Corpus linguistic techniques applied to textlinguistics

SYSTEM System 26 (1998) 541±552

Corpus linguistic techniques applied to textlinguistics L. Flowerdew* Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Language Centre, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Abstract A decade ago, most corpus research focussed on the lexico-grammatical patterning of text and how certain items tend to co-occur in naturally occurring language. However, recent advances in corpus linguistics have adopted a far more textlinguistic approach to corpus analysis. This article reviews corpus-based studies which draw on theoretical insights from systemics, genre and discourse analysis for exploration of small-scale specialised corpora of academic writing. However, such advances do not seem to have been taken up so widely in more applied corpus studies which exploit corpora for pedagogical purposes, as they still tend to focus on the collocational aspect of the text. Moreover, in those studies which do draw on various textlinguistic approaches for the interpretation and analysis of results, the implications for pedagogy are not developed in any great detail with the consequence that the ®ndings have had little in¯uence on ESP syllabus and materials design. If corpus linguistics is to develop further its ``applied'' aspect and potential for exploitation, specialised corpora need to be exploited at a more textlinguistic level than at present to mirror the advances in more theoretical corpus research. # 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Corpus linguistics is already a well-established area for language description and analysis (Aijmer and Altenberg, 1991). However during the last decade there has been a discernible shift in the use of computerised text corpora from pure linguistic *Tel.: 00852 2358 7855; fax: 00852 2335 0249; e-mail: [email protected] 0346-251X/98/$Ðsee front matter # 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd.. All rights reserved PII: S034 6-251X(98)0003 9-6

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research per se to a more `applied' corpus linguistic perspective where the focus is on the learner in some way. Whereas, previously, large-scale corpora such as Brown and LOB were used for exploration of linguistic patterns (Kjellmer, 1987; Meijs, 1988), insights from the exploration of these two corpora gradually have begun to feed into various aspects of language teaching (Holmes, 1988; Kennedy, 1992). Thus, exploitation of corpora is now becoming an increasingly signi®cant additional aspect of corpus work in the sense that learners' needs are governing decisions about where to undertake descriptive research for various pedagogical purposes. In sofar as the exploitation of corpora is concerned, corpus ®ndings are being used in the compilation of dictionaries and grammar (Sinclair, 1987), to inform syllabus design and materials production (Willis and Willis, 1989) and also to create teaching materials (Tribble and Jones, 1990). Interlanguage copora are being compiled with the eventual aim of in¯uencing pedagogic materials (see Granger, 1998). Corpora are being exploited by students for inductive learning (Johns, 1994). Thus, this burgeoning ®eld is now developing a more `applied', learner-centred approach to corpus work. Concomitant with these recent developments in applied corpus linguistics, the recognition of `specialised' genre-based corpora, initiated by Biber (1988), has become an important aspect of this ®eld. Some, such as the International Corpus of Learner English, ICLE (Granger et al., 1994), are being compiled on an international and national basis, but many have been compiled institutionally (see Yang, 1986; Zhu, 1989; Kennedy, 1995) or individually (see Flowerdew, 1996, p. 101 for a list of small-scale corpora for ESP applications). A great deal of the corpus-based and more applied corpus work to date, focuses on the collocability of language (Willis, 1990; Sinclair, 1991) and how certain lexical items tend to co-occur in naturally occurring language with certain grammatical patternings. In fact, Stubbs (1996), p. 36, goes so far as to say that: `There is no boundary between lexis and grammar: lexis and grammar are interdependent.' Such research, as Murison-Bowie (1996), p. 182, points out, has been extremely useful in informing pedagogic concerns: Corpus linguistics has furthermore helped to reconceptualise the units of linguistic description. As some of the tenets of such a lexico-grammatical view of language are explored, teachers and researchers need to consider the pedagogic opportunities provided by the better understanding of ®xed phrases, collocations and longer regularities in language patterning. However, this lexico-grammatical patterning, explored in corpus analysis and exploited in teaching materials, tends to centre on the propositional content of text, i.e. the ideational level, and does not show how meanings are built up across text or the relationship between a phrase and others in the text. Such patterning can be regarded as somewhat atomistic if not analysed within a larger framework of

