Open Access
Beyond smell: rethinking the figurative force of olfactory language

July 15, 2025

Jun Lang, Heidi Hui Shi, Zhuo Jing-Schmidt

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This study examines the usage, semantics, and affective valence of olfactory metaphors in English, addressing a gap in sensory language and metaphor research. We analyze eight basic smell lexemes ( smell , aroma , scent , odor , stench , stink , reek , fragrance ) in the iWeb corpus, tracing their abstract noun collocates through frequency counts, WordNet hypernym paths, intersection analysis, and affective valence ratings. Our results reveal that English olfactory metaphors are highly productive, mapping smell perception onto a broad array of abstract experiences, especially socioemotional and moral domains. The eight patterns exhibit pronounced affective polarization: while some (e.g., fragrance , aroma ) skew positive, most (e.g., stink , stench , reek, odor ) skew negative, reflecting both olfactory hedonics and a cognitive negativity bias. These findings deepen our understanding of how sensory language structures abstract thought and affirm the rich figurative potential of smell in English, with implications for theories of sensory language, conceptual metaphor, and embodied cognition.
Open Access
Word order flexibility affects complementizer omission: a cross-linguistic investigation

July 8, 2025

Yue Zou, Hao Lin

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It has been observed in many languages that the complementizer at the beginning of a complement clause (CC) can be optionally omitted. Several accounts of language processing have been proposed to explain the phenomenon. Specifically for the ambiguity avoidance account, however, mixed results have been reported in previous research. In our study, we investigate whether the cross-linguistic difference in omission rates can be explained by the ambiguity avoidance account at a general strategic level. Our hypothesis is that, in order to avoid ambiguities, users of languages with a more flexible word order should be more reluctant to omit the complementizer. To test it, we conducted an in-depth analysis in three languages that are different in the degree of word order flexibility – English, German, and Russian, and a broad analysis with 23 languages from 13 genera. The results provide complementary evidence that word order flexibility indeed emerges as an important predictor of complementizer omission.
Open Access
Does corpus size influence normalised frequencies?

June 24, 2025

Sascha Wolfer, Alexander Koplenig

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Several frequency-based measures are influenced by corpus size (e.g. lexical diversity or text similarity measures). It is largely unquestioned, however, that normalised frequencies correct for the influence of corpus size – but it has not yet been systematically tested whether and how they might be influenced by corpus size themselves. The central question is whether the normalised frequency of an element in a smaller corpus can be meaningfully compared to the normalised frequency of the same element in a larger corpus. We are testing the association between lists of normalised frequencies derived from corpus samples of different sizes from six languages. Our results suggest that the size of the underlying corpora does not negatively influence comparisons of normalised frequency lists, i.e. different corpus sizes do not lead to normalised frequencies no longer being comparable. For lower-frequency types, these associations decrease rather quickly. These empirical findings converge with predictions from statistical theory.
Open Access
Accounting for the entire system of complexity features: evidence for general oral versus literate grammatical complexity dimensions

June 11, 2025

Douglas Biber, Tove Larsson

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Two recent studies (Biber, Douglas, Larsson Tove & Gregory R. Hancock. 2024a. The linguistic organization of grammatical text complexity: Comparing the empirical adequacy of theory-based models. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 20(2). 347–373; Biber, Douglas, Larsson Tove & Gregory R. Hancock. 2024b. Dimensions of text complexity in the spoken and written modes: A comparison of theory-based models. Journal of English Linguistics 52(1). 65–94) evaluate how well theory-based models account for the distributions of complexity features across spoken and written texts. Those studies provide strong evidence for two groupings of complexity features: phrases functioning syntactically as noun modifiers, and finite dependent clauses functioning as clause-level constituents. At the same time, those studies fail to identify systematic patterns of covariation for the other complexity features (e.g., phrases functioning as clause-level constituents). The present study picks up where those previous studies left off, exploring the possibility that complexity features pattern together in systematic ways at the register level, even though they have less strong patterns of covariation across individual texts. The results show that: 1) all 25 features can be grouped into one of two groupings, referred to as the “oral” and “literate” complexity dimensions, and 2) those two dimensions have a strong complementary relation to one another. These general patterns are described and interpreted relative to the particular features grouped into each dimension, the register distributions associated with each dimension, and the extent to which these register-level patterns are found at the text level.
Open Access
Lexical bloom, syntactic retreat: examining complexity trade-offs within Classical Chinese evolution across two millennia

