Approaching Language Variation through Corpora

Contents: Geoffrey Leech: Foreword - Shunji Yamazaki/Robert Sigley: Preface: Approaching Variation - Stig Johansson: Interpreting Textual Distribution: Social and Situational Factors - Robert Sigley: Assessing Corpus Comparability Using a Formality Index: The Case of the Brown/LOB Clones - Sebastian Hoffmann/Robert Sigley: Approaching a Linguistic Variable: That-Omission in Mandative Sentences - Graeme Kennedy: Semantic Preference of High-Frequency Mental Verbs in the British National Corpus - Teruhiko Fukaya: Functional Variation in Use of Though and When Clauses - Shunji Yamazaki: Comparing Adjective Comparison across Genre and Time in Standard Varieties of Modern English - Matti Rissanen: On the Occurrence and Variation of the Adverbial Subordination Markers Þe and Þoet in Old English texts - Toshio Saito: The Syntactic Development of the Gerund in Early Modern English: A Survey Based on the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English - Yoko Iyeiri: The Verb Pray in Chaucer and Caxton - Satoru Tsukamoto: Defining Periods of Middle English by Measuring Rates of Language Change - Pam Peters: Style and Politeness: The Case of the Personal Pronoun - Masahiro Hori: Approaching Literature as a Corpus: Gender-Based Conversational Styles in Hemingway's 'Hills Like White Elephants' - Maria Stubbe: Active Listening in Conversation: Gender and the Use of Verbal Feedback.

Shunji Yamazaki has previously investigated collocations as a source of variation; adjective use in New Zealand English; and (with G. Kennedy) the influence of the indigenous language of Maori on New Zealand English. Together with T. Saito and J. Nakamura, he edited English Corpus Linguistics in Japan (2002).
Robert Sigley has previously investigated the effects of regional and institutional standards on spelling variation; the factors influencing relative pronoun choice; statistical modelling of linguistically-conditioned variation; definition and use of stylistic continua to characterize corpus texts; and (with Janet Holmes) use of gendermarking terms in occupational contexts.