In recent years, much research has been carried out on body-part terms in expressing metonymic and metaphorical notions in terms of embodiment in cognitive linguistics. Among the terms, heart-centered expressions have been widely explored in English and other languages to show the significance of our bodily experiences in expressing our emotions as well as interpersonal or social relationships. However, little research has been carried out on the metaphoric expressions of chest or breast (cf. Kövecses 2002, Lakoff & Johnson 1980). The purpose of this research is to explore literal and metaphoric meanings of kasum ‘chest/ breast’ in a Korean written corpus in terms of corpus linguistics and conceptual metaphor (Perez 2008, Berendt, et al. n.d.). This research analyzes 2,373 tokens of kasum, 114 ces-kasum ‘milk-breast’ and 355 simcang ‘heart’ from the Sejong Project Corpus. Cognitive linguistic research has shown that the head is usually related to mind/reason but the heart to emotion/feelings in many languages. However, examination of the Korean data shows that simcang is used literally in most cases as a technical term in medical contexts, and that ces-kasum is used literally in most cases to refer to a woman’s breast. Unlike these two body-part terms, kasum is used as a cover term to express not only the upper body part literally but also an entity as a locus and perceiver of emotion/ feelings metaphorically. Examination of the corpus data shows the following major findings: (i) 819 tokens (34.5%) are used to refer to the body part chest literally, 1,512 tokens (63.7%) metaphorically (Deignan 2005), (ii) 921 tokens (38.8%) are used to show physiological responses in expressing emotion/feelings, using such terms as “the chest is aching, pounding, choking/being blocked, trembling, sinking, etc.”, (iii) 412 tokens (17.4%) are used to show kasum is a locus for emotion. As these findings show, in Korean, as folk knowledge contrary to the scientific knowledge about the roles of the brain, kasum is viewed as a locus or perceiver for emotional feelings in response to physical/ physiological stimuli. The findings show that the folk knowledge forms the basis for conceptual metaphor for kasum: (i) a locus for feelings, (ii) a container of emotions, (iii) an entity/a material, (iv) a storage/hiding place, etc. Finally, this research shows that in Korean, unlike in English and some other languages, kasum plays an important role in expressing emotional feelings, displaying conceptual metaphorical meanings derived from folk knowledge.

This study examines collocates of two near-synonyms safety and security, drawing data from two general corpora (BNC Written and COCA Written) and one self-built specialized corpus (IMO Corpus). Collocates are extracted by Wordsmith 6.0; then a network analysis is given on some interesting collocates. Firstly, diachronic analysis exhibits a stable usage of safety whereas two big leaps of security in 1920-1930 and in 2000. In addition, it has been discovered that some generalizations made by industrial and information fields cannot be applied to the maritime-related words in a specialized corpus. Specifically, non-maritime-related general collocates tend to show very clear preference on safety and security in IMO corpus whereas maritime-related words have various behaviors when collocating with safety and security. Thirdly, network analysis by Netminer 4.0 is given on some shared interesting collocates such as maritime and ship, providing the brokerage role analysis for the differences between safety and security. At last, a semantic domain network analysis is displayed to explain how near-synonyms are different and similar based on their common and exclusive semantic domains.

Song lyrics reflect the society linguistically and ideologically and in turn have a social and linguistic power to influence the society. Thus, lyrics can be used to gain insights into social beliefs, namely gender representations and stereotypes. This study sets out to investigate the representations of male and female in lyrics using a corpus-based approach. Focusing on the lemmas GIRL, WOMAN, BOY, and MAN, it examines what these gender-marked items refer to and the way males and females are portrayed in hip-hop and country music. The results show that the lemmas refer to a number of different things that are not limited to their literal meanings. In fact, some of them may not even be easily found in the definitions provided in the dictionary. Although they frequently refer to adult males and females in the lyrics of both types of music, it was revealed that some uses of the lemmas were unique to a particular music genre. Additionally, stereotypical representations of gender seem to prevail in song lyrics; although some differences can be found across music genres, females are often sexually objectified and are associated with beauty and emotional intemperance whereas males are portrayed as active, aggressive, and confident. This suggests that, as a type of text that reflects social beliefs, lyrics can be useful for raising awareness of the aspects of society, such as prevalent gender stereotypes. Therefore, lyrics may be used as an authentic material that contains rich sociolinguistic information on gender representations for linguistic and cultural lessons.

