It’s great to see so many friends here this
evening and so many people who are friends
for the future, I said to Suganthi our Head
of Department as everybody was coming in,
I said my life is flashing in front of my
eyes, as people I’ve known for a long time
and fairly recently, all came along so it’s
very nice to see everybody.
This is going to be quite a casual talk which
is a way, a polite way of saying you may not
learn anything very new, and it is very much
some personal reflections on Corpus Linguistics
into 2017.
I do remember being old enough when Corpus
Linguistics was a very new thing, and I remember
going to a meeting of the Linguistics Association
of Great Britain when it was described as
this new fashion. Of course it has moved on
very much since then and it’s moved on so
much that I must admit I’m beginning to
feel a little bit like a dinosaur in the world
of Corpus Linguistics. Partly because that
is how I really feel, and partly because clip
art has a lot of cool pictures of dinosaurs,
I’ve got quite involved in that.
So I’m going to talk structure my talk around
five moves or turns in Corpus Linguistics
which I think are observable. I’ll be thinking
about the influence of Corpus Linguistics
on various aspects of linguistics but also
about the influence of these changes on Corpus
Linguistics itself.
It looks as though I’m going to say five
important things but actually there are only
two main takeaway notes. One is that I think
the statistical manipulation of corpora is
the new corpus driven and construction grammar
offers a reinterpretation of units of meaning
and grammar patterns.
But the first thing I’m going to walk about
is the continued trend towards specialisation
in corpus linguistics by which I mean simply
compiling corpora of quite specific text types.
It isn’t a particularly new trend of course
but perhaps worth commenting on. And if we
doubted it that corpus linguistics increasingly
looks at specialised text here are some examples
from this year’s conference. And I’m just
going through this from the programme, very
specific genres such as Academic bio-data
or school text books, specific topics such
as Romanian Migrants, Harassment, Careers
and Employability, specific sources such as
the Daily Express or on line forums and just
some more, there we go.
So we are of course familiar with the role
Corpus Linguistics plays in assisting the
investigation of discourse and the contribution
it makes to other disciplines, whether this
is a humanities discipline such as stylistics
or the many social sciences assisted by for
example the CASS Centre at Lancaster University.
As Baker, Partington, Toole and Malberg and
many others have pointed out combining corpus
techniques with discourse analysis makes the
corpus analysis more robust and enables latent
patterns to be observed, and by latent patterning
I mean word collocations, phrases, meanings
that are significant in a discourse but which
can’t be observed as frequent by looking
at individual text alone.
What corpus linguistics does is to rearrange
the data in this case words and type categories
so that the patterning is more easily observed.
And what this does to, is demonstrate and
assert the centrality of corpus linguistics
to linguistics itself and by it also provides
a surface to linguistics by demonstrating
and asserting the centrality of linguistics
to all intellectual endeavour and for this
audience that’s surely not too great a claim
to make.
More specifically what corpus linguistics
in the study of specialised discourse shows
is that the detail of form really matters,
how something is said is important, and accumulation
really matters, repetition of a form and a
message creates salience.
So it’s all good, but what about the other
way around and now we think about the influence
of the study of specialised discourse on corpus
linguistic, one possibly negative effect one
positive one neutral.
Corpus Linguistics continues to develop as
a main stream methodology it’s no longer
only a fashion but a bedrock of how linguistics
is done and it tends to take on a service
role in relation to other disciplines. The
tried and tested methods may be valued more
than innovation in methodology, having said
that servicing other disciplines can have
its advantages and what Hardy and Baker have
called the helicopter effect of studying specific
discourses is one such.
The third influence is in reinvigorating the
debate about register and the totality of
a language, Doug Biber has argued for example
that there’s no such thing as general English,
there are only individual registers. Increasing
the specificity of text moving beyond register
perhaps both demonstrates the importance of
comparing corpora and raises the question
of the optimum level of specificity of description.
So I’m now moving on to the next point,
and this point is the Modality Effect, what
I’m talking about here basically is the
kind of linguistic and other semiotic texts
incorporated into corpus linguistics that
has grown explanation ally from the early
necessary focus on written text to an increasing
emphasis on spoken text to signed text and
then onto images and to gestures, and similarly
we trace a development in sources available,
when I first started in association with Co-Build
there was a large very large cupboard full
of books that had been torn to pieces so that
they could each, each page by page could be
put through a scanner and that was the only
way of getting the books into a corpus, well
that was a long time ago.