June 10, 2025

Jiamiao Song, Lei Lei

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The Complexity Trade-off Hypothesis suggests that when one language domain becomes more complex, another tends to simplify to maintain an overall balance of complexity in languages. Previous studies sought to test such trade-offs across languages, implying the equal complexity across languages. However, this assumption has been increasingly questioned. Furthermore, little attention has been given to diachronic changes and interactions in lexical and syntactic complexities, especially within ancient and non-European languages. Against this backdrop, this study explored the evolution of lexical and syntactic complexities and their possible trade-off in Classical Chinese over two millennia. Based on entropy and dependency distance metrics, we found a marked increase in lexical complexity alongside a decrease in syntactic complexity. Our findings provided support to the existence of trade-offs in an individual language and broadened the scope of the complexity trade-off analysis in historical language contexts.
Open Access
On the learnability of aspectual usage

June 2, 2025

Dagmar Divjak, Petar Milin, Maciej Borowski

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We examine the learnability of grammatical aspect in Polish through the application of an error-correction learning algorithm to corpus data. We explore whether mastery of aspectual usage can be attained solely through exposure to co-occurrence patterns, or if an understanding of the abstract semantic distinctions discussed in the aspectual literature are a prerequisite. To validate the model, we compare the corpus-based findings with data on aspectual usage from a survey of Polish L1 users. Our findings show that aspectual preferences are best accounted for by a model that relies on co-occurrence information to predict a particular lemma, without reference to aspectual information. The models incorporating aspectual information, either by predicting aspect from co-occurrence information or from abstract semantic labels, performed adequately but were only able to capture usage preferences relating to one of the two aspects. This study contributes insights into the role of usage in the acquisition of linguistic categories and underscores the importance of integrating diverse evidence sources and methodologies for the development and validation of linguistic theories.
Open Access
Semantic and contextual constraints on the causative alternation in English: a multifactorial analysis

April 22, 2025

Jiyoun Kim, Hanjung Lee, Ye-eun Cho

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Many verbs in English show causative and noncausative uses. The goal of this paper is to identify a factor most strongly associated with the realizations of the causative alternation. We report a corpus study that tested effects of three semantic and contextual factors – intentionality, contextual identifiability, and external causality – against 3,864 instances of causative and noncausative uses of 135 alternating verbs extracted from the automatically parsed British National Corpus. Our results of a series of multifactorial analyses of the corpus data indicate that intentionality and contextual identifiability are significantly associated with the realizations, with contextual identifiability being the most predictive factor: causative situations with a clear identifiable agent are realized predominantly as a causative, whereas those with a less clear, non-agentive cause are generally expressed noncausatively. Building on Rappaport Hovav, Malka. (2014). Lexical content and context: The causative alternation in English revisited. Lingua 141. 8–29. DOI:10.1016/j.lingua.2013.09.006, Rappaport Hovav, Malka. (2020). Deconstructing internal causation. In Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal & Nora Boneh (eds.), Perspectives on causations: Selected papers from the Jerusalem workshop 2017 , 219–256. Berlin: Springer and Lee, Hanjung. (2023). Cause identifiability and the causative alternation in English: A corpus-based analysis. Linguistic Research 40(3). 353–385, accounts of contextual constraints on the causative alternation, we propose that the observed pattern of form-meaning associations in the data can be interpreted as a consequence of general principles of communicative efficiency.
Open Access
When one wrong rights another: speakers passivize to express the subject as the experiencer in psychological verb use

April 10, 2025

Noa Attali, Amnon Attali, Anne Therese Frederiksen

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Speakers have many choices for how to express a given message yet strongly prefer some over others. We suggest that one preference speakers have in spontaneous language use is presenting the experiencer of an emotion in a salient position: as the subject of the sentence. We extend prior work on the experiencer-as-subject bias to the understudied area of spontaneous language use. We examined a corpus for speakers’ choices regarding a) active versus passive sentences and b) two kinds of psychological verbs, subject-experiencer versus object-experiencer. Language users generally prefer active over passive sentences, and there is some evidence that object-experiencer verbs (e.g., Mary frightens Lisa) are dispreferred compared to subject-experiencer verbs (e.g., Lisa fears Mary) much as passive sentences are compared to active sentences. However, in line with an experiencer-as-subject bias, we show how one wrong can right another: speakers show a greater-than-expected preference to produce a generally dispreferred sentence structure, when doing so achieves the desired experiencer-as-subject. Specifically, we find stark differences in passive use rates: as many as 50 % of the uses of certain verbs in the dispreferred object-experiencer verb class are passive, while 4 % is the highest rate of passive sentences for verbs in the preferred subject-experiencer verb class.
Open Access
A corpus approach to orthographic chunking: near-naive word separation in Swiss German text messages

