If a federal official is deliberately violating the Constitution, is it possible that no federal ... more If a federal official is deliberately violating the Constitution, is it possible that no federal court has the power to halt that conduct? Federal judges have been answering “yes” for more than a century – dismissing certain kinds of lawsuits alleging unconstitutional conduct by ruling that the lawsuits were not “cases” as meant in the phrase “The judicial Power shall extend to all cases” in Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution. In 1911 the United States Supreme Court declared: “[T]he exercise of the judicial power is limited to ‘cases’ and ‘controversies.’ … By cases and controversies are intended the claims of litigants. … The term implies the existence of present or possible adverse parties, whose contentions are submitted to the court for adjudication.” The Supreme Court has subsequently further specified the meaning of “case” within the meaning of Article III to include the following “essential core”: a plaintiff who has suffered a concrete and particularized injury that...
This paper introduces the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) as a new resourc... more This paper introduces the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) as a new resource that will enable researchers and teachers of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) to investigate the written discourse of highly advanced student writers whose written assignments have been awarded the grade ‘A’. The usefulness of two aspects of the design of the corpus — variation across discipline and across student level — is illustrated by two case studies, one on attribution and one on recurrent phraseological patterns. The first case study investigates how references to the work of others are realized and to what extent disciplinary variation exists in unpublished academic writing by students. The second study examines the use of phraseological items (n-grams and phrase-frames) by students at four different levels of undergraduate and graduate study. The paper closes with a discussion of the results of both case studies and describes future avenues for MICUSP-based research.
This plenary speech provides an overview of applications of corpus research in several core areas... more This plenary speech provides an overview of applications of corpus research in several core areas of applied linguistics, including second language acquisition and language assessment. It does this by showcasing a number of recent studies carried out by or with involvement of the author. These studies all focus on phraseological aspects of language and demonstrate the importance of studying its patterned nature. The studies also illustrate how corpora and corpus-analytic techniques can allow us as applied linguists to contribute to solving problems in other disciplines (such as legal scholarship or music theory) and hope to thereby encourage more interdisciplinary research collaborations between corpus linguists and scholars from other fields.
Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2019
Using data from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and the British National Corpu... more Using data from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and the British National Corpus (BNC), this article examines what Turkish learners of English know about a set of frequent verb-argument constructions (VACs, such as ‘V with n’ as illustrated by ‘I like to go with the flow’) and in what ways their VAC knowledge is influenced by native English usage and by transfer from their first language (L1), Turkish. An ICLE Turkish analysis gave us access to dominant verb-VAC associations in Turkish learners ́ English, and provided insights into the productivity and predictability of selected constructions. Comparisons with the BNC and other ICLE subsets (ICLE German and ICLE Spanish) allowed us to determine how strong the usage effect is on Turkish learners’ verb-VAC associations and whether Turkish learners differ in this respect from learners of other typologically different L1s. Potential effects of L1 transfer were explored with the help of a large reference corpus of Turki...
This paper aims to connect recent corpus research on phraseology with current language testing pr... more This paper aims to connect recent corpus research on phraseology with current language testing practice. It discusses how corpora and corpus-analytic techniques can illuminate central aspects of speech and help in conceptualizing the notion of lexicogrammar in second language speaking assessment. The description of speech and some of its core features is based on the 1.8-million-word Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and on the 10-million-word spoken component of the British National Corpus (BNC). Analyses of word frequency and keyword lists are followed by an automatic extraction of different types of phraseological items that are particularly common in speech and serve important communicative functions. These corpus explorations provide evidence for the strong interconnectedness of lexical items and grammatical structures in natural language. Based on the assumption that the existence of lexicogrammatical patterns is of relevance for constructs of speaking tests,...
Over the past few decades, corpora have not only revolutionized linguistic research but have also... more Over the past few decades, corpora have not only revolutionized linguistic research but have also had an impact on second language learning and teaching. In the field of applied linguistics, more and more researchers and practitioners treasure what corpus linguistics has to offer to language pedagogy. Still, corpora and corpus tools have yet to be widely implemented in pedagogical contexts. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of pedagogical corpus applications and to review recent publications in the area of corpus linguistics and language teaching. It covers indirect corpus applications, such as in syllabus or materials design, as well as direct applications of corpora in the second language classroom. The article aims to illustrate how both general and specialized language corpora can be used in these applications and discusses directions for future research in applied corpus linguistics.