So we had the scanned books of the early 80’s
right through to published and unpublished
materials to the more ephemeral texts, the
tweets and other forms of social media coming
on to the one I’ve heard about most recently
from my colleague Ruth Page which is Snapchat,
I’ve no idea what that is but they tell
me it exists and you can snap.
And the influence of this on corpus linguistics
I think is an explosion of methodologies responding
to nonlinear forms of text to non-standard
texts to very short, very numerous texts,
and indeed to temporary texts, and as you
can see this is way beyond my area of expertise
so I’m going to move on fairly quickly from
that.
I’m going to move on to an area where I
have no more expertise but where I have more
to say. The quantity has always lain at the
heart of corpus linguistics from early observations
intuitive observations of what is most frequent
through measures of significance to today’s
more sophisticated complex statistical techniques.
I want to make the argument that corpus work
that starts with statistical manipulation
of text might be termed the new ‘corpus
driven’ now this term comes of course from
Tognini-Bonelli’s distinction between corpus
based and corpus driven, corpus based research
which builds on known categories and corpus
driven research which seeks to derive new
categories from raw observation. Corpus driven
research is often linguistically naïve with
observations about categories emerging from
the data that don’t necessarily coincide
with pre-existing linguistic knowledge.
Although the debate between corpus based and
corpus driven has largely passed into history
and the dichotomy nowadays is more likely
to be treated as a cline I do think that the
notion of corpus driven can usefully be applied
to studies that start not from the word as
Tognini-Bonelli did but from the numbers,
and to return to a point I made earlier corpus
investigation is about rearranging the data,
facilitating the observation of pattern. When
that re-arrangement is carried out statistically
its quantitatively sophisticated but linguistically
naïve, it basically uses a bag of words that’s
what I’m going to talk about.
I’m going to give two examples from work
with which I have been associated although
the person who was mostly responsible for
the work is somebody other than myself, so
it’s not exactly plagiarism but I am borrowing
from people’s work.
What these studies have in common is that
in each case numbers were used, I use numbers
you know because that’s what people likely
understand, numbers. Numbers were used to
derive lists of words that tend to co-occur,
not in the sense of collocation within a three
word span, five word span, but within the
same text or sub-corpus. I spent quite a lot
of my research life looking at lists of words
and putting them into categories, putting
them into lists of words that have similar
meanings, but that was me and my colleague
sitting there and doing that. In each of the
examples I’m going to talk about that task
was done statistically, with human intervention
only in selecting and applying the statistics
only.
I’ve spoken about each of these studies
before so I’m going to go over them fairly
briefly. The first example is work by Neil
Miller on the appalling website rate my professors
dot com, where people write about the Professors
who have taught them and how wonderful or
how dreadful they are. Neil Miller was interested
in the adjectives and in which adjectives
were used by the community of writers who
were describing each Professor. So he was
interested in which adjectives most significantly
co-occur in the texts about each Professor,
so each Professor’s text comprises a kind
of sub-corpus.
To over-simplify what he did he used PCA to
derive lists of adjectives which were likely
to co-occur, for example a Professor approved
of as being intelligent that’s in the first
list on this slide was likely also to be described
as brilliant, interesting and smart, not necessarily
by the same writer but by another writer evaluating
the same Professor. We can mnemonic labels
to these groups in this case intelligence
and helpfulness, but the groups themselves
were driven by the numbers not created by
Neil or by myself.
So here are two of the groups, with the first
few adjectives in each group and the mnemonic.
The lists themselves simply answer the question,
‘what do writers talk about when they rate
their Professors’ and it’s not surprising
that what they talk about is how intelligent
the Professor is and how helpful the Professor
is. But the numbers made lists are capable
of offering another prospective the words
inspiring, engaging and interesting, are put
in the same group as intelligent, smart and
so on, and this suggests to us that for the
writers, intelligence is valued insofar as
it has a positive effect on the student or
the consumer. We might say that this group
of adjectives commodifies education, this
is the voice of the student as the consumer
of the intelligence of the Professor.
When we turn to the helpfulness group on the
other hand we see words such as available
and approachable as well as helpful and sweet
and so on. The presence of these words suggests
that students being able to talk to Professors
is something to be remarked on in the feedback.
It suggests a level of humility perhaps at
odds with the consumer view of the intelligence
groups, it’s the voice of the student as
subordinate.
