Individuals, Groups, and Corpora

主讲人：Michael Barlow教授

时间：2018年10月17号周三下午2:30 -- 4:00

地点：如心楼806

专家简介：

Michael Barlow is associate professor andPh.D supervisor at the University of Auckland in 2004. His main researchinterests involve the analysis of large text databases in order to increase ourunderstanding of the cognitive representation of language (a usage-basedperspective) and to make progress in understanding L2 acquisition and improvinglanguage teaching. As part of that endeavour, he has been creating textanalysis software (MonoConc, ParaConc, Collocate, and more recetly WordSkew). He is on the editorial boards for the International Journal ofCorpus Linguistics, Studies in Corpus Linguistics, Routledge FrequencyDictionary Series, and the English Language Research Journal and is founderof the Asia-Pacific Corpus Linguistics Association. He has published prodigiously and has been invited to give talks at alarge number of academic conferences and universities across the world.

内容简介：

Frequencydata arising from corpus studies have been used to enrich our understanding ofgrammar as a network of lexicogrammatical structures. However, what thegrammars based on corpus data actually represent tends not to be confronted inan explicit manner. For instance, we can ask whether the grammar represents thelanguage of a particular social group or the language of an individual, perhapsidealized.

In this presentation I will take some small steps in approachingthese issues about the nature of grammar by examining samples of the spokenoutput of five White House Press Secretaries, paying attention to the natureand extent of individual differences in production. While there are manyidiosyncratic differences in grammar and style in the speech of individuals,the aim here is to investigate very frequent components of grammar. In thisstudy, we can examine differences in the distribution of the most commonbigrams in spoken usage. The results show that even with these common bigramssuch as of the, there are major distinctions in usage bydifferent press secretaries and we find that the inter-speaker variation for arange of bigrams is much greater than the intra-speaker variation. The resultspose interesting questions concerning the relationship between the language ofthe individual and the language of the group and for the representation ofgrammar in relation to production and comprehension processes.