System And Corpus: Exploring Connections

By Author: emaly su
Total Articles: 235
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That, or you can have the perfect piece of Chanel Jewelry as a gift for someone special (not necessarily someone you're about to marry), but it takes the perfect trim ring to complete.

The blurb's claim that 'This book is the first to combine interests in two currently popular approaches [Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Corpus Linguistics (CL)] to language description' [emphasis added] may be challenged.

Nevertheless, this is an important contribution to both, and likely to become as influential as Hunston and Thompson's earlier collection, Evaluation in Text.

As Thompson and Hunston more modestly explain in their somewhat provocative introductory chapter, since SFL is essentially a theory of language, CL is essentially a method for investigating language, and both are concerned with naturally occurring language as text, they are complementary, if not productively synergic.

Following a caricature of SFL as theory heavy and therefore not open to what the data might throw up, and CL as theory light and therefore not approaching language systematically, ...
... Thompson and Hunston each provide Pandora Jewelry general overviews of their respective approaches which make the book accessible to non-specialist readers.

If corpus linguists are simply those who focus on corpus data (p. 102), then being an SFL corpus linguist is unproblematic (and most shunt effectively between manual and automated analyses). The challenge to SFL comes from the Sinclair corpus-driven tradition (p. 8), as illustrated in the next three chapters.

Michael Stubbs' paper, 'Corpus Analysis (CA): the state of the art and three types of unanswered questions', helpfully provides a historical and broad disciplinary context to CA.

He then highlights issues in moving from corpus descriptions to explanations. It is possible to generalize that certain antonyms or male-female pairs co-occur more frequently than by chance, but how we move to an explanation of this is 'at present entirely obscure' (p. 24).

The focus is not on individual schemas of specific phrases or lexical items, but on wider lexical fields, and how these could be, but are not, used to support social and psychological theories of language such as those of Searle or Levinson.

Michael Hoey explicitly addresses the interaction between CL and SFL. He begins with an overview of four concepts collocation, semantic association, colligation, and textual colligation and related terminology..

Hoey then uses the analysis of one sentence to argue for his theory of lexical priming that lexical items are 'primed' to occur not only with other lexical items, but also with a particular semantic prosody, in particular grammatical functions and in particular positions (e.g. Theme of first paragraph) in text. This work clearly illustrates constraints on 'choice' in systems.

Hunston's chapter 'Phraseology and system' is central in its teasing out of similarities, differences, complementarities, and issues between her corpus-driven phraseological approach to language and SFL. Starting with the word 'evidence', she demonstrates how CA arrives at the phraseological unit 'there is (an amount of) evidence to suggest that + finite clause' and makes the case for pattern grammar.

She then carefully explores what this means for approaches to language in terms of register; semantic prosodies; syntagms and paradigms; grammar and lexis. These key issues are picked up by papers throughout the collection, but Hunston is alone in suggesting that system networks (grammatical descriptions) produced by SFL and Phraseology might not be reconcilable.

As this collection originated in the 29th International SFL Congress, Liverpool, 2002, the remaining 10 chapters assume an SFL approach. In contrast to Hoey and Hunston, Gordon Tucker argues that the lexical patterns of Jewelry Store collocation and semi-fixed phrases as profitably investigated in CL can be accommodated within a generative systemic model.

He shows how there have been improvements in the Cardiff Grammar, for example, in the nominal group, to reflect linguistic behaviour uncovered through corpus linguistic research. He too addresses the paradigmatic-syntagmatic question and points out how corpus evidence shows that all paradigmatic options are not equal, and that this not only informs descriptions of particular registers, but also 'general probabilistic tendencies at the very heart of the grammar' (p. 91).

This introduces pre-selection and pathways through a system network, and the exciting or perhaps daunting recognition that such description of a systemic grammar is 'an endless task' (p. 94).