And we can make similar comments about the
negative adjectives, here are two groups that
we have labelled ‘rudeness’ and ‘incompetence’,
notice that the incompetence group again positions
the student as the consumer chastising the
Professor for the feeling engendered in the
students. But the most harsh adjective unprofessional
is used by students not in conjunction with
incompetence but in the other interpersonal
group alongside rude and mean in some, as
Neil Miller has said you be anything you like
with students except rude.
My second example may again be familiar to
you and it comes from work which I’m going
to credit to Akira Murakami, this is based
on a corpus of research articles from the
Journal, Environmental Change, and it identifies
words which in the corpus as a whole tend
to co-occur in stretches of text at least
300 words long, so a couple of paragraphs.
So these are some of the lists of words which
as I say tend to co-occur within a couple
of paragraphs. Some of them are very observable
recognisable as topics, we have a kind of
forest topic, a kind of risk topic and some
are less recognisable as topics, so if one
was doing this manually with a list of words
that are frequent in this journal for example
one might pick out the first of these and
the second but less likely to pick out the
third and the fourth.
And there are various kinds of topic which
I’m just going to zip through because I
want to come on to the second, the next point
the main point, which is that deriving the
lists statistically in a way that ignores
their meaning when the lists are put together
without anybody looking at them and thinking
about it throws up some surprises that I think
would be missed if we started with a method
that involved the meaning of words, for example
the word ‘Agriculture’ occurs in two lists,
one to do with crops, one to do with livestock
and the similar word ‘farm’ occurs not
in those lists but in another list that centres
on farming as a localised human activity rather
than an economic one. And also what we see
from these lists are topics that are shaped
by the texts they occur in or are construed
by, in other words the lists make up topics
that are unique to this corpus, to this journal,
for example there are lists that combine the
names of natural entities with indications
of human involvement. River and Irrigation
or Forest and Conservation or sea or flood,
another example is the predominance of risk
words in these lists, not just risk words
such as risk and hazard but also stress along
water or problem along with environment. And
there are words about mitigating risk, mitigation
with carbon or protect with coastal and so
on.
So to summarise I’ve argued that in corpus
driven research in particular the data is
rearranged to enhance observation, corpus
driven research takes a naïve view of language
finding strings of letters or words, strings
of words or phrases and applying insightful
observation to them and I think this is what
the numbers in fact are doing for us.
So in this case this is why I say that numbers
based Corpus research is the new corpus driven,
it is statistics rather than concordancing
that’s used to rearrange the words. The
work as linguistically naïve taking a bag
of words approach and the rearrangement is
followed by insightful we hope observation.
I’m now going to turn to the fourth thing
I’m talking about is the Cognitive Effect,
Cognitive Linguistics is not something that
I have been involved with myself but many
of our new colleagues here at Birmingham,
work in Cognitive Linguistics and I have been
heard to say ‘if anybody else mentions the
word ITracker to me I shall scream’. But
clearly there’s a growing affinity between
cognitive and corpus approaches to language
and we are all very good friends ITrackers
notwithstanding. From my very partial prospective
cognitive linguistics is about the study of
metaphor and the study of construction grammar
and I’m going to focus on the second of
these today.
So constructions are mental constructs mapping
form and meaning existing at all generalities
of meaning, so for example, single word the
word ‘apple’ will form apple or apple
of someone’s eye and the meaning adored
person, but also it’s a very general level
subject verb inversion with the meaning something
like interrogative or the ditransitive transfer
of possession a positive as causative into
or the conative at meaning an incomplete action.
So abstract grammatical features and particular
grammatical functions.
And corpus linguistics is of course important
to constructions because corpus investigation
allows for the identification of constructions
in text, and this can be done from scratch
deriving techniques as many have done for
recognising repeated strings or patterns of
words that can then be proposed as evidence
for the existence of constructions. What I’m
going to propose here though is that previous
work on corpus data can be put into service
to identify constructions.
A fairly obvious way to do this is to propose
a reinterpretation of units of meaning as
proposed by Sinclair as constructions, this
is Sinclair’s characterisation of a unit
of meaning, one or more words the form is
variable but semi-fixed the form is open to
creativity, the meaning of the whole is more
than the sum of the parts, the meaning is
consistent and the meaning is often affective
and implicit. For example a headline from
earlier this month, ‘UK ditches it’s ‘cake
and eat it’ Brexit stance’. The phrase
I am going to focus on here is ‘cake and
eat it’, and if we look in a corpus and
the one I looked in was the Bank of English,
we find ‘cake and eat it’ the string ‘cake
and eat it’ 165 instances all preceded by
‘have’ so we can then look at have, cake,
and, and if we look at the figures here which
is actually pretty impossible. ‘Have’
is the most frequent wordform rather than
other forms on the ladder, and if we look
at the possessives it is relatively rarely,
relatively rarely ‘our’ or ‘my’ so
although we can talk about ‘have my cake
and eat it’ we’re much more likely to
talk about ‘have your cake and eat it’
or ‘have their cake and eat it’ and the
‘and eat it’ component is fairly fixed.
