Douglas Biber, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey N. Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan
The completely redesigned Grammar of Spoken and Written English is a comprehensive corpus-based reference grammar. GSWE describes the structural characteristics of grammatical constructions in English, as do other reference grammars. But GSWE is unique in that it gives equal attention to describing… read more
The aim of this book is to show the way forward to a coherent view of language in which the achievement of the formalist paradigm is strengthened to the extent that its claims are weakened. A formal theory such as generative grammar is a special theory which is to be subsumed in a general theory of… read more
Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at Lancaster University (United Kingdom), Geoffrey Leech raises several points about Corpus Linguistics per se in a thought-provoking way. As far as the historical perspective is concerned, he indicates whom he considers the founding fathers of this field… read more
I begin this chapter with a brief survey of how frequency – in particular, frequency of words – had a role in language learning in the days before electronic corpora existed. Then I consider how the ‘corpus revolution’ made frequency information available in a totally unprecedented way from the… read more
The paper presents a comparison of tag frequencies in two matching one-million word reference corpora of British standard English, the 1961 LOB-corpus and its 1991 “clone” produced at Freiburg. Both corpora were tagged using a version of the CLAWS part-of-speech-tagger developed at Lancaster, and… read more
In this article, we undertake selective quantitative analyses of the demographi-cally-sampled spoken English component of the British National Corpus (for brevity, referred to here as the ''Conversational Corpus"). This is a subcorpus of c. 4.5 million words, in which speakers and respondents (see… read more
