Corpus Linguistics Beyond the Word: Corpus Research from Phrase to Discourse (Language & Computers 60) (Language & Computers: Studies in Practical Linguistics)

288 Pages·2006·1.92 MB·English

Corpus Linguistics
Beyond the Word
LANGUAGE AND COMPUTERS:
STUDIES IN PRACTICAL LINGUISTICS
No 60
edited by
Christian Mair
Charles F. Meyer
Nelleke Oostdijk
Corpus Linguistics
Beyond the Word
Corpus Research
from Phrase to Discourse
Edited by
Eileen Fitzpatrick
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Cover design: Pier Post
Online access is included in print subscriptions:
see www.rodopi.nl
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
"ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence".
ISBN-10: 90-420-2135-7
ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2135-8
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Printed in The Netherlands
Contents
iii
Preface
Analysis Tools and Corpus Annotation
A Syntactic Feature Counting Method for Selecting Machine Translation 1
Training Corpora
Leslie Barrett, David F. Greenberg, and Mark Schwartz
The Envelope of Variation in Multidimensional Register and Genre 21
Analyses
Angus B. Grieve-Smith
Using Singular-Value Decomposition on Local Word Contexts to Derive a 43
Measure of Constructional Similarity
Paul Deane and Derrick Higgins
Problematic Syntactic Patterns 59
Sebastian van Delden
Towards a Comprehensive Survey of Register-based Variation in Spanish 73
Syntax
Mark Davies
Between the Humanist and the Modernist: Semi-automated Analysis of 87
Linguistic Corpora
Gregory Garretson and Mary Catherine O’Connor
Pragmatic Annotation of an Academic Spoken Corpus for Pedagogical 107
Purposes
Carson Maynard and Sheryl Leicher
Using Oral Corpora in Contrastive Studies of Linguistic Politeness 117
María José García Vizcaíno
Corpus Applications: Pedagogy and Linguistic Analysis
One Corpus, Two Contexts: Intersections of Content-Area Teacher Training 143
and Medical Education
Boyd Davis and Lisa Russell-Pinson
“GRIMMATIK:” German Grammar through the Magic of the Brothers 167
Grimm Fairytales and the Online Grimm Corpus
Margrit V. Zinggeler
Assessing the Development of Foreign Language Writing Skills: Syntactic 185
and Lexical Features
Pieter de Haan & Kees van Esch
A Contrastive Functional Analysis of Errors in Spanish EFL University 203
Writers’ Argumentative Texts: a Corpus-based Study
JoAnne Neff, Francisco Ballesteros, Emma Dafouz, Francisco Martínez,
Juan-Pedro Rica, Mercedes Díez and Rosa Prieto
How to End an Introduction in a Computer Science Article? 227
A Corpus-based Approach
Wasima Shehzad
Does Albanian have a Third Person Personal Pronoun? Let’s have a Look 243
at the Corpus…
Alexander Murzaku
The Use of Relativizers across Speaker Roles and Gender: Explorations in 257
19th-century Trials, Drama and Letters
Christine Johansson
Preface
The papers published in this volume were originally presented at the Fifth North
American Symposium on Corpus Linguistics, co-sponsored by the American
Association of Applied Corpus Linguistics and the Linguistics Department of
Montclair State University. The symposium was held from May 21-23, 2004 at
Montclair State in Montclair, New Jersey. The conference drew more than 100
participants from 14 different countries. Altogether, 41 papers were presented.
The symposium papers represented several areas of corpus studies
including language development, syntactic analysis, pragmatics and discourse,
language change, register variation, corpus creation and annotation, as well as
practical applications of corpus work, primarily in language teaching, but also in
medical training and machine translation. A common thread through most of the
papers was the use of corpora to study domains longer than the word.
The 15 papers presented here capture the expansion of the discipline into
the investigation of larger spans of linguistic productions from the syntactic
patterns of phrases up to and including rhetorical devices and pragmatic strategies
in the full discourse. Not surprisingly, fully half of the papers deal with the
computational tools, linguistic techniques, and specialized annotation needed to
search for and analyze these longer spans of language. Many of these papers use
statistical techniques new to the area of applied corpus linguistics. Most of the
remaining papers examine syntactic and rhetorical properties of one or more
corpora with an applied focus. These distinct concentrations dictated the division
of the volume into two sections, one on tools and strategies and the other on
applications of corpus analysis.
The first paper in the tools and strategies section, by Barrett, Greenberg,
and Schwartz, explores the idea of distinguishing document domains – here
medicine, military, finance, and fiction – on the basis of part-of-speech tag
densities alone, supporting the notion that automated document classification, for
applications in machine translation and elsewhere, is possible using methods
other than the commonly used lexical methods. Such methods, the paper argues,
are ideal for creating syntactically as well as lexically balanced corpora.