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various approaches to textlinguistics, namely systemic-functional grammar and also genre and discourse analysis. Grabe and Kaplan (1996), p. 46 argue thus: The general dilemma facing most projects on corpus research is the lack of a theoretical foundation for the interpretation of the results prior to the analysis. Thus, most corpus research has been of a post-hoc nature, looking at the frequency counts and deciding what can be said about these results. In the past couple of years, however, corpus linguists have paid more attention to the theoretical textlinguistic bases underpinning corpus analysis. This paper will examine, with reference to some of the `specialised' corpora of written academic texts referred to earlier, corpus research which has recourse to the systemic-functional analysis of Halliday (1994), namely the three metafunctions: ideational, interpersonal and textual. The ideational function comprises two subfunctions: the experiential which is concerned with propositional content, or ideas, and the logical function which looks at the relationship between ideas. The interpersonal function is concerned with the writer's attitude to the message and is typically realised through modal verbs (e.g. should, may) and various types of modal adjuncts (e.g. probably, obviously). The textual function refers to the language used to organise the text itself (eg. thus, ®rst, and). The communicative meaning of the text as a whole is realised through the meshing of these three metafunctions in the lexico-grammar of the clause. Within this Hallidayan model, thematic structure (theme + rheme), another system of analysis involved in text organisation, will also be considered. Halliday refers to theme as ``the point of departure of the message'' which is carried by one clause with the rheme realising the rest of the message. Another criticism which could be levelled against the corpus analyses centering exclusively on lexico-grammatical patterning is that such phrases are usually examined at the local level with very little, if any, indication as to their functionality in the text. Recently, however, corpus linguistic techniques have been applied to another dimension of textlinguistics, i.e. genre analysis (Swales, 1990) where prototypical lexico-grammatical phrases for salient `move structures' have been identi®ed. Furthermore, discourse-based work (Hoey, 1991; Crombie, 1985), which examines relations between words not only within the clause (i.e. corresponding to Halliday's logical sub-function) but across clause boundaries (i.e. corresponding to Halliday's textual function), has also played a key role in corpus analysis. In the following sections, this paper will examine some recent corpus-based studies which do rely on a theoretical textlinguistic underpinning for interpretation of their ®ndings. But, at the same time, this paper will also demonstrate that such work, although increasingly common in the exploration of corpora for language description, is only just beginning to ®lter through into more `applied' corpus-based research for exploitation in language teaching.

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2. Textlinguistic approaches 2.1. Systemic-functional grammar Two areas of systemic-functional grammar which have received particular attention from systemic linguists working with computerised corpora are the interpersonal level and the thematic structure (theme + rheme), which can encompass all three of Halliday's metafunctions. Interpersonal level. Although many researchers have examined the area of interpersonal strategies largely in academic scienti®c text, very few of these have adopted a corpus-based approach. Moreover, those that (Holmes, 1988; Hyland, 1996, p. 482; Hyland and Milton, 1997) have noted that the ®ndings have made little impact on teaching materials. ESP writing textbooks tend to ignore or under-represent the signi®cance of hedging and most explanations of epistemic devices are generally illinformed and inadequate (Hyland, 1996). The research of Hyland and Milton (1997) compared the expressions of doubt and certainty in the examination scripts of argumentative writing of 900 Cantonese speaking school leavers writing in English with those of 770 British learners of a similar age and educational experience. They conclude that: `The Hong Kong learners employed syntactically simpler constructions, relied on a more limited range of devices, o€ered stronger commitments to statements and exhibited greater problems in conveying a precise degree of certainty' (Hyland and Milton, p. 201). However, the pedagogic applications of their corpus ®ndings are only sketched brie¯y. Flowerdew (1997) has also examined interpersonal strategies in a learner corpus of academic report writing of undergraduate tertiary-level students. She analysed the use of author comment and also boosters and downtoners in the section on reporting data, and the use of various hedging devices for giving a possible explanation for the data and stating the implications of the ®ndings in the discussion section of the report. The corpus analysis revealed that a restricted range of such devices utilising a limited grammatical repertoire were used. Although some suggestions for exercises are given to target this problematic area, again, these are only brie¯y presented. Thematic structure. The most innovative corpus-based work to date in the area of systemics is by Matthiessen (1997) and a Systemic Meaning Modelling Group at the University of Macquarie, who have devised a set of computational tools (SysFan and SysConc) which analyse and present the corpus results according to marked theme and rheme, in addition to various other systemic parameters. The advantage of this type of analysis is that it presents a snapshot of the systemic progression in text and can show how themes are built up across the text. Other systemicists have used corpus software to identify themes for de®ning genres. Ghadessy (1995) shows how the grammatical and lexico-semantic properties of clause themes di€er according to type of genre/register. From his analysis of a computerised corpus of 37 newspaper sports commentaries, Ghadessy concludes that the theme in this type of register generally deals with participants as actors/agents which,