This article examines the relationship between sentential subjectival position and sentential syntactic complexity using the written section of the ICE-GB as the data source. The information the subject bears is generally regarded as given, with new information provided by other functional classes after it. This means that generally the part of the sentence after the verb would more elaborate, hence longer, than the one before it, manifesting the principle of end weight. Since the English language is basically an SVO language, this seems to suggest that the position of the subject in the sentence would have a certain relationship with sentence length, hence sentence complexity. The result shows the relationship between sentential syntactic complexity and sentential structural variation in number of sentences with different structures is bell-shaped, which can be described with Nemcová and Serdelová’s synonyms and word length model. The sentential subjects appear in 46 different positions in the sentence, but the predominant position is sentence initial. Generally, the sentential subjectival position is an indicator of sentential syntactic complexity; the larger the sentential subjectival position, the more syntactically complex the sentence. This phenomenon, apart from rhetorical and stylistic reasons, is due to the principle of end weight and communication dynamism in the sentence.

This paper investigated English modal auxiliary verbs can and may in three East Asian EFL learners’ writings (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). For the investigation, two different types of corpora were adopted. One is the ICE-USA corpus which included the writings of the English as a Native Language (ENL) speakers and the TOEFL11 corpus which contained the writings of the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Among the eleven sections of the TOEFL11 corpus, three components were selected in the analysis. This paper was theoretically based on Bates and MacWhinney’s Competition Model (1982, 1989), and four language models were statistically constructed. These models were constructed as follows. From the four different corpora, all the sentences with can and may were extracted, and twenty linguistic factors were manually encoded. Then, the statistical models were constructed based on the encoded corpus data, and similarities and differences were analyzed in the statistical models. Two different types of statistical analyses were adopted. One was a logistic regression, and the other was a Behavioural Profiles analysis. Through the analysis, the following facts were observed: (i) six linguistic factors were involved in the choice of alternation, (ii) eight linguistic factors were interact with L1 which made three East Asian EFL learners’ writings non-native, and (iii) the uses of can and may by the three East Asian EFL learners were different from those of the ENL speakers.

Recent years have witnessed increasing attention to L2 creative writing not only in language classrooms but also in various disciplinary settings, in this case, an English scriptwriting module for Chinese university students doing Communication Studies. This text-based L2 writing study investigates the stylistic characteristics emerging from 54 pieces of film scripts written in English submitted by the students upon completion of the module. The above investigation is done through comparison of the student scripts to 16 selected professional English film scripts representing different genres. The particular pedagogical approaches for this scriptwriting module are briefly explained. Nevertheless, the study is corpus-driven. It utilises Keyword analysis (Scott, 2015) and Key Semantic Domain analysis (Rayson, 2008) to locate noticeable ideological and discoursal features of the student scripts particularly concerning: the attempts at dramatic tension; effort at visual details; and deviation from conventions of scriptwriting in English. Two focal students were selected to see the trajectories of changes regarding individual writers’ textual features throughout the workshops to the final film script. The above is facilitated by Cluster analysis which reveals ‘local textual functions’ (Mahlberg, 2007). In addition, qualitative interpretation of the focal students’ writing and their reflective comments was also performed. The results hold pedagogical implications particularly regarding: the modelling of certain stylistic aspects of English scriptwriting; and the design of more targeted future ESL/EFL scriptwriting course in China.

