Along with a renewed interest in the empirical foundations of linguistics, the increasing accessibility of large-scale corpora has sparked a surge of corpus-linguistic work on the grammar of natural languages. Corpus-based methods enhance our knowledge and understanding of individual languages, and they are theoretically significant because they allow us to test complex hypotheses on empirical and reproducible data. Spread over six thematic sections, the fifteen case studies in this book reflect on how methodological challenges and decisions affect the corpus-based analysis of grammatical patterns. They cover a wide variety of phenomena (syntax, registers, learner language, morphology, productivity, multilingualism) under different frameworks, including construction grammar, discourse analysis, and generative grammar. The contributors discuss the respective methodological and theoretical issues, proposing innovative solutions for linguistics in the 21st century.
The Beldeko corpus as a Resource to Investigate Cohesion in German
Learner Language: a Preliminary Analysis of Corpus Homogeneity.- Make it a
Double: The Building and Use of the LSFB and FRAPé Corpora to Compare French
Belgian Sign Language and Belgian French.- Data retrieval and sampling.- On
the internal and external productivity of IAW phrases in German.- The Finnish
Existential Partitive construction analyzed: comparing two applications of
collostructional analysis.- Fragments as Constructions: a Corpus-Driven
Proposal.- A Corpus-Based Perspective on 'Split Stimuli' in German.- Manner
and reportative evidential adverbials an annotation study on German
nach-PPs.- Dime con quién te juntas y te diré quién eres - from Construction
Grammar: A case study of a snowclone in Spanish.- Latvian Deverbal Nouns in
ien- and -um- and Derivational Productivity: a Corpus-Based Analysis.-
Syntactic Complexity across Registers in Russian.- Investigating Modality
through Lexical Modals: a Corpus Study of the Brexit Political Discourse.-
Case-Marking Alternation with Psychological Verbs in Spanish: Combining
Different Corpus Data Sources.- Grammar bores the crap out of me!: a
Mixed-Method Study on the X the Y out of Z Construction and Its Usage by
ESL and ENL Speakers.- Overt head marking and choice of genitive construction
in Modern Hebrew: Empirical data and theoretical questions.- Reflexive
Pronouns and Locative PPs in English: Evidence from 3 Corpora and Speaker
Judgement.
Torsten Leuschner is Professor of German Linguistics at Ghent University and Visiting Reader at Queen Mary University of London.
Anaļs Vajnovszki is taking a joint PhD between Ghent University and Paris 3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle on shell nouns in French and Romanian.
Gauthier Delaby is a Ph.D. student at Ghent University. His research focuses on Construction Grammar and its application to Dutch.
Jóhanna Baršdal is Professor of Scandinavian Linguistics at Ghent University. She is founding editor of Journal of Historical Linguistics and series editor of Brill's Studies in Historical Linguistics.