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he remarks, is no doubt related to the fact that in the case of sports commentaries the processes are material (e.g. kick, shoot, lead, score). Francis (1989) has also explored the concept of how themes can encode genres, noting how the themes in analytical expository text of newspaper editorials have clauses where the point of departure is an anticipatory or existential subject, it or there. However, to date, very little of this work has been taken up in applied corpus linguistics. In the following section, I consider, in greater detail, the role that genre analysis plays in corpusbased research. 2.2. Genre analysis Several researchers have considered lexico-grammatical patterning from a more functional perspective, akin to the `move structures' associated with genre analysis. Gledhill (1995), p. 11, posits the notion of phraseology ± `... a system of preferred expressions di€erentiated by the rhetorical aims of a discourse community'. To illustrate, Gledhill (1996) examines the di€erent collocational behaviour of the grammatical item in in the titles, abstracts, results and discussion sections of cancer research abstracts and articles, noting the salient phrases which are prototypical for each sub-section. Butler (1990) has carried out similar type of work with modal verbs, exploring the distribution of di€erent modal types in relation to the macrostructure of certain text types (articles and textbooks) and subject matter (physics and biology). For example, he found that in the introduction sections of articles the modals will/shall were used to indicate what the reader could expect in the rest of the text and other modals used were mostly concerned with conclusions from the earlier work forming the basis of the further work reported in the article. Such research is an extremely important contribution to the ®eld because as Gledhill (1995), p. 12, succinctly puts it, `. . . hitherto genre analysis has not fully capitalised on phraseology, and corpus linguistics has not begun to treat its texts communicatively'. It would be extremely useful for pedagogic purposes if such insights from genre analysis could be applied to illuminate the functionality of phrases in some recent, more applied corpus-based work. For example, Tribble (1991) notes the contrasting ways in which speech verbs, e.g. said are used in the Humanities and Engineering corpus (see Table 1 taken from Tribble, 1991). Tribble points out that the dominant structure in which said occurs in the Humanities text is as reported speech and also notes that in the Science text the dominant structure is BE + said + `to' in®nitive. However, what is of more interest in these examples, which Tribble does not expand on, is the fact that we can discern the move structures of these phrases by examining the contextual clues in the truncated concordanced lines. For example, in the Historical corpus, if we could view the wider context of these lines, we might well ®nd that said has the function of refuting or expressing reservation as it occurs in the same environment as the language of argumentation (views, objections, claims). Similarly, an examination of the concordanced lines for said to be in the Engineering corpus reveals that this phrase

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Table 1 Concordanced lines for `said' (from Tribble, 1991) Historical (EHR corpus) EHR1900 and war were in the Crown, but it was said that engaging in a EHR1900 nisters as far as they were able. Some said that parliament to EHR1939 cover, opposed to Bismarck's views. He said that Giers believed that EHR1939 it. In reply to Paget's objections he said that he believed the EHR1939 ly was not altogether satisfactory. He said that he did not expect EHR1939 dings, deprecated isolated action, and said that he had impressed on EHR1939 crbia's claims; but at least it can be said that he was not so EHR1900 them that those men spoke falsely who said that his alliance with EHR1900 roposed by the earl of Nottingham, and said that in their opinion no EHR1900 which has been illegally obtained.' He said that it belonged solely Engineering (Rodgers and Mayhew, 1980) ENGI f the atmosphere or the sea, it may be said that a given quantity ENGI ough in thermodynamics there cannot be said to be any heat in a ENGI n of a force. Although there cannot be said to be any work in a ENGI he boundary. As in mechanics, work is said to be done when a force ENGI thermodynamic equilibrium. A system is said to be in thermodynamic ENGI ¯uid remains constant, the process is said to be isothermal. Since ENGI iston to compress a ¯uid, the work is said to be negative. Heat, ENGI from the surroundings, the quantity is said to be positive and, ENGI pushing a piston outwards, the work is said to be positive. ENGI cted. iv Throttling A ¯ow of ¯uid is said to be throttled when Extracts from concordances of said that and BE + said + ``to'' in®nitive in the English Historical Review corpus and Rodgers and Mayhew (1980), Table 1.9.