Moving on what is before ‘have possessive
cake and’ it’s preceded by volition wanting
or trying to have your cake, it’s also preceded
by modals of possibility and particularly
negative ones, and there are some explicit
instances of the effective meaning of the
unit of meaning, he cannot have his cake and
eat it, they both want to have their cake
and eat it too, he accuses him of trying to
have his cake and eat it, maybe we just realised
we can’t have our cake and eat it.
So thinking of this in terms of a unit of
meaning we’ve got a collocation, have cake
eat, we’ve got a colligation, the grammar
we’ve got modals possessive the coordinator,
we’ve got a semantic set of wanting and
trying and impossibility and what we might,
the way we might express the semantic porosity
is something like it’s wrong to aim for
two contradictory things.
But of course we can, we could also say what
we have here is a have cake and eat it construction,
and as we would expect from a construction
we can find a number of variations, her tart
and eat it, have your ham and eat it, have
their veal and eat it, have his beefcake and
eat it, I do not understand at all, their
hamburgers and eat it, have their gateaux
and eat it, have you duck and eat it, have
your loaf and eat it and so on.
We can do something very similar with another
unit of meaning again proposed by Sinclair
around the node sever, and he notes examples
such as these here, and proposes a unit of
meaning which, with its own grammatical elements,
so we’ve always got the word link, we’ve
always got with or to and we’ve very often
got all and if we don’t have all we’ve
got a possessive.
Of course there is variability in the noun,
ties is very common, links connections, contacts,
relations, bonds and so on, but there’s
also variability in the verb, so although
sever, so I’m here looking for verb all
ties, links connections, contacts, sever is
the most frequent but cut is also frequent
and a few others as well. We can look at the
preceding text and note that to is very frequent
along with the verbs that go along with to,
like advise, decide, force, so we’ve got
meanings of futurity of volition and obligation
and then looking at the modifier so I’m
looking here at sever, space, ties all is
very frequent but also then the possessives,
and I think that sense of absoluteness that
we get with all permeates the unit.
So we might say we have a sever all ties construction
with the verbs, sever, cut, break, the nouns,
ties, links to connections, with an implicature
of absoluteness and an implicature of obligation
and volition. The unit of meaning itself combines
a sever all ties bit, and a ties or links
or connections followed by the prepositions
with or to and is probably a specification
of a general destroy something construction
which I’m going to come back to in a moment.
But my main proposal is that the work on Pattern
Grammar carried out in the 1990’s by Gill
Francis, Elizabeth Manning and myself, [30:41]
form the basis of construction identification.
The Pattern Grammar resources are shortly
I hope, touch wood, shortly to be relaunched
by Collins as an on-line free resource that
will be searchable and this resource which
is not quite ready to be launched on the general
public yet was a subject of a workshop held
last week here at Birmingham and I’d like
to thank the workshop participants for their
contribution to some of the ideas here. They’ve
also been used as the basis for construction
recognition in the book by Ellis Rimmer and
McDonald who investigate verb argument constructions
in language acquisition using Pattern Grammar.
So Grammar Patterns are the systematisation
of the complementation patterns of adjectives,
nouns and verbs, there are about 100 main
patterns with some other variations and there
are approximately 10 groups of meanings within
each pattern. This means that we have the
basis for about 1,000 constructions all at
the same level of specificity so to the construction
grammar community I offer a 1,000 constructions
here for the taking. And many of the things
that we call patterns have been investigated
previously under the title of constructions
by Goldberg, Rhys, Stafanovich, Ilternon and
others, so for example this one talked his
way into dismiss the idea as fooled them into
believing that and told them the story, we
can describe those as patterns, we can describe
them as constructions, either way.
I’m now going to give examples from three
other patterns and in each case I’m going
to focus on one meaning group within each
pattern, so I’m going to find one common
meaning from the several meanings expressed
by the pattern, and I’m going to propose
as well that the pattern elements can be labelled
semantically in a way that combines the concept
of construction with related concepts of frames
and local grammars.
