Review in ICAME Journal, Volume 40, 2016, DOI: 10.
1515/icame-2016-0009
Douglas Biber and Randi Reppen (eds.). The Cambridge handbook of English
corpus linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 639 pp.
ISBN 978-1-107-03738-0 (hardback). Reviewed by Adam Smith, Macquarie
University.
This addition to the Cambridge Handbook series presents an expansive cover-
age of the achievements and potential of corpus linguistics as a research
approach over a wide range of subdisciplines. In their Introduction, Biber and
Reppen write that it is, unlike other textbooks and handbooks available in the
area, “a critical discussion of the ‘state of the art’ rather than an introductory
overview of the field in general” (p. 4). It is designed for practising scholars and
advanced students, focussing on descriptions of landmark studies in each area,
as well as providing an empirical case study in each chapter, to demonstrate the
application of corpus techniques.
The book is organized in four parts. The first presents a set of methodologi-
cal considerations, in the form of an introduction to corpora, a survey of compu-
tational tools for corpus compilation and analysis, and a summary of statistical
techniques available for the interrogation of corpus data. Part II looks at corpus
analysis of linguistic characteristics, from discourse intonation to collocation/
phraseology, grammar, discourse analysis and pragmatics. The third section is
concerned with the analysis of varieties, of register and genre as well as across
dialects, world Englishes and learner language. The final section is a miscellany,
covering applications of corpus use as diverse as lexicography, pedagogy and
translation.
Davies’s introductory chapter surveys the kinds of research that can be car-
ried out in different classes of corpora, going from the smaller Brown family to
larger genre-balanced corpora like the BNC and his own Corpus of Contempo-
rary American English (COCA), to massive text archives like Lexis-Nexis and
Google Books, and the Web as a corpus. He offers the intriguing prospect that,
with access to data and biodata from social media, and improved processing
speeds, researchers may soon be able to “examine the use of a particular word,
or phrase, or syntactic construction virtually in real time” (p. 30). Rayson’s
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chapter on corpus compilation and analysis takes a similarly positive approach
to the technological developments that have occurred over corpus linguistics’
brief history, charting the evolution of tools for compilation, annotation and
retrieval. Rayson sees the need for improved visualization techniques, given the
amount of data now available to be analysed, but predicts that methods devel-
oped in corpus linguistics will have an impact on other text-based disciplines in
the social sciences. Gries, on the other hand, sees corpus linguistics lagging
behind disciplines such as psychology or sociology when it comes to statistical
methods, and is openly critical of the approach of some previous studies. It is
hard to argue with his assertion that a knowledge of important concepts such as
dispersion, and informed application of statistical techniques, is essential for
such a data-driven area of linguistics. However, given the range of academic
areas where corpora are used, as attested by this volume, a rather friendlier pre-
sentation of the tools available would have assisted Gries’ promotion of statis-
tics. For example, the formula for calculating relative entropy is presented early
in the chapter, with only a cursory explanation of how it works. Compare this
with Xiao’s careful unpacking of formulae used to calculate statistically signifi-
cant collocations in a later chapter.
Part II of the handbook is organized as a progression of lexical levels, from
prosody, through lexical characteristics (keywords, collocations and phraseol-
ogy), followed by four chapters on aspects of grammar, then concluding with
corpus-based studies of discourse functions and pragmatics. This structure
means that the opening chapter, on discourse intonation, addresses an area that is
relatively poorly served by existing corpora – although Cheng’s case study on
the use of prominence on pronouns, using the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken
English, demonstrates the rich possibilities that prosodically transcribed corpora
can offer. In contrast, the lexically-based chapters (by Culpeper and Demmen;
Xiao; Gray and Biber) can point to large existing fields of research, and great
progress in the development of analytical tools, particularly to identify units of
meaning. Corpus research has had a profound influence on many linguists’
approach to grammar, in reassessing its relationship to the lexis and showing
how it can vary across regions and genres, and change over time. The chapters
here on descriptive grammar (Leech), grammatical variation (Kolbe-Hanna
and Szmrecsanyi), grammatical change (Hilpert and Mair) and lexical gram-
mar (Hunston) give a very thorough overview of this influence, and present a
range of corpus approaches, including the use of the Oxford English dictionary’s
quotation database as a means of charting diachronic change. The final three
chapters in this section apply corpus methodologies to areas of linguistics that
have traditionally been areas of qualitative rather than quantitative study – dis-
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course analysis and pragmatics. The authors (Partington and Marchi; Clancy
and O’Keeffe; and Taavitsainen) look at the ways in which corpus linguistics
can and has added value to previous approaches.
Part III is concerned with the analysis of varieties, looking at the area of reg-
ister variation in general (Conrad), diachronic change (Kytö and Smitterberg),
as well as particular registers such as spoken (Staples), written academic
(Hyland) and literary (Mahlberg). Biber’s multidimensional analysis model is
a feature of several of these studies, as a means of differentiating register-spe-
cific characteristics. As Conrad notes, corpus-based research is particularly well
suited to the study of register variation, with most well-designed corpora provid-
ing representative samples of registers. The question of regional variation is
then covered by Grieve (on dialect variation), Hundt (on World Englishes),
Mauranen, Carey and Ranta (on English as a lingua franca), and finally the
question of learner language as a variety is addressed by Gilquin and Granger.
