Geoffrey Leech

Paul Rayson

Andrew (All Of Lancaster University) Wilson

Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English is a landmark volume in the development of vocabulary frequency studies. Whereas previous books have in general given frequency information about the written language only, this book provides information on both speech and writing. It not only gives information about the language as a whole, but also about the differences between spoken and written English, and between different spoken and written varieties of the language. The frequencies are derived from a wide ranging and up-to-date corpus of English: the British National Corpus, which was compiled from over 4,000 written texts and spoken transcriptions representing the present day language in the UK. The book is based on a new version of the corpus (available from 2001) providing more accurate grammatical information, which is essential (for example) for distinguishing words like leaves (noun) and leaves (verb) with different meanings. The book begins with a general introduction, explaining why such information is important and highlighting interesting linguistic findings that emerge from the statistical analysis of the British National Corpus vocabulary. It also contains twenty four 'interest boxes' which highlight and comment on different aspects of frequency - for example, the most common colour words in English in order of frequency, and a comparison of male words (e.g. man) and female words (e.g. woman) in terms of their frequency.

based on the British National Corpus

Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English

Andrew Wilson

Dawn Archer

This volume contains a selection of the papers delivered at the Corpus Linguistics 2003 conference, held at Lancaster University in April 2003. The papers selected address a wide range of world languages - Basque, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Maltese, Russian, Spanish, and Slovene. Both synchronic and diachronic studies are included, as well as studies of learner language. In addition to mainstream linguistic analyses of phonetics, vocabulary, syntax, semantics, and rhetoric, application areas covered in the volume include financial forecasting, cross-cultural research, corpus processing, and language teaching.

Corpus Linguistics Around the World

Tony McEnery

Richard Xiao

A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese is an invaluable tool for all learners of Mandarin Chinese, providing a list of the 5,000 words and the 2,000 Chinese characters (simplified) most commonly used in the language. Based on a fifty-million-word corpus composed of spoken, fiction, non-fiction and news texts in current use, the dictionary provides the user with a detailed frequency-based list, as well as alphabetical and part-of-speech indexes. All entries in the frequency list feature the English equivalent and a sample sentence with English translation. The Dictionary also contains thirty thematically organized lists of frequently used words on a variety of topics such as food, weather, travel and time expressions. A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese enables students of all levels to maximize their study of Mandarin vocabulary in an efficient and engaging way. It is also an excellent resource for teachers of the language. A CD version is available to purchase separately. Designed for use by corpus and computational linguists it provides the full text in a format that researchers can process and turn into suitable lists for their own research work.

Core Vocabulary for Learners

A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese

Elena Semino

Zsófia Demjén

Andrew Hardie

Sheila Payne

This book presents the methodology, findings and implications of a large-scale corpus-based study of the metaphors used to talk about cancer and the end of life (including care at the end of life) in the UK. It focuses on metaphor as a central linguistic and cognitive tool that is frequently used to talk and think about sensitive and subjective experiences, such as illness, emotions, death, and dying, and that can both help and hinder communication and well-being, depending on how it is used. The book centers on a combination of qualitative analyses and innovative corpus linguistic methods. This methodological assemblage was applied to the systematic study of the metaphors used in a 1.5-million-word corpus. The corpus consists of interviews with, and online forum posts written by, members of three stakeholder groups, namely: patients diagnosed with advanced cancer; unpaid carers looking after a relative with a diagnosis of advanced cancer; and healthcare professionals. The book presents a range of qualitative and quantitative findings that have implications for: metaphor theory and analysis; corpus linguistic and computational approaches to metaphor; and training and practice in cancer care and hospice, palliative and end-of-life care.

A Corpus-Based Study

Metaphor, Cancer and the End of Life

Paul Rayson

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