A hallmark of corpus linguistics is the study of patterns of language use. The studies presented in this volume all use corpora to investigate patterns of lexis from various perspectives. The first section, “Sequence and Order”, presents theoretical and practical aspects of the linguist’s task of uncovering the principles that determine such patterns. The next section, “Competing Constructions”, discusses the relationship between lexical patterns with similar meanings in the light of diachronic, regional and register variation. New developments in terms of lexicogrammatical meaning and patterning are dealt with in the section “Emerging Patterns”. The final section, “Correlating patterns and meaning”, discusses ways in which meaning can be studied in corpus data despite the lack of narrowly defined search terms. Though situated at different points on a continuum between lexical and grammatical emphasis, the studies all confirm the inseparability of lexis and grammar.

This volume takes stock of current research in contrastive lexical studies. It reflects the growing interest in corpus-based approaches to the study of lexis, in particular the use of multilingual corpora, shared by researchers working in widely differing fields - contrastive linguistics, lexicology, lexicography, terminology, computational linguistics and machine translation. The articles in the volume, which cover a wide diversity of languages, are divided into four main sections: the exploration of cross-linguistic equivalence, contrastive lexical semantics, corpus-based multilingual lexicography, and translation and parallel concordancing. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to recent trends in contrastive lexical studies written by the editors of the volume, Bengt Altenberg and Sylviane Granger.

Computers offer new perspectives in the study of language, allowing us to see phenomena that previously remained obscure because of the limitations of our vantage points. It is not uncommon for computers to be likened to the telescope, or microscope, in this respect. In this pioneering computer-assisted study of translation, Dorothy Kenny suggests another image, that of the kaleidoscope: playful changes of perspective using corpus-processing software allow textual patterns to come into focus and then recede again as others take their place. And against the background of repeated patterns in a corpus, creative uses of language gain a particular prominence. In Lexis and Creativity in Translation, Kenny monitors the translation of creative source-text word forms and collocations uncovered in a specially constructed German-English parallel corpus of literary texts. Using an abundance of examples, she reveals evidence of both normalization and ingenious creativity in translation. Her discussion of lexical creativity draws on insights from traditional morphology, structural semantics and, most notably, neo-Firthian corpus linguistics, suggesting that rumours of the demise of linguistics in translation studies are greatly exaggerated. Lexis and Creativity in Translation is essential reading for anyone interested in corpus linguistics and its impact so far on translation studies. The book also offers theoretical and practical guidance for researchers who wish to conduct their own corpus-based investigations of translation. No previous knowledge of German, corpus linguistics or computing is assumed.

The contributions in this volume provide a kaleidoscope of state-of-the-art research in corpus linguistics on lexis and lexicogrammar. Central issues are the presentation of major corpus resources (both corpora and software tools), the findings (especially about frequency) which are simply not accessible without such resources, their theoretical implications relating to both lexical units and word meanings, and the practical – especially pedagogical – applications of corpus findings. This is complemented by a lexicographer’s view on the data structures implicit in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The volume, which has sprung from the 36th ICAME conference, held in at Trier University in May 2015, will be of relevance for theoretical and applied linguists interested in corpora, word usage, and the mental lexicon.

Cognitive Linguistics, the branch of linguistics that tries to "make one's account of human language accord with what is generally known about the mind and the brain," has become one of the most flourishing fields of contemporary linguistics. The chapters address many classic topics of Cognitive Linguistics. These topics include studies on the semantics of specific words (including polysemy and synonymy) as well as semantic characteristics of particular syntactic patterns / constructions (including constructional synonymy and the schematicity of constructions), the analysis of causatives, transitivity, and image-schematic aspects of posture verbs. The key characteristic of this volume is that all papers adopt the methodological perspective of Corpus Linguistics, the rapidly evolving branch of linguistics based on the computerized analysis of language used in authentic settings. Thus, the contributions do not only all provide various new insights in their respective fields, they also introduce new data as well as new corpus-based and quantitative methods of analysis. On the basis of their findings, the authors discuss both theoretical implications going well beyond the singular topics of the studies and show how the discipline of Cognitive Linguistics can benefit from the rigorous analysis of naturally-occurring language. The languages which are investigated are English, German, Dutch, and Russian, and the data come from a variety of different corpora. As such, the present volume will be of interest to a wide range of scholars with many different foci and interests and should pave the way for further integration of usage-based techniques of analysis within this exciting paradigm.

Passages of authentic text are analysed to demonstrate the operations of patterns of lexis across sentence boundaries and over considerable distances within and between texts. These insights are related to a comprehensive theory of language, in which 'lexis' and 'text' are shown to be important levels of language organization. Implications for the teaching of reading and writing are also discussed. First Prize English Speaking Union's Duke of Edinburgh Book Competition

With fresh state-of-the-art perspectives on language patterning, this volume showcases studies that recognize and provide evidence for the inseparability of lexis and grammar. The contributors explore in what ways these two areas, often treated separately in linguistic theory and description, form an organic whole.

Despite its importance for language and cognition, the theoretical concept of »pattern« has received little attention in linguistics so far. The articles in this volume demonstrate the multifariousness of linguistic patterns in lexicology, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, text linguistics, pragmatics, construction grammar, phonology and language acquisition and develop new perspectives on »pattern« as a linguistic concept.

The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics 2e provides an updated overview of a dynamic and rapidly growing area with a widely applied methodology. Over a decade on from the first edition of the Handbook, this collection of 47 chapters from experts in key areas offers a comprehensive introduction to both the development and use of corpora as well as their ever-evolving applications to other areas, such as digital humanities, sociolinguistics, stylistics, translation studies, materials design, language teaching and teacher development, media discourse, discourse analysis, forensic linguistics, second language acquisition and testing. The new edition updates all core chapters and includes new chapters on corpus linguistics and statistics, digital humanities, translation, phonetics and phonology, second language acquisition, social media and theoretical perspectives. Chapters provide annotated further reading lists and step-by-step guides as well as detailed overviews across a wide range of themes. The Handbook also includes a wealth of case studies that draw on some of the many new corpora and corpus tools that have emerged in the last decade. Organised across four themes, moving from the basic start-up topics such as corpus building and design to analysis, application and reflection, this second edition remains a crucial point of reference for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars in applied linguistics.

The studies in this volume approach English grammatical patterns in novel ways by interrogating corpora, focusing on patterns in the verb phrase (tense, aspect and modality), the noun phrase (intensification and focus marking), complementation structures and clause combining. Some studies interrogate historical corpora to reconstruct the diachronic development of patterns such as light verb constructions, verb-particle combinations, the be a-verbing progressive and absolute constructions. Other studies analyse synchronic datasets to typify the functions in discourse of, amongst others, tag questions and it-clefts, or to elucidate some long-standing problems in the syntactic analysis of verbal or adjectival complementation patterns, thanks to the empirical detail only corpora can provide. The volume documents the practices that have been developed to guarantee optimal representativeness of corpus data, to formulate definitions of patterns that can be operationalized in extractions, and to build dimensions of variation such as text type and register into rich grammatical descriptions.