The purpose of this presentation is to examine the use of connectors in English writing of Korean undergraduate students. Compared with intermediate or advanced level English writers in EFL contexts, not much has been explored in what beginning EFL writers tend to do in their writing. In this study, the authors aim to find out what types of connectors are most widely used (i.e., additive, causal/ resultative and sequential) by the beginning Korean writers of English and whether or not they are influenced by their L1 use. The participants will be 40 sophomores who are taking the pre-intermediate English writing course during the spring semester of 2016. As for the instruments, the questionnaire survey and the pre- and the post-tests on the use of the connectives by the students will be conducted. The participants are going to write 5 different kinds of paragraphs (i.e., definition, process, description, opinion, and narration) consisting of approximately 120 words in length respectively during the 15-week semester. Because the kinds of writing the beginning participants will produce are paragraphs not essays, it is expected that the use of connectors will be somewhat limited to certain kinds. The students’ works will be analyzed in terms of the frequency of the connective use using AntCon. The results will shed light on pedagogical implications and suggestions for how to teach beginning writers the use of connectors more effectively.

The current study explores the characteristics of frequently-used multi-word expressions (i.e., lexical bundles) in spoken and written Russian. Lexical bundles are retrieved from a one million word Russian National Corpus (RNC) sample. The lexical bundles in spoken and written sub-corpora of the RNC are analyzed quantitatively regarding discourse functions of reference expressions, stance bundles, and discourse organizers. The analysis confirms that the spoken and written Russian corpora exhibit significantly different lexical bundle distribution patterns: there are more referential expressions in written Russian; while there are more stance bundles in spoken Russian. The study also suggests future study calling more in-depth investigation for developing language-specific discourse functions.

SOLAS Convention, as the most important international maritime treaty regulating ship safety, sets up the minimum safety levels for construction, equipment and operation. Due to the development of technology, safety understanding and management, all three safety standards are undergoing revision over time. This paper aims to explore and explain the trend of these changing standards by employing a keyword analysis on SOLAS Convention based on the idea that keywords are indicative of changes in writing style, which can ultimately be linked back to social change. To achieve this objective, five consolidated versions of SOLAS Convention covering the period from 1974 to 2015 were targeted to collect data. Keywords of three safety standards in each version were extracted respectively using WordSmith tools. For discovering the degree of diachronic changes in each safety standard, statistical measures like frequency count and type-token ratio were adopted to compare the lexical distribution and density of each keyword list. The findings suggest that all three safety standards have been revised over time and the changes vary in terms of degree and content. This study is believed to be useful for understanding the safety concerns in maritime industry and to contribute to the literature in the diachronic research conducted by keyword-based approach.

Vocabulary is one of the crucial factors for students’ academic comprehension (Anderson, 2008; Grabe, 2009; Laufer, 1992; Nation, 2001; Qian, 2002). Thus, academic vocabulary lists have been created for research and materials of English as a foreign language (EFL) and English for specific purpose (ESP). Although the academic vocabulary lists have been widely used, few studies have probed into the reliability of the lists. Miller and Biber (2015) pointed out this gap and suggested that the reliability of word lists would be investigated by simply dividing a corpus into random smaller sub-corpora. A thirty-million-word corpus was created with 900 academic articles across nine disciplines of humanity, social sciences and sciences. Then the corpus was divided into two sub-corpora and sixteen criteria sets of register frequency, range, discipline measurement and dispersion were applied to each sub-corpus for vocabulary list creation. The replicability of the vocabulary lists was examined to find a set of criteria extracting the most reliable vocabulary list. The results showed that the combination of the lenient register frequency and discipline measurement, and the strict dispersion was the most desirable condition to create a reliable academic vocabulary list. This result was similar to Gardner and Davies (2012)’ methodology to create their vocabulary list called Academic Vocabulary List, but does not show the impact of range on the replicability of an academic vocabulary list. The implications and limitations were also addressed.