Corpus linguistics

Corpora of children’s spontaneous speech production and the input that they hear are essential to research how children learn language.

We use existing corpora in the CHILDES database as well as purpose-built corpora to inform and extend our experimental work on children’s acquisition of sound structure, morphology, syntax and interaction.

Three of the audio (and/or video) corpora available on the CHILDES database were developed by researchers now at Macquarie:

• The Providence (English) Database
• The Lyon (French) Database
• the Demuth Sesotho Corpus.

We use natural language corpora to study many kinds of social contexts, including:

• media and political discourse
• clinical consultations in medicine and psychotherapy
• literary texts.

We draw on both specialised register-specific corpora (where the data comes from one kind of social context), as well as large multi-generic corpora, such as the British National Corpus.

A number of researchers working in the focus area language variation and change make use of synchronic and diachronic corpora to investigate how languages vary in different settings and across time.

Corpora can be used to investigate variation not just in what people say but how they say it.

AusTalk is a large state-of-the-art database of spoken Australian English from all around the country. Collected from 2011-2016, almost a thousand adults with ages ranging from 18 to 83 from 15 different locations in all states and territories were recorded.

AusTalk represents regional and social diversity and linguistic variation of Australian English, including Australian Aboriginal English. Each speaker was audio and video recorded on three separate occasions to sample their voice in a range of scripted and spontaneous speech situations at various times.

Access AusTalk through Alveo.

We use different corpora of student writing to search for and investigate the micro- (lexico-grammatical) and macro-level (generic and rhetorical) features of discipline-specific genres.

The outcomes of the student writing corpus research will help different stakeholders in academia and beyond to deal with issues related to academic communication and literacy.

We also intend to develop local student writing corpora to complement ones such as the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus.

We use electronic corpora and quantitative corpus linguistic methods to analyse the linguistic features that set translated language apart from non-translated language.

We try to 'fingerprint' what makes translated language different from language that has not been translated, and develop hypotheses about the cognitive and social constraints that give rise to these features.

We also use corpus methods to investigate a variety of other research questions in translation and interpreting, including translation style and ideology in translation.

ICE (the International Corpus of English) has greatly facilitated study into the convergence and divergence of Englishes around the world. It currently contains 23 equivalent one-million-word corpora of both spoken and written English for regions including:

• Australia
• Great Britain
• Hong Kong
• India
• Jamaica
• New Zealand
• the Philippines
• South Africa.

For features that require larger amounts of data, the GloWbE (Global Web-based English) corpus provides multi-million-word collections of written text.

The following corpora were collected at Macquarie and are available to researchers on request:

• ACE (Australian Corpus of English)
• ICE-AUS, the Australian component of ICE
• ART (Australian Radio Talkback corpus).

This project uses newly compiled comparable historical corpora of the British, Australian and South African Hansard to investigate how written English usage changes over time in three varieties of English.

This project is funded under a Macquarie University Research Development Grant (MQRDG 2017-2018).

This project investigates how regional varieties develop their local features while in contact with neighbouring varieties and 'super varieties' (such as American and British English).

The research will examine written, spoken and online discussion data from corpus collections of varieties of English such as Australian, Indian, New Zealand and Sri Lankan, so as to test whether more formal registers of writing (eg parliamentary records, newspapers) are more or less receptive to international English than informal conversation or online interaction.

This project is funded by a Universities Australia/DAAD grant (2018-2019) in partnership with the Justus Liebig University Giessen.

This project, initiated in 2006 and still very active, uses specialised corpora to find headwords and provide definitions for online termbanks focusing on:

• academic areas for first-year students on TermFinder
• the needs of the general public, in the areas of family law on LawTermFinder and cancer treatment on HealthTermFinder.