Discourse markers can have various functions depending on the context in which they are used. Taking this into consideration, in this corpus-based research, we analyzed and unveiled quantitatively and qualitatively the functions of four discourse markers in academic spoken English. To this purpose, four discourse markers, i.e., “I mean,” “I think,” “you see,” and “you know,” were selected for the study. The British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus was used as the data gathering source. To detect the discourse markers, concordance lines of the corpus were carefully read and analyzed. The quantitative analysis demonstrated that from among the four discourse markers, “you know” and “you see” were the most and the least frequent ones in the corpus, respectively. In line with the quantitative analysis, the qualitative analysis of the concordance lines demonstrated that there were various functions with regard to each of the four discourse markers. The findings of this study can have implications in fields such as corpus-based studies, genre analysis, and contrastive linguistics.
Discourse markers, as the elements which serve to establish writer-reader/speaker-audience interaction, can be multi-functional. Considering the multi-functionality of discourse markers, this study will analyse the discourse marker you know in terms of its translation and function in an English–Persian context. For this purpose, the Mizan parallel corpus of English–Persian languages (13,596,676 tokens) was used. Alongside the parallel corpus, a second Persian corpus, the Bijankhan Corpus (68,560,954 words), was used as the reference corpus against which translations and functions were compared. From amongst the 5,349 tokens of you know in the English corpus, 991 were thetical. The analysis of the corpora indicated that the thetical you know had fourteen functions in English, while its counterpart miduni (‘you know’) in Persian had sixteen. From among the functions, claiming acceptance, introducing explanations and giving shared knowledge were the most prevalent in the parallel corpus, whereas in the reference corpus, claiming acceptance, giving shared knowledge and softening the force of an utterance were the most common functions. Close reading of the corpus demonstrated that the functions of the discourse marker you know remained unchanged in translation due to its context-dependency. In addition, there appeared to be six different translation strategies in transferring discourse markers. We hope that the results of this study have useful implications for researchers in such areas as comparative linguistics, translation studies and corpus linguistics.
Contemporaneously with the advances of technology as well as the advent of computers in language studies, we have witnessed a boom in the emergence of new books in Corpus Linguistics (see for example Dash & Ramamoorthy 2019;Paquot & Gries, 2020;Seoane & Biber, 2021). From among the informative books in this fast growing field of knowledge is the current one authored by Barth and Schnell in 2022. This work of scholarship has been organized in 11 chapters, which provide readers with state-of-the-art concepts of theory and practice for conducting research in the domain of Corpus Linguistics.The first two chapters function as an introduction in which the authors, succinctly, shed some light on the basic concept of corpus, its divergence from other approaches as well as its convergence with other usage-oriented fields within linguistics such as Sociolinguistics, Linguistics Typology and Language Change. The authors provide the reader with a definition of corpus and Corpus Linguistics, words, lexeme, type and token as well as some basic statistical concepts such as mode, mean and median. Later on, the authors make a distinction between structural context, syntagmatic context and constructional context in order to delineate the role of context in corpora.There are different types of corpora with specific composition criteria, which need to be delineated for the readers. In this regard, Chapter three, which is thematically divided into two parts, is a detailed description of the corpus composition criteria and typology. In the first part, the authors enumerate such concepts as size, balance, representativeness as well as authenticity and spontaneity as the core criteria for compiling a corpus. Furthermore, a subtle distinction is made between raw, primary
In the last few decades, corpora have achieved a significant place in the field of applied linguistics, teaching pedagogy, translation studies and academic circles around the globe. As corpora has developed into the multidisciplinary approach to be used in mixed (both qualitative and quantitative) studies, developing linguistic corpora has achieved a significant interest in academics all over the world. The volume Academic writing with corpora: a resource book for datadriven learning by Tatyana Karpenko-Seccombe involves recently developed corpora-based material for the practitioners, scholars and researchers working in the field of corpus linguistics and corpus-based studies. All this is reflected in the diversity of corpus-based studies collection where linguistic, functional and cognitive approaches have been employed by scholars to make use of corpora. With four chapters, the impressive volume consists of three sections, introducing the practical implementation of corpora, corpus tools, and features of corpus-based studies and provides understanding about usefulness of corpora for researchers and practitioners in producing quality research.The first chapter, the introduction by Karpenko-Seccombe offers the purpose and outline of the book and the prevalent theme of the volume. Karpenko-Seccombe discusses in detail how corpus tools have been incorporated effectively in the academic research today at global level. Further, Karpenko-Seccombe presents how this corpus can be exploited autonomously by the researchers and academicians to make use of such corpus tools for conducting effective research.In addition, the significant contribution of this chapter is the brief introduction to a number of other concordancers (concordance program): BNC-English corpora (the British National Corpus, https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/), SkELL (Sketch Engine for Language Learning, https://www.sketchengine.eu/ skell/) and MICUSP (Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers, 2009, http:// micusp.elicorpora.info/). In this vein, Karpenko-Seccombe includes practical illustrations and exercises for the practitioners to make use of these illustrations for effective teaching of corpora tools. Further, Karpenko-Seccombe makes a comparison of these tools as She says that MICUSP is different from the previous corpus tools in that it doesn't present results in concordance lines but highlights them in the source texts. You can access the full papers, which can be useful for academic writers, (p. 32).Chapter two provides the introduction to corpus tools, and significant functions of these tools. For instance, Karpenko-Seccombe presents the language pattern, and ways to identify the mistakes in prepositions by writers of second language with the orientation of concordance search. Karpenko-Seccombe provides the illustrations with the pictorial charts while using Lextutor (a free and open online corpus tool), and states how words are put in the tools to search recurrent patterns of prepositions used in the language. The problem that second-l...
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