functions as a de®nition marker which can either be retrospective, as in line six:... ¯uid remains constant, the process is said to be isothermal., or prospective as in line ®ve: ... thermodynamic equilibrium. A system is said to be in thermodynamic... Here, one is automatically tempted to ®nish o€ the phrase with... equilibrium when ... (although one would have to consult a corpus to verify this predictivity), which strongly suggests that when is an obligatory part of this lexical phrase for signalling a prospective de®nition. 2.3. Discourse analysis Let us now, examine corpus-based studies which draw on various aspects of discourse analysis for their theoretical foundation. One study which considers lexicogrammatical patterning from the perspective of both functionality and sentence position is the research of Hoey (1993), p. 81, on how the word reason is used in text, with one major ®nding being: when reason is sentence-initial, it functions to signal a reason relation in patterns such as: x. The reason is (simple) y. x. The reason is y.

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x. The reason for this (z) is y. The reason x is y. It would therefore be most useful to take up the following suggestion o€ered by de Beaugrande (1996), p. 525: `We could use the corpus to explore which types of words or collocations tend to be used for beginning or ending a sentence'. In this respect, a related area for further exploration would be that of colligation as it may well be the case that not only do certain collocations tend to occur in a certain position in the sentence, which not only determines their functionality, but also their grammatical structure. Granger (in press) has carried out research into the discourse features of participle clauses, and also pinpoints this aspect as a fruitful area for further research: As regards the discourse function of participle clauses, our investigation has shown that -ed and -ing clauses play an important role in the foregrounding and backgrounding of information. In this ®eld, there is scope for in-depth research into the relationship between particular sentence positions, especially initial and ®nal, and particular discourse functions. However, more applied corpus-based work tends to focus solely on the surface features of collocations without examining the underlying discourse functions of these co-occurring items. I now take the example of the analysis of Kennedy (1995), of the 300,000 word Wellington Economics corpus to illustrate the role discourse analysis could play in applied corpus-based studies. Kennedy lists the content words which occur most commonly with the item increase and also compares these frequencies with those from a general academic corpus, as shown in Table 2. Kennedy concludes the article with a brief reference to the usefulness of such statistical information on collocational patterning for syllabus designers and materials writers. However, one signi®cant aspect about these statistics is the high frequency of occurrence of the words resulting and lead with increase which strongly suggests that they combine to form semi-®xed lexical phrases signalling the semantic relation of cause and e€ect. The noun factor is also likely to have a similar signalling function, and is thus an example of the anaphoric nouns Francis (1986) and the three vocabulary items of Winter (1977). I am therefore advocating that it is necessary to look below the surface of the collocational patternings (Table 2) to observe their discourse functions in the text overall. The corpus-based analysis of cause-e€ect markers of Flowerdew (1998b) in the Greenpeace report on Global Warming reveals that the prepositions with, through, from and for are frequently used in combination with nominalisations to signal the reason±result relation between clauses, an aspect which is rarely noted in pedagogic materials. Another researcher who has adopted a more discoursal approach to corpus analysis is Wu (1992) who examines lexico-grammar from three di€erent aspects: organisational, rhetorical and discoursal. Drawing on a corpus of engineering texts, she shows how consider can be used as a discourse signal: either to set up a

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Table 2 Type/Tokens for content words occurring with INCREASE (from Kennedy, 1995). Content words which occur six or more times before INCREASE in position N-1±N-5 in the economics and general academic corpora Collocate

No. of tokens in economics

No. of tokens in general academic

Price Income Supply Resulting Quantity Unit Demand Lead Output Percentage Rate Wage Steady Trade Large Cost Capital Factor Labour Movies