While Barrett et al. distinguish domains on the basis of syntactic
information, Grieve-Smith offers a caution in the use of grammatical information
to discriminate text genre. Grieve-Smith emphasizes that certain features can be
expected to co-vary based on their grammatical effects rather than on the situation
of language use, or genre, and that this co-variation must not be conflated with
the situational co-variation that should be distinguishing the genres. Grieve-
Smith, borrowing the notion of ‘envelope of variation’ from sociolinguistics,
maps the occurrence of third person pronouns and demonstrative adjectives,
which should show a negative grammatical correlation, but no situational
correlation. Grieve-Smith's success in demonstrating a significant
effect of grammar in the correlation of these factors points to the difficulty
inherent in teasing apart the features used to discriminate among genres.
iv
While the Barrett and Grieve-Smith papers examine syntactic issues in
text classification, the paper by Deane and Higgins uses local context to classify
words into similar syntactico-semantic classes, such as terms for body parts and
kinship, for applications like the TOEFL synonym test. Local context, unlike the
more sematically oreinted methods like Latent Semantic Analysis (Laudauer and
Dumais, 1997), is heavily influenced by syntactic parallelism. Deane and Higgins
use a vector space model approach that views words and contexts as vectors in a
large multidimensional space, allowing for similarity between words and/or
contexts to be mathematically determined based on the closeness of the vectors.
Comparison of their approach with the semantic approaches shows interesting
differences in judgments of word similarities that can be exploited in language
modeling, language testing, judgments of text cohesion, and automatic lexical
acquisition.
In an effort to improve the output of a partial parser and its supporting
part-of-speech tagger, Sebastian van Delden’s paper discusses recurring tagging
and parsing errors and offers simple heuristics that were implemented to improve
the performance of the information retrieval system that they support and outlines
further large-scale improvements.
Mark Davies’ paper details the syntactic annotation of the 20 million word
“1900s” portion of the Corpus del Español, which contains equivalent sizes of
conversation, fiction, and non-fiction. The corpus was annotated for nearly 150
syntactic features, and feature frequencies in the 20 different registers were
calculated. Davies details the types of annotation used, and gives illustrative
comparisons of features across registers that demonstrate the value of the
annotation for studies of the nature of syntactic variation in Spanish.
The last three papers in this section deal with the treatment of linguistic
phenomena that do not readily lend themselves to computational solutions.
Garretson and O’Connor describe the use of linguistic proxies – discrete tokens
that give a reasonably good index of an elusive phenomenon – and a method that
involves alternating passes of automated and manual coding to analyze data, with
the possessive alternation in English as a case study. The paper also describes the
reusable computational tools created for the project and considers the distinct
advantages of using human-computer alternation to further linguistic analysis in
terms of consistency and accuracy on a large scale.
Maynard and Leicher, on the other hand, concentrate on features that lack
obvious linguistic proxies. Their paper details ongoing efforts to manually
annotate the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) for
pragmatic information using an inventory of 25 pragmatic features, such as
evaluations, introductions, narratives, and requests. Abstracts describing content
and salient pragmatic features are given for each speech event (lab, seminar,
office hour, etc.) and each transcript header describes the relative frequency of
each feature. In addition, a representative subcorpus of fifty transcripts has been
manually tagged for 12 of the features and will soon be computer searchable.
The paper by Maria Jose Garcia Vizcaino demonstrates the value of
working with pragmatically tagged corpora, while noting the issues involved in
v
dealing with annotations that do not conform to a coherent taxonomy. Garcia
Vizcaino describes the use of two annotated corpora, the British National Corpus
and the Corpus Oral de Referencia del Español Contemporáneo (COREC), a
corpus of Peninsular Spanish, to contrast politeness strategies in Spanish and
English. The paper describes the annotations in the two corpora that are needed
for pragmalinguistic studies and provides step-by-step details of her adaptations
of the corpora for such analysis.
The second section of the book presents applications of corpus work in
education and linguistic research. While most of the papers on corpora in
education deal with second language pedagogy, the first paper in this section, by
Boyd Davis and Lisa Russell-Pinson, deals with corpus re-use in K-12 content
area education and medical education. Using the Charlotte Narrative and
Conversation Collection – with input from speakers in and around Mecklenburg
County, NC, who span a range of ages, ethnicities, cultures and native languages
– the authors describe the value of corpora in sensitizing K-12 teachers to their
increasingly diverse student population and as a resource for content area lessons.
In addition, a subset of the CNCC covering older speakers is compared to a
corpus of on-going conversations with speakers diagnosed with dementia for
research on disordered speech and for teaching healthcare providers to
communicate effectively with the elderly.
While Davis and Russell-Pinson use corpora for content area and medical
education, Margrit Zinggeler uses the online brothers Grimm fairy tales for
German language teaching to intermediate and advanced learners of the language.
Zinggeler exemplifies detailed exercises on parts of speech and grammatical
structure created from the tales and notes that students use the newly acquired
forms readily in writing their own fairy tales and in class discussions about the
content and meaning of the tales.
The next two papers, by de Haan and van Esch and Neff et al., analyze the
linguistic features of argumentative essays written by students of English as a
Foreign Language. The data collected by de Haan and van Esch from the same
group of native Dutch speakers over time allow them to do a longitudinal study of
the development of writing skills at three proficiency levels. Some of the features
studied by de Haan and van Esch result in ambiguous findings; for example,
while mean essay length increased over time, mean word length did not increase
at the same rate, and type/token ratio fell. The paper provides insight as to what
features should be expected to correlate and why, as students advance in their
written English skills.
The Neff et al. paper examines the Spanish data from the International
Corpus of Learner English Error Tagging Project in the contrastive error analysis
framework. The results show that grammar (35%) and lexis (28%) account for
two-thirds of the errors, while punctuation, form, word, lexico-grammatical
factors, register, and style account for successively fewer errors. The paper
proposes useful areas of investigation within English-Spanish contrastive data.
The final three papers in the volume use corpora to study linguistic features of
spoken and written language. Shehzad’s paper, with a practical application in the