The present paper attempts to synthesize results from two independent lines of corpus-based research: One focused on grammatical complexity, and the second focused on the expression of stance. The paper begins by describing an unexpected pattern of use in conversational discourse: Despite the fact that conversation is co-constructed by multiple participants, producing language in real-time and discussing personal topics, it is characterized by an extremely dense use of dependent clauses. Corpus-based findings regarding the use of stance expressions are less surprising, showing how stance devices are more commonly used in conversation than in academic writing. The main focus of the present paper is to explore the intersection between these two lines of research, showing how many grammatically complex structures in conversation are used to support the functional prominence given to the expression of stance in that register. That is, utterances in conversation often involve two grammatical components, with an idea or a report of an action occurring as the dependent clause, and an expression of stance occurring as the main clause that provides the interpretive frame for the information in the dependent clause. As a result, it is not a coincidence that personal expressions of stance as well as complex grammatical structures are both so prevalent in conversational discourse.

The paper reports on part of a larger scale collaborative and interdisciplinary project among English Applied Studies, Land Surveying and Geo-informatics, and utility specialists industry in engineering in Hong Kong. The present study interviewed 36 utility specialists in Hong Kong to find out their understanding of and perceived importance of communicative competences in English situated in their professional workplaces. The corpora created from the interview data were analysed in several complementary and inter-connected ways, namely word lists, concgram lists, and key semantic fields, to ascertain the kinds of meanings or topical concerns and themes expressed by the professionals when they talked about different types of competences in communication, namely linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse, strategic, socio-cultural, and social in their workplace. The project has also achieved effective outcomes in terms of knowledge sharing and exchange with the industry.

This paper discusses the utilization of multi-dimensional (MD) analysis (Biber, 1988; 1995) to examine linguistic variation in learner speech represented by transcribed interviews from the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI). LINDSEI is the first large-scale corpus of spoken learner English with sub-corpora of interview responses from eleven different mother-tongue backgrounds. The primary goals of this study are: to extract and identify the linguistic dimensions of learner speech from LINDSEI, to functionally interpret these dimensions, and to compare how these dimensions are distributed across speakers’ eleven first language backgrounds. Results show that the four primary functional dimensions of learner speech are: Involved Conversational Style vs. Informational Production; Complex Statement of Opinion; Formal, Academic Focus of Discussion vs. Informal, Non-Academic Discourse; and Personal Narrative Prose vs. Non-Narrative Discourse. Interesting differences are observed in how these dimensions are used by learners across first language backgrounds and interview tasks.

This article provides a systematic account of collocational use in Chinese EFL learners’ oral production and explores some of the issues involved, by adopting a corpus-based error analysis approach. The distribution of six types of collocational errors extracted from two sizeable Chinese learner English corpora shows that verb-noun collocations pose the greatest difficulty for Chinese learners. An exploration of the correlation between the learners’ English proficiency and collocational performance finds that the learners’ knowledge of collocation has not developed alongside their knowledge of vocabulary in general. Our further descriptive and diagnostic analyses of verb-noun errors indicate that 1) Chinese EFL learners have the greatest difficulty with the verbs when using verb-noun collocations; 2) the learners’ use of nouns is also not satisfactory; 3) due attention should be paid to the inappropriate use of the non-lexical elements (prepositions and articles); and 4) the main causes of verb-noun collocational errors include L1 transfer, assumed synonyms, overgeneralization and misselection of the target word. It is suggested that university English teaching in China should attach more importance to the examination and diagnosis of collocational errors and also integrate learner-centered, corpus-based methods into vocabulary teaching.

This research describes an attempt to establish a pedagogically useful list of the most frequent formulaic sequences for engineering undergraduates who need to read the textbooks of their fields in English. The Engineering English Formulae/Formulaic Sequences List (EEFL) was derived from a corpus containing 4.57 million tokens of one hundred college textbooks across twenty engineering subjects. In consideration of formulae for widespread use and pedagogical relevance, a series of criteria were applied. Comparable to a list of 1,000 high-frequency individual words, a total of 1,000 two- to six-word sequences were selected into the EEFL and they accounted for 25.73% of the running words in the Engineering Textbook Corpus. The EEFL, not highly technical in nature, contains the most commonly-used multi-word units traversing the subfields of the engineering domain and engineering majors may encounter these word sequences very often. For matriculating engineering students, the present EEFL and the EEWL (Engineering English Word List common to engineering subjects) may be mutually complementary in providing a pathway to the engineering register and may be helpful for ESP teachers without a background of science and technology when preparing engineering English teaching materials for an EST course required by most engineering-related departments.