We used free association tasks to investigate second language (L2) verb-argument constructions (V... more We used free association tasks to investigate second language (L2) verb-argument constructions (VACs) and the ways in which their access is sensitive to statistical patterns of usage (verb type-token frequency distribution, VAC-verb contingency, verb-VAC semantic prototypicality). 131 German, 131 Spanish, and 131 Czech advanced L2 learners of English generated the first word that came to mind to fill the V slot in 40 sparse VAC frames such as ‘he __ across the …’, ‘it __ of the …’, etc. For each VAC, we compared these results with corpus analyses of verb selection preferences in 100 million words of usage and with the semantic network structure of the verbs in these VACs. For all language groups, multiple regression analyses predicting the frequencies of verb types generated for each VAC show independent contributions of (i) verb frequency in the VAC, (ii) VAC-verb contingency, and (iii) verb prototypicality in terms of centrality within the VAC semantic network. L2 VAC processing i...
If a federal official is deliberately violating the Constitution, is it possible that no federal ... more If a federal official is deliberately violating the Constitution, is it possible that no federal court has the power to halt that conduct? Federal judges have been answering “yes” for more than a century – dismissing certain kinds of lawsuits alleging unconstitutional conduct by ruling that the lawsuits were not “cases” as meant in the phrase “The judicial Power shall extend to all cases” in Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution. In 1911 the United States Supreme Court declared: “[T]he exercise of the judicial power is limited to ‘cases’ and ‘controversies.’ … By cases and controversies are intended the claims of litigants. … The term implies the existence of present or possible adverse parties, whose contentions are submitted to the court for adjudication.” The Supreme Court has subsequently further specified the meaning of “case” within the meaning of Article III to include the following “essential core”: a plaintiff who has suffered a concrete and particularized injury that...
This paper introduces the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) as a new resourc... more This paper introduces the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) as a new resource that will enable researchers and teachers of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) to investigate the written discourse of highly advanced student writers whose written assignments have been awarded the grade ‘A’. The usefulness of two aspects of the design of the corpus — variation across discipline and across student level — is illustrated by two case studies, one on attribution and one on recurrent phraseological patterns. The first case study investigates how references to the work of others are realized and to what extent disciplinary variation exists in unpublished academic writing by students. The second study examines the use of phraseological items (n-grams and phrase-frames) by students at four different levels of undergraduate and graduate study. The paper closes with a discussion of the results of both case studies and describes future avenues for MICUSP-based research.
This plenary speech provides an overview of applications of corpus research in several core areas... more This plenary speech provides an overview of applications of corpus research in several core areas of applied linguistics, including second language acquisition and language assessment. It does this by showcasing a number of recent studies carried out by or with involvement of the author. These studies all focus on phraseological aspects of language and demonstrate the importance of studying its patterned nature. The studies also illustrate how corpora and corpus-analytic techniques can allow us as applied linguists to contribute to solving problems in other disciplines (such as legal scholarship or music theory) and hope to thereby encourage more interdisciplinary research collaborations between corpus linguists and scholars from other fields.
Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2019
Using data from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and the British National Corpu... more Using data from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and the British National Corpus (BNC), this article examines what Turkish learners of English know about a set of frequent verb-argument constructions (VACs, such as ‘V with n’ as illustrated by ‘I like to go with the flow’) and in what ways their VAC knowledge is influenced by native English usage and by transfer from their first language (L1), Turkish. An ICLE Turkish analysis gave us access to dominant verb-VAC associations in Turkish learners ́ English, and provided insights into the productivity and predictability of selected constructions. Comparisons with the BNC and other ICLE subsets (ICLE German and ICLE Spanish) allowed us to determine how strong the usage effect is on Turkish learners’ verb-VAC associations and whether Turkish learners differ in this respect from learners of other typologically different L1s. Potential effects of L1 transfer were explored with the help of a large reference corpus of Turki...
This paper aims to connect recent corpus research on phraseology with current language testing pr... more This paper aims to connect recent corpus research on phraseology with current language testing practice. It discusses how corpora and corpus-analytic techniques can illuminate central aspects of speech and help in conceptualizing the notion of lexicogrammar in second language speaking assessment. The description of speech and some of its core features is based on the 1.8-million-word Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and on the 10-million-word spoken component of the British National Corpus (BNC). Analyses of word frequency and keyword lists are followed by an automatic extraction of different types of phraseological items that are particularly common in speech and serve important communicative functions. These corpus explorations provide evidence for the strong interconnectedness of lexical items and grammatical structures in natural language. Based on the assumption that the existence of lexicogrammatical patterns is of relevance for constructs of speaking tests,...