March 14, 2025

Erika Just, Paul Widmer

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A lot of importance is indirectly attributed to the orthographic word: it constitutes the basis of any task that is preceded by tokenization and presents material for stimuli in psycholinguistic experiments. But in many writing traditions, the orthographic word is representative of isolated entries in the lexicon and largely ignores phonological processes of production. This study examines near-naive word separation in Swiss German using a corpus of text messages, revealing distinct patterns of orthographic segmentation driven by phonological processes such as assimilation and epenthesis. Compared to Standard German, Swiss German exhibits fewer orthographic words, suggesting heightened representation of prosodic dependencies in writing. Writers prioritize phonology over syntax when deviating from standard German space insertion conventions. These findings increase doubts about the meaningfulness of orthographic representation for word-based comparative linguistic research and highlight the importance of integrating phonological information into natural language processing models.
Open Access
Predicting native speaker choice: the role of corpus-based frequency metrics in morpho-syntactic alternations

March 14, 2025

Jane Klavan, Alice Blumenthal-Dramé, Ann Veismann

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This paper investigates the role of corpus-based frequency metrics in predicting native speaker choice in Estonian, a Finno-Ugric language with rich inflectional morphology. We test whether frequency affects the choice between two constructions which represent the alternants of a morphosyntactic alternation in Estonian – the adessive case construction and the postpositional peal construction. Both constructions are used, inter alia , to express the spatial relationship of one object located on top of another object, e.g. Raamat on laual/laua peal ‘The book is on the table’. We further compare which out of several well-established frequency metrics yields the most accurate predictions and whether frequency on its own outperforms the predictiveness of significant semantic and morpho-syntactic variables identified in previous research (e.g. Klavan, Jane. 2012. Evidence in linguistics: Corpus-linguistic and experimental methods for studying grammatical synonymy (Dissertationes Linguisticae Universitatis Tartuensis). Tartu: University of Tartu Press, Klavan, Jane. 2020. Pitting corpus-based classification models against each other: A case study for predicting constructional choice in written Estonian. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 16(2). 363–391). The comparison of several mixed-effects logistic regression models showed that out of seven frequency metrics considered overall, only those related to the postposition peal are predictive. Adding previously established semantic and morphosyntatic variables to the winning frequency metrics significantly improved model fit and outperformed any simpler model. We conclude that frequency affects the choice between two constructions in different ways and that it does not explain away other functional predictors.
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Introduction to the special issue on collostructions

March 14, 2025

Stefan Th. Gries, Stefanie Wulff

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This paper serves as an introduction to CLLT’s special issue celebrating 20 years of collostructional analysis, a corpus-linguistic method developed in the early aughts to quantify the degree of association between words and constructions and between words in one construction. A variety of case studies revisit critical aspects of collostructional studies, apply the method to native and learner data, and to synchronic and diachronic questions, and chart new ground by extending the method in various quantitative ways (e.g., with the inclusion of more and more diverse variables than just words and constructions or with network models and advanced regression approaches).
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A multivariate corpus analysis of locative inversion in Mandarin Chinese

March 14, 2025

Yuting Li

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This study seeks to contribute to the understanding of the semantics and pragmatics associated with locative inversion (LI), a construction characterised by a preverbal locative phrase and a postverbal noun phrase. While previous studies have suggested that newness, definiteness, and heaviness are responsible for licensing locative inversion, few have examined the effect of one of these factors in conjunction with the other two. Many claims about locative inversion have not been quantitatively assessed. In response, this study presents a quantitative analysis of 899 instances including 562 LI and 337 uninverted constructions (non-LI) collected from the Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) Corpus, providing further empirical evidence for the effects of discourse information, the definiteness effect, and heaviness observed in the literature. Among other factors, discourse information shows a more pronounced effect. The result also introduces the novel finding of the effect of animacy on the choice of locative variants, a topic not yet discussed in existing studies. Additionally, an examination of verb semantics reveals varying preferences for locative variants among verbs. The finding that unergative verbs and non-passivized transitive verbs are found in locative inversion in Mandarin Chinese challenges the conventional belief that locative inversion serves as an unaccusative diagnostic.
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When shields and distances are key: a corpus-based study of Slovene bare pronouns in negated clauses

