English Abstracts

Some reflections on Corpus Linguistics upon request................................................................................................Richard Zhonghua XIAO (1)

Dr. Richard Xiao is Reader at the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, United Kingdom. His major research interests cover corpus-based language studies,contrastive linguistics, translation studies, Chinese linguistics, English language and linguistics,tense and aspect theory, and teaching Chinese as a second language. It is with great pleasure that Dr. Xiao has completed a written interview with our journal around such topics as his views on the recent advances in corpus research home and abroad as well as his personal academic career.

Liang Maocheng’s views on corpus research and computer technology

.........................................................................................................LIANG Maocheng (15)

Professor Liang is Professor of corpus linguistics and applied linguistics at the National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education, Beijing Foreign Studies University, China. His research interests include computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, automated essay scoring, corpusbased interlanguage analysis, and second language acquisition. He is vice Chairman and a founding member of Corpus Linguistics Society of China. In this interview, Liang writes about,around eight topics suggested by the Journal, the impact of computer technology on corpus-based language studies, and looks into the prospect of the field in the age of big data.

Xing Fukun’s views on corpus research and computer technology..................................................................................................................XING Fukun (26)

Dr. Xing is affiliated to the PLA University of Foreign Languages, China. His major research interests include computational linguistics and corpus linguistics. In this interview, Xing addresses too the eight topics suggested by the Journal concerning the impact of computer technology on corpus based language studies, and how the technology in the time of big data will shape the future of corpus studies.

Demystifying Zipf’s law and Zipfian linguistic economy theory..................................................................................................................DING Zheng (36)

Zipf argues that, because the speaker’s and the auditor’s behaviors are both governed by the principle of least effort, the speaker’s and the auditor’s economies are in conflict, a speaker-based force of unification is in opposition with an auditor-based force of diversification, and the two forces manufactures in speech stream a balanced vocabulary distribution, which is termed by Zipf himself rank-frequency distribution and afterward famously known as Zipf’s law. According to relevant mathematical studies which have established consensus, Zipf’s law is not a product of the principle of least effort. Therefore Zipfian theory of linguistic economy is starved of its vitally important evidence. Moreover and under linguistically rational scrutiny, Zipf’s theory on the two forces and the two-sided economies is far from infallible. This paper intends to develop an intuitive exposition that the Zipf’s law is not a product of the principle of least effort and to undertake a demystifying and critical review of Zipfian theory of linguistic economy.

A study of the collocational behaviour of Chinese time words: Nian ‘year’, yue ‘month’ and tian ‘day’...........................................................................................................FANG Qingming (48)

This paper attempts to investigate the time words nian ‘year’, yue ‘month’, and tian ‘day’collocated with numbers on the basis of corpus data. The previously syntax-based studies are updated with lexical frequency and collocational behaviour of the words. The word nian ‘year’has significantly higher frequency than yue ‘month’ and tian ‘day’; likewise, nian ‘year’ has nine meanings different from yue ‘month’ and tian ‘day’. The nominal classifier ge has to be added to yue ‘month’ when it is used as in cardinal number contexts. The multi-word units youyitian‘one day or someday’ and diertian ‘the second day’ are interpreted against their pragmatic and textual functions. The paper concludes that among a few high frequency words of a lexical field,sometimes only partial homogeneity in terms of collocational, syntactic and lexico-semantic properties is shared.

Entity, attribute and relation: The trichotomy of shell nouns and their interpersonal functions..................................................................................................................JIANG Feng (62)

Shell nouns metaphorically refer to a type of nouns which carry and represent propositional information, a key feature of lexical cohesion in discourse. However its affordances of stance construction are less noticed than deserved, which is caused at least by unclear semanticclassification and interpersonal function of shell nouns. This paper is based on a corpus of 60 research articles and comes up with a new function-based classification of shell nouns concerning entity, attribute and relation in an attempt to explore how shell nouns allow stance construction and social interaction along discourse community in the disciplines.

Idioms and idiomaticity in translational Chinese:Translation Universals hypotheses revisited.............................................................................................................ZHANG Ruying (75)

The present study intends to explore the idiomatic properties of idioms in translated Chinese texts(i.e. ZCTC) to verify and revisit Baker’s Translation Universals hypotheses from the perspective of Chinese. As a follow-up study of Xiao and Dai (2010) on word clusters in translated Chinese,the present paper manually filtered the annotated word clusters in the two corpora into idioms based on Xinhua Chengyu Cidian (2002) dictionary and examined the total counts of token, type,part-of-speech distribution, high-frequency idioms as well as semantic and structural properties of idioms in the two corpora. It is observed that compared with their native counterparts (i.e. as in LCMC), idioms in translated Chinese are less in total amount, more diversified in type and exhibit a polarisation of high-frequency and low-frequency idioms. Their meaning tends to be more literal and explicit and their structure demonstrates more fixedness, revealing translators’ prudence in conforming to the standard norms of the target language. These results reconfirm the hypothesis of explicitation, standardisation and leveling out in the Translation Universals theory, yet leaving the simplification hypothesis largely unmatched with Chinese. Thus, the present paper revises this simplification hypothesis in the TUs theory to a polarisation hypothesis, hoping to better account for the perplexing phenomenon in idiomatic usage in translated Chinese.

Lexical bundles in China-based English journal articles of science and engineering...................................................................................................................QIAN Yubin (86)

The present paper, in conformity with Biber and his colleagues’ framework, sets out to describe and discuss the structures and functions of four-word lexical bundles in China-based English journal articles of science and engineering. The target bundles are investigated in terms of structural categories, colligation of VP-based bundles, co-occurrence of PP-based and NP-based bundles, AP-based bundles, functional categories and their pragmatic connotations. A further analysis on the relations between structures and functions has revealed the distribution pattern of bundles. These findings have implications for studying Chinese scientists’ and engineers’ language competence in academic research as well as improving academic writing pedagogy.

Constructing an agricultural research article corpus of English...................................................................LIU Ping, HUANG Xiaoqian & LIU Shan (97)

This paper discusses the necessity of agricultural academic English corpus construction, and introduces the procedures of construction, which include the collection of data, the conversion and cleaning of texts, annotation, tagging, and the extraction of texts. It compares two text cleaning methods. The agricultural academic English corpus was mounted to Hua Zhong Agricultural University (HZAU) intranet using the CQPweb (Corpus Query Processor) system. HZAU CQPweb was tried out in the Ph.D. students’ and undergraduates’ academic writing courses. The written feedback of the trial indicates that most students acknowledge that corpus-assisted learning helps improve English academic writing quality and claim that they will use corpora in writing up their academic papers. In the meanwhile, the feedback also shows that the existing corpus resources need to be enriched, and that corpus search is still too complicated and not user-friendly enough.