Again, these studies are well-served by a wide range of existing corpora, from
the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED), to the many varieties of English
represented in the International Corpus of English (ICE), and then the ICLE,
focussing on learner English. It is a slight disappointment that Hundt’s chapter
concentrating, as it does, on ICE – because of the structural comparability of its
corpora – does not investigate the possibilities (and drawbacks) to the study of
World Englishes presented by the recently published Corpus of Global Web-
based English (GloWbE).
Part IV, on “other applications of corpus analysis” presents corpus research
into a variety of areas that do not quite fit under a common heading, but are nev-
ertheless central to the development of corpus linguistics. Martinez and
Schmitt look at vocabulary lists such as West’s General Service List, and Cox-
head’s Academic Word List, and discuss how newer versions of these lists have
applied more refined corpus techniques in an attempt to enhance their useful-
ness. Corpora have long informed the making of dictionaries, and Paquot con-
centrates on an area where dictionaries still have a way to go – in their coverage
of phraseology. Paquot suggests future developments where corpora will be
more closely integrated into dictionaries to present patterns of word usage rele-
vant to the user’s interest. Two studies of pedagogical use of corpora follow –
classroom applications of corpus analysis (Cobb and Boulton) and the effect
that corpora have on the presentation of grammar in pedagogical materials
(Meunier and Reppen). The final chapter takes us beyond the book’s central
focus on English to look at issues of translation such as simplification, normal-
ization and conservatism of language (Bernadini).
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The most innovative feature of this volume, the inclusion of an empirical
case study demonstrating corpus methodology, is addressed quite differently by
different authors. A few chapters do not include one, for instance Leech’s on
descriptive grammar, which restricts itself to an overview to the contributions of
corpus linguistics to the description of grammar, and acts as an introduction to
the following chapters on grammatical variation, grammatical change and lexi-
cal grammar. Those that do, vary in their approaches, with some presenting
brand new studies, such as those on forced primings in a discourse analysis of
White House briefings by Partington and Marchi, and another by Hyland
looking at author identity in academic writing. There are several chapters where
previous work is summarized or built on, as in Culpeper and Demmen’s dem-
onstration of the use of keywords in a semantic domain analysis of Romeo and
Juliet, and Kytö and Smitterberg’s discussion of a study of the use of thou vs.
you across different registers in Early Modern English. Some of the empirical
studies are not based on the analysis of corpus data, notably the chapters on ped-
agogical applications of corpora, with one providing a meta-analysis of existing
studies on the effect on different modes of learning of the use of corpora (Cobb
and Boulton), another comparing the treatment of the passive between non-cor-
pus and corpus-informed grammars (Meunier and Reppen). This variety of
approaches serves to enhance an appreciation of the range of studies possible
within the field of corpus linguistics, although sometimes – particularly in
pieces of original research – we get a sense that the author is too constricted by
space to provide a full account of their material. This is evident in Kolbe-
Hanna and Szmrecsanyi’s case study on the variation in the use of the comple-
mentizer that across different dialect areas in Britain, where a lot of the detail of
the analysis has to be condensed into an extended footnote. Also, in the spoken
discourse chapter, Staples gives us a whole range of interesting data on stance
features found at different phases of nurse-patient interactions, but no summary
conclusions on the findings are presented.
Another element of each chapter is the survey of existing literature, and the
state of the art for each field. The promise of the Introduction is that each chap-
ter will present a discussion of “the most important studies” (p. 6) in each area,
which is again a challenge within the limited space available. One approach that
comes across as being particularly useful, especially to researchers new to a
field, is the presentation of summary tables relating researchers/papers to areas
of interest within a field. These are provided in several chapters, including Gray
and Biber’s on phraseology, and Conrad’s on register variation.
There are a few additions/improvements that could have been considered to
make this work a little more user-friendly. One would be a glossary. As previ-
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ously noted, there are issues over terminology as fundamental to the field as reg-
ister and genre. Add to this various clearly technical statistical terms that may be
unfamiliar to even experienced corpus linguists, and potential confusion over
the use of phrases such as corpus-driven/corpus-based versus top-down/bottom-
up, and the case for a consolidated glossary is quite strong. Also, a more com-
prehensive list of corpora than the short summary of “major corpora cited in the
handbook” would be a valuable tool. It is not clear what quality allows a corpus
to be classified as “major” (size, frequency of use/mention?), but there are many
others cited that are the basis for important research, and most users of this
handbook would be glad of a ready reference to find those most relevant to
them. Finally, while this is a very well-produced book, with the numerous tables
and figures usually clearly presented to convey complex information, occasion-
ally some reproductions of search outputs that are designed for a screen inter-
face do not render so clearly in print.
But these are minor quibbles. This volume is dedicated to the memory of
Geoffrey Leech, and its comprehensiveness and quality are fitting testament to
his innovation and versatility as a linguist. It is a handbook in a very practical
sense, demonstrating the many applications of corpus linguistic techniques. This
relatively new approach to research has already made huge strides in providing a
set of ever more sophisticated tools for enhancing our understanding of lan-
guage. The Cambridge handbook of English corpus linguistics not only charts
the important achievements already made, but sets a template and highlights the
potential for future developments in the field that will allow a still greater range
of work to be done.
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