March 13, 2025

Kristina Gregorčič

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In some strict Negative Concord (NC) languages, Negative Concord Items (NCIs) can be freely used in negated clauses, while pronominal Polarity Sensitive Items (PSIs) are blocked. Despite being a strict NC language, Slovene does not exhibit such blocking. This raises the question of why there is more than one pronoun group suitable for use in negated clauses. We seek to provide an answer to this question by offering a comprehensive analysis of the data from the reference corpus Gigafida 2.0 . We focus on the scopal interaction between Slovene bare PSI pronouns and different types of clausemate negation, showing that bare pronouns either outscope propositional negation or appear in its scope with the help of “shielding” positive implicatures. Unmodified bare pronouns commonly occur in the scope of presuppositional negation, which is syntactically more distant from them than propositional negation and highlights the contextual activation of the embedded proposition. The pragmatic markedness exhibited by bare pronouns in the scope of negation is expected, as such use is much less prominent in the paradigm of negated clauses.
Open Access
Lexical factors in English definiteness marking: a corpus-based investigation

January 21, 2025

Florent Perek, Lotte Sommerer

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Using data from the British National Corpus, this paper examines the correlation between particular nouns and verbs and the definiteness of direct objects. We find that many nouns, and even more verbs, strongly prefer either definite or indefinite direct objects. Using distributional semantics, we show that these preferences correlate with the meaning of those lexical items, in that semantically similar items tend to show similar preferences. These findings allow us to reexamine to what extent definiteness marking is primarily driven by discourse-pragmatic considerations, as is traditionally considered to be the case. We argue that lexical factors play a role in definiteness marking, and following a usage-based approach to grammatical representation, we suggest that speakers may store information about the typical definiteness status of noun phrases with their mental representation of lexical items, in particular the argument structure of verbs.
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Refining the network for the Chinese analytic causative constructicon: insights from corpus analysis and psycholinguistic experimentation

January 15, 2025

Xiaoyu Tian

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This study explores the network of the Chinese analytic causative constructicon adopting a cross-variety perspective. Unlike prior research focusing solely on the causative marker, this study acknowledges the multi-level nature of the constructicon and examines the descriptive causative construction identified by Zhang, Lili. (2005. Cong shiyi dao zhishi [The causativisation of Chinese shi-yi constructions]. Taida Wenshi Zhexue Bao (62). 119–152), which features a syntactically specified causee slot and a semantically defined effect predicate slot, distinguishing it from general causatives. Combining corpus analysis and psycholinguistic experimentation, our research reveals a consistent preference for using lìng as the causative marker within the descriptive causative construction, observed in both Mainland and Taiwan Chinese. By analyzing the syntactic and semantic features of the descriptive causative construction and its association with the causative marker lìng, we argue that this construction is stored at a separate level. Furthermore, we propose that the Chinese analytic causative constructicon is best represented by a radial network, accommodating both hierarchical and associative relationships, rather than a purely hierarchical structure as illustrated in Pijpops, Dirk, Dirk Speelman, Freek Van De Velde & Stefan Grondelaers. (2021. Incorporating the multi-level nature of the constructicon into hypothesis testing. Cognitive Linguistics 32(3). 487–528).
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BERT-assisted behavioral profiling of polysemy: contrastive analysis of HONG in Chinese and RED in English

January 15, 2025

Yiming Song, Deliang Wang

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This study conducts a corpus-based contrastive analysis of the basic color term “red” in Chinese (HONG) and English (RED), innovatively employing the AI model BERT to triangulate, validate, and enrich the findings of the behavioral profile (BP) analysis. Results illustrate HONG’s more variational semasiological structure than RED, with both exhibiting unique usage patterns among similarities. The triangulation with BERT embeddings visualizes the performance of each subjectively annotated BP variable, and further demonstrates the semantic extending process in both HONG and RED. The underlying cognitive and socio-cultural factors are lastly discussed. Theoretically, this study bridges frequency-based AI models and usage-based Cognitive Linguistics by simulating human cognitive processes to abstract linguistic knowledge from extensive data, advancing our understanding of language through AI technology. Methodologically, this study is the first to integrate AI models in assisting BP analysis, with BERT embeddings offering objective corroborations and deeper insights for conclusions drawn from subjectively labeled BP data.
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From keywords to key embeddings – contrasting French and Swedish web registers using multilingual deep learning