So it’s well known that the, it is, adjective,
that pattern is used to evaluate, it is clear
that, it is important that, it is interesting
that, it is likely that, it is possible that,
and here it is with the semantic elements
added, an evaluation and a target. I don’t
incidentally hold any great store by the labels
given here, the meaning labels, the element
labels that are added they’re a best guess
so far but if somebody wants to change them
then they’re more than welcome to do so.
Then I would suggest we have a reactive ‘that’
construction where we have adjective plus
fact clause, afraid that, aware that, confident
that, disappointed that, happy that, and again
some possible suggested element names, we
have an evaluator and evaluation and a target.
Moving away from evaluative meanings something
which are called a reactive ‘for’ construction
this is the verb noun for noun pattern blame
someone for, criticise for, forgive my mother
for, punish him for reprimanded for, reward
me for, it is looking at this again from this
rather new prospective it seems that blame
may not fit very well there, because it is
an a factual meaning whereas the other are
factual so I’ll never forgive my mother
for wrecking my marriage, construes it as
factual that the mother wrecked the marriage,
whether or not she actually did of course.
Whereas blame the family for the predicament
is, seems to me to be a little different,
so we will remove that there.
And but again, we have some semantic labels
so we have a reactor, we have a reward or
punish, we have a receiver which is not a
good label but can’t think of anything else
at the moment and the reason at the end.
The relationship between the construction
and pattern is not one to one, so here’s
a little table showing three patterns but
five constructions so if we take the pattern
adjective at, noun, there is the construction
person is skilled at activity, with some sample
nodes words, ace, adapt, bad, brilliant, clever,
competent etc., or person is reaction at situation
for example he was furious at the adverse
publicity with a few sample node words given
there. So obviously it depends what kind of
adjective it is as to which of those constructions
it is, and then the two patterns at the bottom
of the table verb, noun, sorry the one pattern
at the bottom of the table verb noun as noun,
with the two constructions associated with
it. Person categorises entity as quality as
in they denounced him as a madman, or entity
strikes person as quality this struck me as
a great litmus test for new features, with
just two verbs that fit into that one.
The pattern verb noun of noun has in the pattern
grammar resource four meaning groups, I’m
going to ignore the last one which is verbs
we couldn’t fit anywhere else for the moment.
So there’s rob and free, inform, acquit
and convict, and for each group we can again
propose some labels 
with divided as to whether the taking away
is a negative thing as in defrauded or a positive
thing as in cured. Another group would be
informed group with labels such as informer,
informed and message, and I’ve separated
out the bottom one the broadcast convinced
me because the broadcast of course is not
the informer but the evidence of the information.
Now, the verb noun of noun pattern works quite
well because there are relatively few meaning
groups, so you’ve only got three constructions
to the pattern, a much more difficult example
is verb noun with noun, which has a lot of
different meanings, blend the spinach with
the egg yolks, confuse cold with flu, education
is correlated with income, console myself
with writing up my notes, plays football with
the staff, stock up your cupboard with tins
of tomatoes, there’s not a great deal that’s
in common there.
There are something like 29 meaning groups
altogether in that pattern but we can merge
some of them together once we look at this
from the point of view of constructions and
this is what I suggested altogether 9 meanings
rather than 29 and I’m not going to go through
all of them but just the ones that I’ve
put in bold there.
So we have I would suggest a meaning of effecting
a connection involved meanings of think of
two things as connected or not, combine two
things, physically or virtually, exchange
two things, and I suggest that we might have
a construe connection with construction with
construer two entities and verbs such as confuse,
combine or replace all of them with, ‘with’
the preposition ‘with’.
Then we have a transfer ownership meaning,
with examples such as these ones, entrust
with, furnish with, honour with, inject with,
land with, or provide with, some positive
provide us with, some negative land us with,
and we have a transferor, a receiver and I
suggest to provide someone with construction.
A meaning to do with bringing about a feeling
or idea verbs to do with feelings and changes
in mental state, acquaint, bore, confront,
familiarise, content, a change in mental state,
a resultative mental with construction, I’m
trying to find names that sound constructiony,
it’s a mental thing construction, it’s
rather nice.
So in other words the proposal is the resources
that are the outcome of extensive corpus research
can be used to specify a very large set of
constructions at a particular level of specificity.
The influence of cognitive linguistics on
corpus linguistics can be positive using empirical
research as the validation of observation,
it might also be negative and I confess this
is a little bee in my bonnet, cognitive linguistics
talks about identifying the psychological
reality of certain linguistic effects and
my only argument with that is an argument
that psychological reality is the only reality
and I don’t like to see corpus linguistics
adopting that view of in order to be real
it has to be demonstrated to be psychologically
real, and I may come back to that in just
a moment.
