This research intends to investigate lexical bundles performing a participant-oriented function in mathematics. Drawing on a 5-million-word corpus of graduate-level textbooks, a total of forty-three bundles recurring at least 20 times per million words (pmw) and spreading in 10 % or more of the texts making up the corpus are retrieved and further subjected to structural and functional analyses. On a structural level, results show that the greatest number of participant-oriented bundles are clauses or clause fragments. Functionally, these patterns are used as rhetorical devices for engagement or as means for expressing the author’s opinions, judgment and evaluation. Implications for language instruction and materials designing are discussed.

A good foreign language curriculum consolidates the three important principles: sequence, continuity and integration. Since English textbooks are the incarnation of the curriculum used in foreign language classrooms, a comparative investigation of the principles in English textbook corpus enlightens differences in English education of South Korea (SK) and North Korea (NK). To this end, the current study analyzes how graded sets of vocabulary are distributed to discover the sequence in the textbooks, and what the repetition rate is by looking into Standardized Type Token Ratio (STTR) to find out the continuity in the textbooks, and what keyword list is in both positive and negative keyword list of the NK corpus against the SK corpus to elicit integration property of the curriculum. The findings are: (1) NK textbooks are structural in sequence, and no such structural sequence is found in SK textbooks. (2) SK textbooks recycle vocabulary more frequently than NK textbooks, and this leads to more rote memorization activities in NK textbooks. (3) NK textbooks are more integrated with other academic subjects such as science, geography and ideology.

While recent corpus linguistic research often focuses on the text–lexis interface, the present study aims to investigate the ways in which grammatical forms can be related to textual functions of lexical items. This question is explored through a functional analysis of the plural noun “days” in comparison with that of its singular counterpart studied in Mahlberg (2005). Results from the qualitative analysis and quantitative comparison of distribution patterns of the two nouns reveal that the functional profile of the plural form is different from that of the singular form in some aspects, as far as textual functions of time nouns are concerned. This is argued to illustrate the inseparability among text, lexis and grammar.

The purpose of this paper is to graphically represent semantic domain networks of maritime English near-synonyms as such displays can provide insights into semantic relations. A specialised corpus from international maritime communities was used. Keywords are extracted by comparing the Maritime English Corpus with the BNC Baby. Among keywords within the top 20 ranks, we focus on ship-vessel and maritime-marine. We use the MI3 score to identify collocates of the two pairs of near-synonyms and the Wmatrix web interface program to tag semantic domains. We create key semantic domain networks using the social network analysis tool NetMiner 4.0. The results show that some semantic domains are connected between the two pairs of near-synonyms, while others are not connected. The findings of the study indicate how semantic domain networks of keyword collocates and simple collocates help to distinguish near-synonyms through graphical representations of a corpus. The paper found that semantic domains with keyword collocates have a stronger tendency to connect two pairs of near-synonyms than those with simple collocates.

This paper investigates the compounding propensity in Maritime English under the theoretical framework of Synergetic Linguistics. It focuses on the dependence of compound number on the properties of length, frequency and polylexy of word stems. A maritime English corpus was used and a set of Visual Foxpro programs were specifically written for processing the corpus and obtaining the data automatically. The results confirm the respective hypotheses of dependence and show that the more frequent and polysemous a word stem is, the more compounds it produces, but the shorter a word stem is, the more frequently it occurs in compounds. The Köhler’s model y=αχb captures this propensity.

Most previous linguistic studies of web language have focused on the ‘new’ internet registers, like blogs, instant messages, and tweets. As a result, we know surprisingly little about the patterns of linguistic variation among the full range of registers found on the searchable web. The present paper provides an overview of a project that begins to fill this gap. Rather than collecting texts from only the ‘new’ web registers, the project is based on a large corpus representing a random sample of the entire searchable web. The first analytical step in the project was to analyze the types of documents found in that corpus, providing an empirical description of the composition of the searchable web. Then, Multi-Dimensional (MD) analysis was applied to describe the patterns of register variation found on the searchable web. The MD analysis first identified the sets of co-occurring linguistic features -- the ‘dimensions’ -- in this discourse domain. Then, those dimensions are used to document the similarities and differences among web registers. In conclusion, we compare our results here to previous MD studies, identifying patterns peculiar to the web versus linguistic patterns found across discourse domains.

This paper explores ways that research in corpus linguistics can be directly applied to inform English language instruction for non-native speakers of English. The primary goal of this brief paper is to highlight the need for a strong connection between research and teaching practice. This goal is achieved by using corpus research on vocabulary and lexical bundles and highlighting resources and activities that incorporate research from these two areas of corpus linguistics directly into language classes without increasing the demands on teachers.