January 14, 2025

Saara Hellström, Valtteri Skantsi, Anna Salmela, Veronika Laippala

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The pervasiveness of the internet has given web language use a central role in society. However, the lack of multilingual corpora and scalable methods has led to the focus on English in web language research. To address this gap, the present paper sets itself in the register research tradition and explores French and Swedish web registers from a cross-linguistic angle. Methodologically we combine keyword analysis with multilingual deep learning, suggesting an approach that enables computational comparisons across languages. Specifically, we extract keywords for French and Swedish web registers, then associate the keywords with fastText word embeddings, and finally, cluster these key embeddings. The findings indicate that there are topical and functional clusters, and they are linguistically motivated and multilingual. The same clusters occur within the same registers in both languages pointing to shared topical and functional similarities – the registers are strikingly similar. The dissimilarities, in contrast, indicate that certain registers like Narrative blogs are to some extent different in French and Swedish. Moreover, grammatical specificities such as the location of adjectives explain some dissimilarities.
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Investigating lexical-semantic effects on morphosyntactic variation using elastic net regression

December 23, 2024

Anthe Sevenants, Freek Van de Velde, Dirk Speelman

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This article showcases elastic net regression as a means to build fairer models of morphosyntactic variation. Elastic net allows lexical items to appear on the same level as traditional, high-level predictors, enabling fuller models of variation. We apply elastic net regression to 1,296,574 Dutch verbal cluster tokens from the SoNaR corpus, analysing a morphosyntactic alternance in Dutch subordinate clauses. Our results show morphosyntactic preferences among verbs, indicating that semantic effects are indeed at play. Further analysis shows that semantic patterns for either word order exist, though it remains difficult to glean any semantic generalisations. Still, the elastic net technique shows that the inclusion of lexical items as full predictors in a model is useful, as much of the variation left unexplained by high-level predictors can be explained in lexical terms.
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Lexical patterns in Hungarian vowel harmony

December 13, 2024

Péter Rácz, Péter Rebrus

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Hungarian shows variable front vowel harmony, particularly in suffixed back vowel + [ɛ] nouns. The study aims to address two main research questions: (1) To what extent does stem-level information (similarity across stems) predict suffix variation for back vowel + [ɛ] stems in Hungarian corpus data? (2) Do suffixes themselves predict suffix variation beyond the stem-level information? We draw on a dataset of 200 noun stems, 4,501 suffixed forms and 4 × 10 6 tokens, based on the New Hungarian Webcorpus, and use a K-Nearest Neighbours learner and a hierarchical generalised linear model to address these questions. We find that the majority of back vowel + [ɛ] stems show variable vowel harmony, that this depends on stem similarity and that similarity effects are amplified by vowel-initial suffixes. This points to a model of Hungarian vowel harmony in which stem- and suffix-level information are lexically specified.
Open Access
A theory for words in Georgian: traditional constructs versus corpus annotation

December 11, 2024

Andrew Hardie, Sophiko Daraselia

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Part-of-speech annotation, as an exercise in categorisation, necessitates a category schema, based on some model or theory of the grammar of the language. Such a model may (sometimes, must ) deviate from traditional approaches for human understanding, as exploration of theoretical issues arising from a Georgian POS schema illustrates. Consistency on classifying by form versus function is problematised by difficult pronoun/demonstrative and adjective/noun distinctions. Adverb subcategorisation illustrates exclusion of semantic/derivational distinctions that traditional approaches readily admit. Variation in plural inflection has implications for how diachronicity is handled, as does “zero case”. Postpositions make necessary a specific approach to cliticisation in which enclitic elements are handled as separate tokens bearing their own analysis. Suffixaufnahme provides a case study in inclusion versus exclusion of a rare but current phenomenon. Verb morphology illustrates how simplifying assumptions help favour abstraction of categories over descriptive exhaustiveness. Divergence between the resulting model and traditional characterisations do not invalidate either, but evidence how a model’s design is inseparable from its purpose. With regard to these select issues of Georgian grammar, this discussion aims both to demonstrate the overall argument regarding theorisation/schematisation for a specific, practical purpose (POS annotation) and to justify solutions proposed to problems at hand.
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A multivariate analysis of canonical and non-canonical uses of switch-reference markers in Mbyá narratives

