Evidentiality in gendered styles in spoken English

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">In this article I discuss the issues and challenges of compiling a corpus of historical plays by a range of playwrights that is highly suitable for use in comparative, corpus-based research into language style in Shakespeare’s plays. In discussing sources for digitised historical play-texts and criteria for making a selection for the present study, I argue that not just any set of Early Modern English plays constitutes a suitable basis upon which to make reliable claims about language style in Shakespeare’s plays relative to those of his peers. I point out factors outside of authorial choice which potentially have bearing on language style, such as sub-genre features and change over time. I also highlight some particular difficulties in compiling a corpus of historical texts, notably dating and spelling variation, and I explain how these were addressed. The corpus detailed in this article extends the prospects for investigating Shakespeare’s language style by providing a context into which it can be set and, as I indicate, is a valuable new publicly accessible resource for future research.</abstract>

Issues and challenges in compiling a corpus of Early Modern English plays for comparison with those of William Shakespeare

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Corpus-based studies of learner language and (especially) English varieties have become more quantitative in nature and increasingly use regression-based methods and classifiers such as classification trees, random forests, etc. One recent development more widely used is the MuPDAR (Multifactorial Prediction and Deviation Analysis using Regressions) approach of Gries and Deshors (2014) and Gries and Adelman (2014). This approach attempts to improve on traditional regression- or tree-based approaches by, firstly, training a model on the reference speakers (often native speakers (NS) in learner corpus studies or British English speakers in variety studies), then, secondly, using this model to predict what such a reference speaker would produce in the situation the target speaker is in (often non-native speakers (NNS) or indigenized-variety speakers). Crucially, the third step then consists of determining whether the target speakers made a canonical choice or not and explore that variability with a second regression model or classifier.Both regression-based modeling in general and MuPDAR in particular have led to many interesting results, but we want to propose two changes in perspective on the results they produce. First, we want to focus attention on the middle ground of the prediction space, i.e. the predictions of a regression/classifier that, essentially, are made non-confidently and translate into a statement such as ‘in this context, both/all alternants would be fine’. Second, we want to make a plug for a greater attention to misclassifications/-predictions and propose a method to identify those as well as discuss what we can learn from studying them. We exemplify our two suggestions based on a brief case study, namely the dative alternation in native and learner corpus data.</abstract>

There’s more to alternations than the main diagonal of a 2×2 confusion matrix: Improvements of MuPDAR and other classificatory alternation studies

Corpus linguistics and African Englishes

Applications of pattern-driven methods in corpus linguistics

Corpus linguistics and the description of English

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ICAME Journal

 An annual publication containing articles and reviews on research carried out related to English language corpora.  Why subscribe and read?  The ICAME Journal provides an up-to-date international forum for research on English corpus linguistics. It features original studies on recent advances in the exploitation of corpora, corpus compilation and software applications. It also features a large number of reviews of scholarly work in the discipline.  Why submit?  The ICAME Journal reaches a broad audience interested in English corpus linguistics. A varied range of submissions is considered for publication: studies based on the use of language corpora or other electronic resources, reports on corpus compilation projects or software applications, shorter notices on recent events and projects, and reviews of recent work in English corpus linguistics.  The ICAME Journal is an annual blind peer-reviewed publication containing articles and reviews on research carried out related to English language corpora  Rejection Rate   22%   Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 