Pattern Grammar: A Corpus-Driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English Susan Hunston and Gill Francis (University of Birmingham) Amsterdam : John Benjamins (Studies in corpus linguistics, edited by Elena Tognini-Bonelli, volume 4), 2000 , xiii+288 pp; hardbound, ISBN 90-272-2273-8 and 1-5561... (original) (raw)

Corpus linguistics and the automatic analysis of English

In a recent paper advocating a corpus-based and probabilistic approach to grammar development, argue that "the current state of the art is far from being able to produce a robust parser of general English" and advocate "steady and quantifiable," empirically corpus-driven grammar development and testing. Black et al. are addressing a community in which armchair introspection has been and still is the dominant methodology in many quarters, but in some parts of Europe, corpus linguistics never died. For nearly two decades, the Nijmegen group led by Jan Aarts have been undertaking corpus analyses that, although motivated primarily by the desire to study language variation using corpus data, are particularly relevant to the issue of broad-coverage grammar development. In distinction to other groups undertaking corpus-based work (e.g., Garside, Leech, and Sampson 1987), the Nijmegen group has consistently adopted the position that it is possible and desirable to develop a formal, generative grammar that characterizes the syntactic properties of a given corpus and can be used to assign appropriate analyses to each of its sentences.

Lexical-grammatical patterns in spoken English

International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 2007

Based on a large set of data from one of the biggest available corpora of spoken British English (the 10-million word spoken component of the BNC), this article explores central lexical-grammatical aspects of progressive forms with future time reference. Among the phenomena investigated are verb preferences, adverbial co-selection, subject types, and negation. It is demonstrated that future time progressives in spoken British English are patterned to a considerable extent (for example that it is individual verbs, rather than semantic groups of verbs, that preferably occur in such constructions) and that actual language use often runs counter to claims that can be found in traditional grammatical descriptions of the construction. A number of general and often neglected issues in the analysis of lexical-grammatical patterns are also addressed, in particular the notion of pattern frequency.

Peter W. Culicover, Natural language syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xvii+490

Journal of Linguistics, 2010

This linguistic textbook by Peter Culicover provides a broad introductory overview of various topics in the study of syntax. Its major objectives are to show how natural language makes use of various syntactic and morphosyntactic devices, and to lay out the conceptual structures that correspond to particular aspects of linguistic form (xi). The title of the book is thoughtprovoking : rather than Introduction to syntax, Syntactic theory or the like, Culicover chose the title Natural language syntax, which can be interpreted twofold. First, it may be regarded as a direct response to recent research in syntax, especially the Minimalist program (Chomsky 1995), emphasizing that linguistic theory needs to place greater emphasis on accounting for actual language data rather than indulge in purely formalistic investigation. Another possible reading of the title is that the syntactic theory proposed in this book is natural, intuitive and simple, and that the title alludes to Culicover's previous book Simpler syntax (Culicover & Jackendoff 2005). In general, the discussions in this book are framed in theory-neutral terms, supplemented with comparisons between Culicover & Jackendoff's 'simpler syntax ' (SS) approach and so-called mainstream generative grammar (MGG). Chapter 1, 'Overview ', defines syntax as 'the system that governs the relationship between form and meaning in a language' (1) ; and states that the goal of linguistic theory is 'to understand what the properties of human languages are, and why they are that way ' (3). Culicover compares the SS and MGG approaches for the treatment of displacement. Instead of pursuing a derivational analysis, as in MGG, SS directly specifies 'correspondence rules ' between syntactic positions and meanings. Chapter 2, ' Syntactic categories ', provides a detailed description of various syntactic and morphosyntactic categories, and introduces the notational device of an attribute value matrix (also employed in Lexical Functional Grammar and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar), which displays the features and values of lexical items. To Culicover, a lexical item expresses the correspondences between mophosyntactic categories, semantic values and phonological representation, as exemplified in (1).