December 5, 2024

Guillaume Thomas, Germino Duarte

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Switch-reference is a family of grammatical devices whose primary function is to indicate whether two linked clauses have coreferential pivots, where the pivot is a prominent argument in each clause. In some languages, in addition to their function of reference tracking, switch-reference markers can be used to indicate whether the events or situations described by the two linked clauses differ with respect to some parameter, such as time, place or actuality. This phenomenon is known as non-canonical switch-reference. Whether canonical and non-canonical switch-reference marking are distinct grammatical phenomena is still an open question. In this paper, we investigate uses of switch-reference markers in a corpus of Mbyá Guaraní (Tupian) narratives, and we argue that the alternation between canonical and non-canonical uses is an epiphenomenon of the multifactorial and probabilistic nature of switch-reference marker choice. In this perspective, there is only one grammatical process of switch-reference marking and the distinction between canonical and non-canonical switch-reference marking is matter of language use.
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From sequentiality to schematization: network-based analysis of covarying collexemes in Mandarin degree adverb constructions

November 11, 2024

Alvin Cheng-Hsien Chen

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This study investigates the semantic structures of degree adverb constructions (DAC) in Mandarin through a network-based approach. We first utilized covarying collexeme analysis to determine significant collexeme pairs strongly associated with the DAC. We then incorporated network-based quantitative methods to analyze the emerging schemas from these collexeme pairs. Our approach involved implementing network analyses at two levels. The collexeme-based network consisted of lexical nodes representing degree adverbs and modified heads, while the construction-based network featured collexeme pairs as nodes. The collexeme-based network reveals that degree adverbs develop distinct semantic preferences for attributes within specific semantic fields, primarily capturing subjective and evaluative aspects of human experience. The construction-based network highlights dynamic interactions among these significant collexeme pairs, showcasing semantically interconnected collexeme pairs forming cohesive constructional families. Furthermore, these semantic groupings underscore the crucial role of metaphorical extension in creating larger semantic clusters for higher-level linguistic generalization. The emergence of semantic coherences from both networks reflects the evolving nature of linguistic generalizations, transitioning from low-level pivot schemas in the collexeme-based network to higher-order generalizations in the construction-based network. This study contributes to the field of usage-based grammar by emphasizing the fundamental role of sequentiality and interconnectedness between linguistic units in linguistic generalization.
Open Access
Detecting interactions with random forests: a comment on Gries’ words of caution and suggestions for improvement

November 11, 2024

Carolin Strobl, Yannick Rothacher, Sven Theiler, Mirka Henninger

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Tree-based methods are being both successfully applied and critically discussed in corpus linguistics. In this article, we would like to contribute a few aspects to this discussion from a methodological point of view. These aspects include the interpretation of interaction effects in single trees and random forests, as well as more general aspects like stability and overfitting. In particular, we have conducted a simulation study to investigate an approach suggested by Gries for computing the importance of interactions in random forests more systematically than the previous literature. The evidence of this simulation study shows that, even when interaction predictors are explicitly added, the permutation variable importance is not suited for distinguishing between main effects and interaction effects or between interaction effects of different orders. We also discuss the use of partial dependence (PD) and individual conditional expectation (ICE) plots for illustrating the functional form and potential interaction effects, and other means of interpretable machine learning.
Open Access
A radically usage-based, collostructional approach to assessing the differences between negative modal contractions and their parent forms

July 16, 2024

Robert Daugs, David Lorenz

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Starting from the premise that English negative modal contractions constitute partly variable patterns of associations that include both the preceding subject and the following verb infinitive, the study sets out to investigate distributional differences between can’t , shouldn’t , and won’t and their corresponding uncontracted parent forms. Given that some configurations are assumed to correlate with specific modal meanings (e.g. inanimate subjects and stative verbs > ‘epistemic prediction’; first person subjects > ‘(un)willingness’ or ‘commissive modality’), roughly 200,000 trigrams from COCA are submitted to distinctive covarying collexeme analysis in order to uncover if these contractions and their full forms are conventionalized and entrenched differentially enough to merit their separate treatment on both conceptual and methodological grounds. The results point to probabilistic tendencies, suggesting a cline where won’t and can’t appear to be more emancipated from their respective full-form analogue than shouldn’t . Furthermore, the study showcases how collostructional methods can be applied fruitfully to case studies embedded in Schmid’s (Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2020. The dynamics of the linguistic system: Usage, conventionalization, and entrenchment . Oxford: Oxford University Press) Entrenchment and Conventionalization Model .
Open Access
Expressing smells in (American) English

