Abstract The passive voice in Chinese is the focus of extensive research seeking to understand its diverse discourse functions. Adopting a corpus-assisted approach, this paper brings attention to an underexplored category of passives — Chinese lexical passive constructions (LPCs) — and analyzes the semantic and pragmatic aspects of the zāo, shòu, and dédào structures. Quantitative and qualitative analysis helps to identify the semantic frames triggered by each LPC, highlighting potential differences in how events are conceptualized. Based on evidence from three corpora representing distinct discourse domains, the paper contends that LPCs differ in the range of events they represent as well as the affective valence they convey. As such, they constitute three distinct ways of conceptualizing the effects of an action, allowing the speaker to express their subjective-objective response to the event. This supports the unique form-function relationship of each LPC and informs the pragmatic implications involved in their selection.

Abstract In this article, we investigate Van der Horst’s (2013) hypothesis that Dutch (like other European languages) underwent a diachronic process of ‘crystallization’, i.e. tighter lexical organization, at the expense of freely combinatorial syntax, in the last centuries. Analysing the collocational association strength in lemma and part-of-speech trigrams using the ΔP measure and entropy (H), we find quantitative support for the idea that Dutch has crystallized in the period under investigation (1850–1999). Further enquiry into the diachrony of the lexicon by means of Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KLD) suggests that the reason might be what Baayen et al. (2017) have called the ‘Ecclesiastes Principle’, namely a lexical expansion that puts a cap on the combinatorial syntax. This lexical expansion is probably a response to the increasing specialization and cultural turnover in late modern times. The slow change in the syntax of Dutch shows how languages adapt to their cultural niche.

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Abstract Recent work has shown that dispersion measures respond to multiple features in the data: Juilland’s D varies systematically with the number of corpus parts, and all commonly used indices are ...

Abstract We compare to what extent the choice of a variant can be predicted from language-internal factors for two linguistic variables: the English dative alternation and the omission of the infiniti...

Abstract The starting point of this paper is a central problem in constructicography: on the one hand, constructicon projects aim at describing a broad spectrum of constructions based on usage data; o...

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Abstract This paper provides a detailed account of the Turkish Learner Corpus (TURLEC). Building on the first author’s doctoral dissertation project, which aimed to identify proficiency descriptors fo...

Abstract This study presents a corpus-assisted discourse analysis examining the semantic frames of (Dis)Interest and (Un)Importance in leave to appeal decisions of the HKSAR appellate courts. With the...

Abstract Stance is deep-rooted in law, where legal values can never stand in a vacuum. Despite a growing body of literature on stance in legal genres, cross-genre examinations conducted from a corpus-...

Abstract The aim of this paper is to combine a quantitative analysis of indicators of pragmatic argumentation with a qualitative investigation of the argument scheme in a corpus of Supreme Court of Ir...

Abstract This study applies full Multidimensional Analysis (MDA) to examine linguistic variation in the Polish Eurolect — a hybrid variety shaped by translation and institutional constraints within th...

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Abstract The present study investigates whether conservatism exists in human- and machine-translated texts from Chinese into English, and whether this tendency is consistently observable across differ...

Abstract Sign language corpora are generally under-represented in the field of corpus linguistics. Fortunately, in the last twenty years there has been a steady rise in their creation, following techn...

Abstract This paper presents a corpus-based study that evaluates variables identified introspectively by Berthonneau (2002) in relation to the alternation between two French synonymous: prochain (‘nex...

Abstract Fuel poverty, a household’s inability to achieve thermal comfort in line with a healthy standard of living at a reasonable cost, became an increasingly prevalent and visible socio-economic is...

Abstract Subgenres of the novel have traditionally been defined first and foremost in terms of their content. Yet, in addition to revisiting themes, settings, plot patterns and character constellation...

Abstract This study examines 10 new combining forms (CFs) in American English from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives, based on data from the Corpus of Historical American English, the Corpus...

Abstract A wealth of linguistic data has been annotated by corpus linguists, and this extant annotated data can be used to automatically replicate and apply the linguist’s annotation scheme by means o...

Abstract This introduction to the special issue Reproducibility, Replicability, and Robustness in Corpus Linguistics calls for more transparent and robust research practices in the field. It situates ...

Abstract Our study focuses on replicability, which entails researchers’ ability to achieve similar results to a prior study using identical methods but a different yet comparable dataset. We address t...

Abstract This paper is an early step in a wider project which, on the behest of the late Prof Michael Hoey, attempts to review the evolution of Lexical Priming (LP) theory since its first appearance i...

Abstract This study examines how contextual factors influence the English dative alternation in written production by Chinese EFL learners, with native English usage serving as the benchmark for compa...

Abstract Although English has become a lingua franca for academic publication, a growing number of multilingual scholars prefer to publish in both English and their first languages. This corpus-based ...

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Abstract Most existing research on adverb placement has focused exclusively on writing. This is unfortunate, given that the spoken mode offers limited opportunity for pre-planning and post-editing and...

Abstract This introduction to the special issue Reproducibility, Replicability, and Robustness in Corpus Linguistics calls for more transparent and robust research practices in the field. It situates ...