From Data to Evidence in English Language Research


Book Description

From Data to Evidence in English Language Research draws on diverse digital data sources alongside more traditional linguistic corpora to offer new insights into the ways in which they can be used to extend and re-evaluate research questions in English linguistics. This is achieved, for example, by increasing data size, adding multi-layered contextual analyses, applying methods from adjacent fields, and adapting existing data sets to new uses. Making innovative contributions to digital linguistics, the chapters in the volume apply a combination of methods to the increasing amount of digital data available to researchers to show how this data – both established and newly available - can be utilized, enriched and rethought to provide new evidence for developments in the English language.




Educating English Language Learners


Book Description

The book provides a review of scientific research on the learning outcomes of students with limited or no proficiency in English in U.S. schools. Research on students in kindergarten to grade 12 is reviewed. The primary chapters of the book focus on these students' acquisition of oral language skills in English, their development of literacy (reading & writing) skills in English, instructional issues in teaching literacy, and achievement in academic domains (i.e., mathematics, science, and reading). The reviews and analyses of the research are relatively technical with a focus on research quality, design characteristics, and statistical analyses. The book provides a set of summary tables that give details about each study, including full references, characteristics of the students in the research, assessment tools and procedures, and results. A concluding chapter summarizes the major issues discussed and makes recommendations about particular areas that need further research.




Methods in Pragmatics


Book Description

Methods in Pragmatics provides a systematic overview of the different types of data, the different methods of data collection and data analysis used in pragmatic research. It offers authoritative and comprehensive surveys of the entire breadth of methods and methodologies. Part 1 covers introspectional, philosophical and cognitive pragmatics. Part 2 is devoted to experimental pragmatics, including discourse completion and dialogue construction tasks, role-plays and other production and comprehension tasks. Part 3 reviews observational pragmatics including ethnographic and discourse analytic methods, and part 4, finally, is devoted to corpus pragmatics including accounts of corpus compilation, annotation and data retrieval specific to pragmatic research. Each contribution provides a state-of-the-art account of the precise workings of one particular method, its applications in the relevant research literature as well as a critical assessment of its strengths and weaknesses and the type of pragmatic research questions for which it is most suitable.




Exploring Language and Society with Big Data


Book Description

As the legislative bodies of democratic nations, parliaments play a fundamental role in society. Consequently the linguistic practices observed in parliamentary discourse are of importance to everyone. This volume brings together leading researchers in areas of corpus linguistics, big data, parliamentary discourse, and historical linguistics in a truly interdisciplinary exploration at the vanguard of big data and corpus methods with the aim to investigate the intersection between linguistic and social change. Making use of both quantitative and qualitative methods, the studies included in this volume range from a focus on explicitly linguistic phenomena to topics that contribute to our understanding of language and society more generally. It breaks new ground in its critical reflection on the conceptual and methodological challenges of using large corpora of parliamentary discourse to study both the specialised language of parliamentary speech and the societies that the parliaments in question represent and govern.




Communicating English in Specialised Domains


Book Description

This volume is dedicated to Maurizio Gotti, in honour of his long and noteworthy academic career. Having served as Full Professor of History of the English Language and of English Language and Translation for more than two decades at the University of Bergamo, Italy, Gotti made significant contributions to multiple areas of study including specialized discourses, lexicography, history of the English language and language teaching. This wide-ranging collection brings together essays from these fields of enquiry authored by scholars whose academic input have interacted in various ways with ideas and topics introduced or extensively discussed by Gotti. The contributions are grouped into four theme-based sections representing the main threads in Gotti’s research, from the macro area of specialised discourse to the more specific fields of research in academic and legal languages, while the fourth section includes contributions dealing with the history of English language, and is followed by a miscellaneous section which concludes the collection.




Approaching English Language Research


Book Description

This book is designed to help students and other interested readers approach research in English Language studies. Its concerns include project, dissertation and thesis research and writing.




Corpora and the Changing Society


Book Description

This book showcases eleven studies dealing with corpora and the changing society. The theme of the volume reflects the fact that changes in society lead to changes in language and vice versa. Focusing on the English language, be it from Old English to the present, or a shorter time span in the immediate past, the contributors in this volume use a variety of corpus methods to address the two patterns of change. The cross-fertilization of cultural studies and corpus linguistics, we hope, is beneficial for both parties, as corpus linguistics offers a vast array of materials and methods to investigate cultural and societal change, while cultural studies provide the theoretical background on which to build our research. The studies included in the present volume illustrate the potential avenues and the merits of combining changing language and changing societies.




Linguistics across Disciplinary Borders


Book Description

This volume highlights the ways in which recent developments in corpus linguistics and natural language processing can engage with topics across language studies, humanities and social science disciplines. New approaches have emerged in recent years that blur disciplinary boundaries, facilitated by factors such as the application of computational methods, access to large data sets, and the sharing of code, as well as continual advances in technologies related to data storage, retrieval, and processing. The “march of data” denotes an area at the border region of linguistics, humanities, and social science disciplines, but also the inevitable development of the underlying technologies that drive analysis in these subject areas. Organized into 3 sections, the chapters are connected by the underlying thread of linguistic corpora: how they can be created, how they can shed light on varieties or registers, and how their metadata can be utilized to better understand the internal structure of similar resources. While some chapters in the volume make use of well-established existing corpora, others analyze data from platforms such as YouTube, Twitter or Reddit. The volume provides insight into the diversity of methods, approaches, and corpora that inform our understanding of the “border regions” between the realms of data science, language/linguistics, and social or cultural studies.




Can We Be Wrong? The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data


Book Description

This Element tackles the problem of generalization with respect to text-based evidence in the field of literary studies. When working with texts, how can we move, reliably and credibly, from individual observations to more general beliefs about the world? The onset of computational methods has highlighted major shortcomings of traditional approaches to texts when it comes to working with small samples of evidence. This Element combines a machine learning-based approach to detect the prevalence and nature of generalization across tens of thousands of sentences from different disciplines alongside a robust discussion of potential solutions to the problem of the generalizability of textual evidence. It exemplifies the way mixed methods can be used in complementary fashion to develop nuanced, evidence-based arguments about complex disciplinary issues in a data-driven research environment.




Studies in the History of the English Language VI


Book Description

The relationships among data, evidence, and methodology in English historical linguistics are perennially vexed. This volume – which ranges chronologically from Old to Present-Day English and from manuscripts to corpora – challenges a wide variety of assumptions and practices and illustrates how diverse methods and approaches construct evidence for historical linguistic arguments from an increasingly large and diverse body of linguistic data.