July 16, 2024

Doris Eveline Schönefeld

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The paper reports on a study of the usage of smell verbs over the last 200 years by speakers of American English. The focus is on how the expression of smell changes over time and what this reveals about the way speakers conceptualize and assess smells. The study is based on usage data from the COHA (Corpus of Historical American English). They were quantitatively analysed employing the methods of simple and (multiple) distinctive collexeme analysis. The results of our investigations indicate both a general increase over time in the usage of smell-verb constructions and a noticeable diversification of the smell vocabulary used by American English speakers. Moreover, the results of the collexeme analyses reveal more detailed aspects of the types of smell descriptors people use in smell talk. Reflecting what kinds of smell emitters are most typically and especially closely associated with the individual smell-verb constructions at particular times, they are informative about the sources of smells that are salient enough in our culture and (well-)known enough in the speech community to be used as functional smell descriptors and how these may change over time.
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Transfer five ways: applications of multiple distinctive collexeme analysis to the dative alternation in Mandarin Chinese

May 27, 2024

Shengyu Liao, Stefan Th. Gries, Stefanie Wulff

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The dative alternation has been extensively studied in the world’s languages, and the meanings of the verbs participating in the alternation have been shown to play a key role in determining its argument realization options. The present paper presents a multiple distinctive collexeme analysis approach to the dative alternation in Mandarin Chinese, which involves a choice of one of five functionally similar alternants, and it does so by also discussing several ways to improve how this has been done statistically in most previous analyses. Linguistically, we identify the core semantic differences of the five constructions based on which verbs statistically prefer to occur in which pattern, focusing on semantic potential and direction of transfer. Methodologically, this study contributes to the slowly growing body of studies that use collexeme strengths that are not only less related to frequency than the traditional methods (i.e., association is measured in a less diluted way) and that are directional (i.e., we can focus on one direction of association from the verb to the construction).
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A collostructional approach to Japanese noun-modifying clause construction use and acquisition: a learner corpus study

March 25, 2024

Nicole C. De Los Reyes, Ute Römer-Barron

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Japanese features a general noun-modifying clause construction (NMCC) with a more versatile range of semantic and pragmatic interpretations than equivalent constructions in other languages. Motivated by the learning challenge NMCCs pose to Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) learners, this article examines speech data from the International Corpus of Japanese as a Second Language (I-JAS) to compare learner use of NMCCs against a large L1 Japanese corpus. Instances of the construction from both corpora were analyzed to identify high-frequency part-of-speech categories and subcategories in the modifying clause predicate and head noun slots. A simple collexeme analysis was then employed to identify strongly attracted and repelled lexical items among those identified in realizations of the construction. Taken together, findings from these analyses revealed an important connection between the semantic weight of head nouns in NMCCs and the idiomaticity of the construction, with learner productions demonstrating a tendency toward heavy head nouns. This study lays the groundwork for future research seeking to explore the NMCC at different levels of granularity and to improve its treatment in JFL pedagogical materials.
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Transfer of collostructions: the case of causative constructions

March 20, 2024

Gaëtanelle Gilquin

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In an attempt to identify possible cases of collostructional transfer in the use of the causative construction [X make Y V inf ] by French-speaking learners of English, two types of analyses are combined in this study. First, a contrastive collostructional analysis compares the verbs occurring in the [V inf ] slot of the English construction and its French equivalent, [X faire V inf Y]. Second, a contrastive interlanguage collostructional analysis compares the verbs used in the [V inf ] slot of [X make Y V inf ] by native speakers of English, French-speaking learners of English and learners of English from other mother tongue backgrounds. The aim is to identify verbs that are more distinctive of [X faire V inf Y] than of [X make Y V inf ] and that are also more likely to be used by French-speaking learners of English than by other populations, as these verbs could be potential cases of collostructional preferences transferred by learners from French to English. The results suggest that learners might transfer verbs expressing a change of state or location and some individual verbs like discover from the French to the English causative construction. Their dispreference for copular verbs (other than be ) could also be the result of transfer effects.
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Revisiting N waiting to happen: word, construction, and corpus choices in a collostructional analysis

March 12, 2024

John Newman

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In undertaking any collostructional analysis, a researcher must make decisions concerning the properties of words, constructions, and corpora. Each of these crucial aspects of the analysis can be dealt with in alternative ways: words can be investigated as either lemmas or inflected forms; a construction can be characterized in alternative ways (reliance on semantics or syntax or some combination thereof, the span of the construction, etc.); the choice of corpus (or corpora) will be influenced by whether a researcher has an interest in different genres and varieties, whether the study is synchronic or diachronic, etc. I review various ways in which a researcher’s decisions about words, constructions, and corpora are relevant to a corpus-based study of N waiting to happen , referencing throughout the collostructional analysis of this construction by Stefanowitsch and Gries. The approach adopted here can be seen as supplementing Stefanowitsch and Gries’ original collostructional analysis. It illustrates how multifarious the results of a corpus-based study of constructions can be and serves as a reminder that no one corpus-based measure can possibly answer all the questions linguists might reasonably ask about a construction.
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Well, maybe you shouldn’t go around shaving poodles: collostructional semantic and discursive prosody in the go (a)round Ving and go (a)round and V constructions

