This book presents a novel analysis of the word-order alternation of English transitive phrasal verbs (Particle Movement) from a cognitive-functional and psycholinguistic perspective. Its main objective, however, is a methodological one, namely, to demonstrate the superiority of corpus-based, multifactorial and probabilistic approaches to grammatical phenomena over traditional analyses based on acceptability judgements and minimal pair tests. The advantages resulting from the advocated multifactorial approach to Particle Movement are: Particle Movement can be described at a previously unknown level of detail; all determinants ever proposed to govern the alternation can be integrated into a single hypothesis explaining the alternation; constructions can be compared to each other with respect to their degree of prototypicality and similarity; it is possible to actually predict with a high degree of accuracy which of the two word orders native speakers will subconsciously choose in the natural production of speech and text (thereby passing the most rigorous test conceivable); finally, competing hypotheses can be compared in terms of their predictive power. Apart from these methodological points, the study also addresses the more theoretical and linguistic question of how to explain such results. It is argued that theories of language production that rest on the notion of processing effort are, contrary to some contemporary analysts, not ideally suited to explain such phenomena and that interactive activation models of language production allow for a more elegant interpretation and implementation of the results.

"Corpus Linguistics in Language Teaching" are derived from the International Seminar, New Trends in Corpus Linguistics for Language Teaching and Translation Studies: In Honour of John Sinclair, organised jointly by the research projects ADELEX (HUM2007-61766, University of Granada) and ECPC (HUM2005-03756, University Jaume I, Castellon), in Granada on 22--24 September 2008."

The standard scientific methodology in linguistics is empirical testing of falsifiable hypotheses. As such the process of hypothesis generation is central, and involves formulation of a research question about a domain of interest and statement of a hypothesis relative to it. In corpus linguistics the domain is text, and generation involves abstraction of data from text, data analysis, and formulation of a hypothesis based on inference from the results. Traditionally this process has been paper-based, but the advent of electronic text has increasingly rendered it obsolete both because the size of digital corpora is now at or beyond the limit of what can efficiently be used in the traditional way, and because the complexity of data abstracted from them can be impenetrable to understanding. Linguists are increasingly turning to mathematical and statistical computational methods for help, and cluster analysis is such a method. It is used across the sciences for hypothesis generation by identification of structure in data which are too large or complex, or both, to be interpretable by direct inspection. This book aims to show how cluster analysis can be used for hypothesis generation in corpus linguistics, thereby contributing to a quantitative empirical methodology for the discipline.

The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (CHECL) surveys the breadth of corpus-based linguistic research on English, including chapters on collocations, phraseology, grammatical variation, historical change, and the description of registers and dialects. The most innovative aspects of the CHECL are its emphasis on critical discussion, its explicit evaluation of the state of the art in each sub-discipline, and the inclusion of empirical case studies. While each chapter includes a broad survey of previous research, the primary focus is on a detailed description of the most important corpus-based studies in this area, with discussion of what those studies found, and why they are important. Each chapter also includes a critical discussion of the corpus-based methods employed for research in this area, as well as an explicit summary of new findings and discoveries.

The first textbook of its kind, Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R demonstrates how to use the open source programming language R for corpus linguistic analyses. Computational and corpus linguists doing corpus work will find that R provides an enormous range of functions that currently require several programs to achieve – searching and processing corpora, arranging and outputting the results of corpus searches, statistical evaluation, and graphing.

This volume offers new insights into figurative language and its pervasive role as a factor of linguistic change. The case studies included in this book explore some of the different ways new metaphoric and metonymic expressions emerge and spread among speech communities, and how these changes can be related to the need to encode ongoing social and cultural processes in the language. They cover a wide series of languages and historical stages.

The study of how words are represented and processed in the mind has served as a meeting ground for research in psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. Right now, this domain of study is in the midst of astonishing developments. At the core of these developments are the methodological and analytic advancements that have enabled researchers to address new phenomena and to ask new questions. These new methodologies have also raised fundamental questions concerning the nature of words in the mind, the nature of language processing, and the ways in which data can be understood. This book provides a timely resource written by international leaders in methodological innovation. It offers fundamental insights into how innovative methodological approaches advance lexical research. It also offers the technical knowledge that is essential to that advancement, but which is rarely found in journal reports. This is a methodologically oriented volume designed to be informative, thought provoking, innovative, and perhaps also revolutionary. The contributions in this volume that originally appeared in The Mental Lexicon 5:3 (2010) and 6:1 (2011) are supplemented with several new chapters, as well as with a new and timely introductory chapter titled "Embracing Complexity".