As I get on to the final effect which I’m
calling ‘The Paradigm Effect’.
So it’s well known that language can be
investigated as a Syntagm or a Paradigm, syntagmatic
focussing on the order of elements the paradigmatic
focusing on the choice between equivalent
elements. And it seems to me that language
can be investigated as a mental construct
which tends to focus on the syntagmatic or
as a social construct which tends to focus
on the paradigmatic and when I say that I’m
really thinking of social views of language
such as systemic functional linguistics which
is famously at its heart about choices between
alternatives at all levels. So language is
represented as a system of choices and meaning
depends on the availability of alternative,
choices are represented at progressive levels
of delicacy and the system and the choices
within are socially rather than mentally motivated.
And some corpus work of course takes the SFL
categories as prior and quantifies them, thereby
adding to Halliday’s work on probabilities
within register but I’m not actually talking
about that kind of work at the moment.
This seems to me to bring to mind these two
words which I can barely pronounce and always
have to look up to remind myself which one
is which and so I acknowledge here Wikipedia
that reminded me today which one is which
and gave the very nice examples of somatology
saying what does a single entity mean what
does chip mean, well it means a different
thing if you’re in the UK and if you’re
in the USA, which is a bit like saying how
is this word or structure used which word
or structure is more frequent etc.
The [45;37] one says if we have a particular
concept what are the different names for it,
so what is the name of the piece of potato
that has been fried in the UK it is one word
in the USA it is another word. The second
of these seems to me in a sense to go into
the paradigmatic and to present for corpus
linguistics the old problem of how do you
find something that is not there, or how do
you find something when you don’t know what
it is so when you know that something is not
said how do you know what is being said instead,
and in a sense that’s what you need to find
out.
Now are little bit, there are some ways of
doing this so for example there are alternative
formulations of a function so there are as
Maggie Charles has suggested you can talk
about the result suggested that or you can
say Darwin interpreted this as and you’ve
got two alternative ways of reporting results
that have very different effects. One of my
favourites is looking at how modality can
be expressed in different ways, we can look
at modal verbs and we have a list of those
so it’s easy to find them but you come across
alternative ways of expressing modality and
one that I discovered by chance almost was
the phrase ‘for fear of’ which expresses
modality without modal meaning without a modal
verb, and that an adjective discovered by
our colleague Gary Plappet was candidate as
in candidate gene which means this is the
gene that might do this but doesn’t actually
use the modal verb.
And then I want to look a little bit further
at the notion of the paradigmatic in terms
of levels of delicacy or levels of specificity
in constructions, and here I’m indebted
to a paper by [48:08] that introduced this
idea to me quite recently, and I want to do
this just with a couple of examples that at
the bottom of the table on the screen you
see a set of constructions of the type I was
talking about before where you have a range
of verbs that can be used for example with
solve a problem, there are other words that
can be used with, solve a problem, address
a problem, attack, beat, fix, solve, settle,
sort, answer a need can be answer, fill, meet,
break a habit, can be break, or kick, handle
a situation can be control or handle or improve
or save, treat a disease can be fight, or
treat, and remove an obstacle I think I only
found remove, so all those lists of verbs
come from the grammar patterns resource that
I was talking about earlier. But all of those
are examples of a more general meaning that
one might wall overcome a negative situation,
which in turn is an example of something more
general which we might call abstract effects
situation, which in turn is part of a more
general construction of the transitive construction
or the pattern verb now.
And alongside that still in the transitive
construction verb noun as well as abstract
effects situation, we’ve got another alternative
within that pattern which we might call entity
effects entity, which of which a specific
example might be person destroys abstract
and that is where we get down to the specific
construction or unit of meaning of sever all
ties.
So each of our specific constructions is an
example of a more general one, and one of
the issues that came up in our workshop last
week was finding the level of specificity
of the various constructions we were talking
about.
So, a summary of what I’ve been saying,
I made five points, specialisation broadens
the scope of corpus linguistics, new forms
of communication, new forms of corpora lead
to an explosion of new methods, numbers based
manipulation of wordforms is the new corpus
driven, existing research can be used to identify
a 1,000 constructions, and the social is as
important as the cognitive and the paradigm
is as important as the syntag.
And with my final little dinosaur colour coordinated
did you notice, I would like to wish you a
very pleasant conference and I look forward
to seeing you during the rest of the week,
thank you.
