System and Corpus

Geoff Thompson is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the University of Liverpool, UK Susan Hunston is Professor of English Language at the University of Birmingham, UK

This book is the first to combine interests in two currently popular approaches to language description, both of which are based on the observation of naturally-occurring, as opposed to invented, language. Systemic Functional Linguistics is a theory that focuses on meaning, choice and probability in language and on language as a social phenomenon. Corpus Linguistics is a practice, rather than a theory: a corpus is a large collection of texts that are used as the basis for language description. It is natural that SFL should turn to corpora as a source of information about grammatical preference, probability and variety, and some of the papers in this collection explore this dimension of the interaction between system and corpus. Conversely, corpus linguists have made generalisations about language that contextualize but also challenge the assumptions of SFL. Some of the papers in the collection expand on this theme. A concluding paper by M.A.K. Halliday responds to the issues raised. The book will therefore be of interest to students and researchers involved in either of these two influential topics in linguistics.

Susan Hunston & Geoff Thompson: Introduction; Michael Stubbs: Corpus analysis: the state of the art and three types of unanswered questions; Michael Hoey: Language as choice: what is chosen?; Susan Hunston: Phraseology and system: a contribution to the debate; Gordon Tucker: Systemic incorporation: on the relationship between corpus and Systemic Functional Grammar; Christian Matthiessen: Systemic functional profiles of system and text: investigations based on texts, text archives and corpora; Amy Neale: Matching Corpus Data and System Networks; Anthony Baldry and Paul Thibault: Multimodal corpus linguistics; Motoko Hori: The paradigm of pain expressions in Japanese; Pattama Patpong: A corpus-based study of the conjunction ko:3 in Thai: an exploration of textual resource; Martin Kaltenbacher: Exploring culture related linguistic differences in tourist board web-sites: the emotive and the factual; Serge Sharoff: How to handle lexical semantics in SFL: a corpus study of purposes for using size adjectives; Donna Miller: Appraising 'giving' in a small corpus of Alma Mater donation requests, or what the standard concordance line will/won't tell us; M A K Halliday: Afterwords