March 7, 2024

Kim Ebensgaard Jensen

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This article presents a corpus-based study of the go (a)round Ving - and go (a)round and V -constructions in American English. More specifically, it addresses the possibility of the constructions serving as pragmatic markers of stance through the collocational phenomenon of semantic prosody. It is argued that the notions of internal and external constructional properties from the early days of construction grammar as well as the corpus-linguistic idea of association patterns would be beneficial to usage-based construction grammatical descriptions of phenomena such as semantic prosody. Drawing on a 248,145,425-word portion of the Corpus of Contemporary American English , both simple collexeme analysis and distinctive collexeme analysis are applied to generate output that feeds into semantic-prosodic analysis. Moreover, standard distinctive collexeme analysis and multiple distinctive collexeme analysis are applied at the level of semantic prosodies in the collexemic fields (i.e., distinctive semantic-prosodic analysis), at the level of verbal category colligations (i.e., distinctive colligational analysis), and at the level of speech act functions of usage-events of the two constructions (i.e., distinctive speech act analysis) as a type of trial balloon. The purpose is to expand semantic-prosodic analysis from focusing merely on lexemes to exploring how other linguistic and pragmatic phenomena may be at play.

Special Issue: 20 years of CLLT; Guest Editors: Stefan Th. Gries and Stefanie Wulff

Special Issue: Register variation and corpus linguistics: Empirical findings and emerging theories Papers in honor of Doug Biber; Guest Editors: Jesse Egbert, Bethany Gray and Tove Larsson

Special Issue: How do corpus-based techniques advance description and theory in English historical linguistics?, Guest Editors: Martin Hilpert and Hubert Cuyckens

Issue 2

Issue 1

Special issue: Learner Corpus Research, Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition, Editors: Sabine De Knop and Fanny Meunier

Contemporary perspectives on discourse and corpora

Issue 2

Issue 1

Special Issue. Corpus linguistics and sociolinguistic inquiry

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory publishes special and thematic issues focussed on important and emerging topics in the field of study. The journal has established a rigorous process to ensure that any special issue manuscripts follow the same high-quality standards and peer review processes as regular manuscripts. For further information on the journal’s peer review policy please see the "Instructions for Authors".

Recent Special Issues

Volume 20 | Issue 3 Special Issue: 20 years of CLLT; Guest Editors: Stefan Th. Gries and Stefanie Wulff

Journal Impact Factor	1.7	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
5-year Journal Impact Factor	2.0	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
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CiteScore	3.6	2024, Scopus (Elsevier B.V., 2025)
SCImago Journal Rank	0.657	2024, SJR (Scimago Lab, 2025; Data Source: Scopus)
Source Normalized Impact per Paper	1.653	2024, CWTS Journal Indicators (CWTS B.V., 2025; Data Source: Scopus)

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Editor-in-Chief
Stefanie Wulff
Linguistics Department
University of Florida
4015 Turlington Hall, P.O. Box 115454
Gainesville, Florida 32611-5454
USA
e-mail: swulff@ufl.edu

Editor-in-Chief
Stefan Th. Gries
South Hall 3506
UC Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, California, 93106
USA
e-mail: stgries@linguistics.ucsb.edu

Founding Editors
Stefan Th. Gries, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA (now General Editor)
Anatol Stefanowitsch, Free University of Berlin, Germany

Editorial Board
Harald Baayen (University of Tübingen, Germany)
Alvin Chen (National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan)
Jesse Egbert (Northern Arizona University, USA)
Susanne Flach (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
Martin Hilpert (University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland)
Chu-Ren Huang　黃居仁 (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Anke Lüdeling (Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany)
Stewart McCauley (the University of Iowa, USA)
Magali Paquot (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
Florent Perek (University of Birmingham, UK)
Anna Theakston (University of Manchester, UK)
Amir Zeldes (Georgetown University, USA)

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Linguistics and Semiotics Applied Linguistics Quantitative, Computational, and Corpus Linguistics

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1613-7035

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1613-7027

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De Gruyter Mouton

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First published:

May 20, 2005

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3 issues per year

eISSN: 1613-7035

ISSN: 1613-7027

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Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

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