Synchronic Corpus Linguistics

Book excerpt: Synchronic corpus linguistics contains select papers from the sixteenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 16). The papers reflect the state of the art in the design, analysis, and annotation of corpora. Corpora new and old facilitate the description of single registers of English (e.g., London teenage English, business English) and of specific grammatical topics across registers (e.g., the grammatical flexibility of idioms), including variation studies (e.g., popular vs. technical registers of English). Other corpora permit the comparison of English to other languages (Norwegian, German, Swedish); of L1 English to L2 English; and of English as an original language to English in translation. A number of these papers emphasize pragmatics: indeed, among the papers on spoken English is an assessment of corpora annotated for discourse analysis. Other papers describe different aspects of the automatic analysis of text. Two papers describe semantic analysis of large text corpora composed of news/business text. Automatic grammatical analysis is the subject of other papers: two evaluate existing automatic parsers and wordclass taggers, while two describe how annotated corpora are being used to develop two new and innovative automatic parsers.