Over the past few decades, corpora have not only revolutionized linguistic research but have also... more Over the past few decades, corpora have not only revolutionized linguistic research but have also had an impact on second language learning and teaching. In the field of applied linguistics, more and more researchers and practitioners treasure what corpus linguistics has to offer to language pedagogy. Still, corpora and corpus tools have yet to be widely implemented in pedagogical contexts. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of pedagogical corpus applications and to review recent publications in the area of corpus linguistics and language teaching. It covers indirect corpus applications, such as in syllabus or materials design, as well as direct applications of corpora in the second language classroom. The article aims to illustrate how both general and specialized language corpora can be used in these applications and discusses directions for future research in applied corpus linguistics.
We used free association tasks to investigate second language (L2) verb-argument constructions (V... more We used free association tasks to investigate second language (L2) verb-argument constructions (VACs) and the ways in which their access is sensitive to statistical patterns of usage (verb type-token frequency distribution, VAC-verb contingency, verb-VAC semantic prototypicality). 131 German, 131 Spanish, and 131 Czech advanced L2 learners of English generated the first word that came to mind to fill the V slot in 40 sparse VAC frames such as ‘he __ across the …’, ‘it __ of the …’, etc. For each VAC, we compared these results with corpus analyses of verb selection preferences in 100 million words of usage and with the semantic network structure of the verbs in these VACs. For all language groups, multiple regression analyses predicting the frequencies of verb types generated for each VAC show independent contributions of (i) verb frequency in the VAC, (ii) VAC-verb contingency, and (iii) verb prototypicality in terms of centrality within the VAC semantic network. L2 VAC processing i...
In the past, large-scale, corpus-based analyses of disciplinary and generic variation have focuse... more In the past, large-scale, corpus-based analyses of disciplinary and generic variation have focused on the writing of experts (e.g., Biber, Conrad, Reppen, Byrd, & Helt, 2002; Hyland, 2008) who are members much more central to their respective academic discourse communities (Swales, 1990). However, as writing instruction increasingly spreads from English departments to writing intensive coursework housed in other disciplines, there is a need to better understand student writing as it exists in those content areas. Such an understanding can help instructors address the needs of novices who are at the peripheries of their academic discourse communities. To that end, this study’s purpose was to uncover a set of factors of co-occurring, lexico-grammatical features to help characterize successful student writing from 16 disciplines. Along with general disciplinary variation, we also wanted to compare how different genres (e.g., reports, research papers, argumentative essays) are realized in and across the disciplines. To do this, MICUSP ("Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers," 2009) was used. MICUSP is a corpus of A-graded, upper-level student papers across 16 disciplines. To find categories based on lexical and grammatical features, the corpus was first electronically tagged using the Biber tagger (Biber, 1988, 2006). Then, we used multi-dimensional analysis, a statistical procedure pioneered by Biber (1988), to identify dimensions of frequently co-occurring features that best accounted for variation. Along with a description of the methodology, this paper will define the features that constitute the factors, which have been labeled based on their communicative functions. Commonalities and differences at the disciplinary and generic levels will be discussed as well as implications for future research, such as a cross-sectional analysis of disciplinary and generic development of different levels of academic writers. To conclude, implications for discipline-specific and genre-based pedagogies will be addressed.
References Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Biber, D., & Conrad, S. (2009). Register, genre, and style. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Biber, D., Conrad, S., Reppen, R., Byrd, P., & Helt, M. (2002). Speaking and writing in the university: A multi-dimensional comparison. TESOL Quarterly, 36(1), 9-48. Hyland, K. (2008). Genre and academic writing in the disciplines. Language Teaching, 41(4), 543-562. Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers. (2009). Ann Arbor, MI: The Regents of the University of Michigan. Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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References
Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Biber, D., & Conrad, S. (2009). Register, genre, and style. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Biber, D., Conrad, S., Reppen, R., Byrd, P., & Helt, M. (2002). Speaking and writing in the university: A multi-dimensional comparison. TESOL Quarterly, 36(1), 9-48.
Hyland, K. (2008). Genre and academic writing in the disciplines. Language Teaching, 41(4), 543-562.
Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers. (2009). Ann Arbor, MI: The Regents of the University of Michigan.
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.