Corpus Linguistics for Grammar: A Guide for Research by Jones Christian Waller Daniel & Daniel Waller

Author:Jones, Christian,Waller, Daniel & Daniel Waller [Christian Jones]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317498995
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

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Other (837) Young (544) Young (16)

Young (277) Other (305) British (11)

Old (113) Local (271) Hardworking (7)

These results suggest that ‘people’ is primed to co-occur with ‘young’ in all sets of data, but more strongly primed to co-occur in the political speeches and the newspaper data as it makes up 0.085% of the political data, 0.005% of the newspaper data and only 0.0027% of the BNC spoken corpus data. A log-likelihood comparison of the occurrences in the political speech corpus in comparison with the newspaper data gives a score of (+) 57.37, showing that this usage is statistically highly significant (p<0.0001).

By examining concordances, we can also explore how ‘young people’ may be primed differently in the different corpora, according to how it functions in the clause. As a noun phrase, it is possible for ‘young people’ to act as subject, object or complement and if there is a particular preference for it to function in a particular way, this tells us about its colligation. To undertake this analysis, examine the concordance lines from the political speech data and compare with the first thirty from each BNC corpus. This is not intended to be a comprehensive analysis but it will give an indication of how ‘young people’ is primed in each corpus and similarities between them. Table 5.9 shows the results from each corpus.

Table 5.9 ‘Young people’ as subject, object or complement in three corpora

‘Young people’ BNC spoken corpus (9,963,693 words) adjectives before ‘people’ BNC newspaper corpus (10,466,422 words) adjectives before ‘people’ Political speeches corpus (19,857 words) adjectives used before ‘people’

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