In this article we examine gender differences in the spoken usage using a selection of files from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our aim is twofold. First, to report on some similarities and differences in the words and phrases used by men and women in conversation. Secondly, we address some methodological issues related to the study of gender and to corpus linguistics research in general. In particular, we aim to address what we call the “bag of words, bag of people’ problem. In many studies a corpus is treated as a bag of words in common techniques such as a keyword analysis. Such frequency-based analyses have led to many discoveries about the nature of language, but the backgrounding of discourse and text structure is problematic in obscuring some patterns of language usage. In addition, corpora are necessarily compiled using the language output of many individuals---a bag of people---and the individual contributions, and hence variation in usage, are often overlooked. These issues are explored with reference to some linguistic elements known to potentially sensitive to gender variation.

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.