The Prime Minister’s Questions has always been regarded as one of the most heated debates in Britain’s political arena. As Teresa May stepped on stage, there has been a huge increase in the number of female MPs in the British Parliament. In this study, a corpus which has 10 sessions of PMQs held from October 2017 to February 2018 is compiled. This study has used the appraisal annotation scheme of the BFSU Qualitative Coder 1.2. (Xu & Jia, 2011) based on the appraisal system (Martin & White, 2005) to find out the differences in the appraisals used by the female and male MPs while raising questions. The results show that the most significant differences in the appraisals appear in the following categories: force (-)＞proclaim (-)＞entertain (-)＞disclaim (+)＞attribute (+). Among these discourse strategies, force, proclaim, and entertain are overused by the male MPs while female MPs tend to use more disclaim and attribute. We cannot simply say whether the female MPs or the male MPs are more impolite because numerous social and cultural factors can influence the results of the study. It’s the different strategies used by the female and male MPs that count.

Previous studies argued that most listening tests used scripted texts which may not represent real-world spoken discourse and that semi-scripted texts should be used (Clark, 2014). However, only a few studies investigated the extent to which these two types of spoken texts are different (Wagner, 2016). This study aimed to identify linguistic features which distinguished scripted from semi-scripted texts. Two corpora were created based on transcripts of standardized listening tests: the reference corpus (the scripted texts) and the target corpus (the semi-scripted texts). Using lexico-grammatical and phonological analyses, results revealed that the semi-scripted texts were different from the scripted counterparts regarding dysfluencies and discourse connectors. Despite the limited number of texts, these findings echoed results from studies using much larger corpora (Biber, 2006). Interpretation and explanations were provided using a register variation framework (Biber & Conrad, 2009). Implications for L2 listening pedagogy and assessment were also addressed.

Classroom use of authentic texts used in everyday communication has not always been an inseparable part of foreign language teaching. According to Grigaliuniene (2013, p. 17), “the structures many current textbooks teach for certain functions are either never used or used infrequently while quite unexpected structures are the ones that actually occur”. Despite the awareness of the importance of authentic patterns of language use, students often learn structures (lexical or grammatical) which are rarely used in actual communication. Teaching authentic phrases is even more important in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) where learners’ specific needs impact the design of a course (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998). What is more, ESP students need to acquire vocabulary of a target profession. Thus, in this preliminary study, conducted using corpus linguistic methodology, an attempt is made to identify and explore the use and discourse functions of frequent and typical patterns of language use, i.e. keywords, recurrent clusters and multi-word terms (nominalizations), found in a custom-designed corpus of car reviews written in English. As shown by examples of student tasks, the results have pedagogical potential in that they can be used as a useful resource when designing or supplementing teaching materials for secondary-school ESP students (automotive technicians and car mechanics).1)

This research intends to investigate lexical bundles performing a participant-oriented function in mathematics. Drawing on a 5-million-word corpus of graduate-level textbooks, a total of forty-three bundles recurring at least 20 times per million words (pmw) and spreading in 10 % or more of the texts making up the corpus are retrieved and further subjected to structural and functional analyses. On a structural level, results show that the greatest number of participant-oriented bundles are clauses or clause fragments. Functionally, these patterns are used as rhetorical devices for engagement or as means for expressing the author’s opinions, judgment and evaluation. Implications for language instruction and materials designing are discussed.

A good foreign language curriculum consolidates the three important principles: sequence, continuity and integration. Since English textbooks are the incarnation of the curriculum used in foreign language classrooms, a comparative investigation of the principles in English textbook corpus enlightens differences in English education of South Korea (SK) and North Korea (NK). To this end, the current study analyzes how graded sets of vocabulary are distributed to discover the sequence in the textbooks, and what the repetition rate is by looking into Standardized Type Token Ratio (STTR) to find out the continuity in the textbooks, and what keyword list is in both positive and negative keyword list of the NK corpus against the SK corpus to elicit integration property of the curriculum. The findings are: (1) NK textbooks are structural in sequence, and no such structural sequence is found in SK textbooks. (2) SK textbooks recycle vocabulary more frequently than NK textbooks, and this leads to more rote memorization activities in NK textbooks. (3) NK textbooks are more integrated with other academic subjects such as science, geography and ideology.

While recent corpus linguistic research often focuses on the text–lexis interface, the present study aims to investigate the ways in which grammatical forms can be related to textual functions of lexical items. This question is explored through a functional analysis of the plural noun “days” in comparison with that of its singular counterpart studied in Mahlberg (2005). Results from the qualitative analysis and quantitative comparison of distribution patterns of the two nouns reveal that the functional profile of the plural form is different from that of the singular form in some aspects, as far as textual functions of time nouns are concerned. This is argued to illustrate the inseparability among text, lexis and grammar.

The purpose of this paper is to graphically represent semantic domain networks of maritime English near-synonyms as such displays can provide insights into semantic relations. A specialised corpus from international maritime communities was used. Keywords are extracted by comparing the Maritime English Corpus with the BNC Baby. Among keywords within the top 20 ranks, we focus on ship-vessel and maritime-marine. We use the MI3 score to identify collocates of the two pairs of near-synonyms and the Wmatrix web interface program to tag semantic domains. We create key semantic domain networks using the social network analysis tool NetMiner 4.0. The results show that some semantic domains are connected between the two pairs of near-synonyms, while others are not connected. The findings of the study indicate how semantic domain networks of keyword collocates and simple collocates help to distinguish near-synonyms through graphical representations of a corpus. The paper found that semantic domains with keyword collocates have a stronger tendency to connect two pairs of near-synonyms than those with simple collocates.

This paper investigates the compounding propensity in Maritime English under the theoretical framework of Synergetic Linguistics. It focuses on the dependence of compound number on the properties of length, frequency and polylexy of word stems. A maritime English corpus was used and a set of Visual Foxpro programs were specifically written for processing the corpus and obtaining the data automatically. The results confirm the respective hypotheses of dependence and show that the more frequent and polysemous a word stem is, the more compounds it produces, but the shorter a word stem is, the more frequently it occurs in compounds. The Köhler’s model y=αχb captures this propensity.