42 32 32 28 21 21 18 16 14 13 13 11 10 10 9 8 8 8 8 6

ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ 16 ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ

particular discourse framework for the following proposition through a lexical phrase such as Let us consider or to signal the writer's evaluation of a following statement through a phrase such as It is very important to consider. Consider can also be used as a rhetorical organiser, ful®lling a predictive function as in the following example: When a pavement is being examined, engineers have to consider two important questions.... However, such observations as the ones above on cause±e€ect markers and the item consider, although they may be informing materials design in speci®c, localised contexts for a particular group of learners, have not as yet in®ltrated mainstream, commercially published ESP materials. This is partly due to the fact that such ®ndings remain at the level of `implications' or `considerations' for ESP teaching. 3. Future directions In order for the ®eld of `applied' corpus linguistics to advance beyond the sentence-level collocational type of research, practitioners could usefully, not only draw upon the research ®ndings of the more theoretical work in this ®eld, but also

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consider using/developing more sophisticated software such as the systemic-based computational tools developed by Matthiessen (1997) to inform materials development. The keyword program in Wordsmith (Scott, 1996, 1997) is a very useful tool for enabling text to be exploited at a more global level as it can characterise a genre through the identi®cation of statistically prominent words in a text, i.e. words of unusually high frequency. Tribble (1998) reports on his use of this tool to show the salient di€erences in the stylistics and register of di€erent genres. Another researcher/practitioner who is attempting to apply corpus-based ®ndings at a more textual level to materials is Milton (1998). Based on his error-analysis of the HKUST Learner Corpus, Milton has devised a `list driven' concordancer and associated databases which can be called up from a wordprocessor to assist students select discoursally appropriate language. This list displays hedging phrases of which Cantonese-speaking learners of English are unaware, but also more importantly, informs the user of the frequency with which the selected expressions occur in the particular text type being explored. Although Milton (p. 195) cautions that `A number of techniques will have to be explored in order to avoid having the learners substitute one set of overused and misused expressions for another', nevertheless such work points the way forward in this more applied area. The suggestions of Flowerdew (1998a), for `data-driven' exercises is another attempt to encourage students to examine text at a more discoursal level. Her corpus data of cause± e€ect markers show that students tend to use connectors to signal local coherence, whereas in the Greenpeace report on Global Warming, these connectors had a far more summative function, signalling a summary conclusion which wrapped up a previous stretch of text. Therefore, in order to sensitise students to the use of connectors as markers of global coherence, the CALL exercises require students to use the view®nder option in the software to examine the previous stretch of text to determine what the precise summative function of these connectors is. Another suggestion, which I believe would have wide pedagogic applications, is more exploitation of the tagging function of existing software on the market. As Leech (1991) remarks most of the work on text annotation (tagging) has been done at the grammatical (word class) or syntactic (parsing) level. Very little has been done on the semantic or pragmatic/discourse level to date. For example, text could be tagged manually to indicate the generic `move structures' such as background, scope, purpose in the introduction sections of reports. Likewise, discourse tags could be inserted into the text to indicate the situation±problem±solution± evaluation pattern (Hoey, 1991). This would thus add a further dimension to concordancing, and KWIC (key-words-in-context) could then be sorted according to their functional/discoursal roles. Leech (1991), p. 25, points out that `It is likely that in the relatively near future certain levels of annotation, especially the semantic and pragmatic/discourse levels, will begin to receive greater priority'. This would also seem to o€er exciting possibilities to apply empirical corpus data to materials exploitation.

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4. Concluding remarks The main thrust of this paper has been to critically review recent work in corpus linguistics and in more applied corpus-based work in the area of academic writing. Within the more theoretical ®eld of corpus linguistics, where the focus is on language description and analysis, the exploration of corpora has moved away from concentration solely on the lexico-grammatical patterning of text and is now being conducted within various frameworks of textlinguistics, namely systemics, genre and discourse analysis. However, such is rarely the case with those more applied studies which still tend to concentrate on collocational patterns for exploitation in syllabus design or language teaching. Moreover, in those few studies which do draw on various textlinguistic approaches for the interpretation of results, the implications for pedagogy are not developed in any great detail with the consequence that the ®ndings have had little in¯uence on ESP syllabus and materials design. If corpus linguistics is to develop further its `applied' aspect and potential for exploitation in the classroom of academic/professional writing, specialised corpora need to be explored at a more discoursal level than at present. This would then provide syllabus designers and materials writers with a more coherent and constructive base for exploiting the ®ndings for pedagogic purposes.

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