Eric Atwell

The good ship ‘ICAME’ is sailing on. Not only are the proceedings of the annual conferences usually published; but there have recently also been a number of festschrifts and other collections devoted to corpus linguistics in general and work by ICAME regulars in particular. So the body of literature which the present volume − essentially the proceedings of the twelfth ICAME conference staged at Ilkley/Leeds in 1991 − has been added to has grown to considerable proportions. Over the years ICAME meetings have provided a forum for diverse and not always easily compatible interests. This is reflected in the tripartite division of the present volume. Part 1, ‘Corpus collection, annotation and standards,’ with contributions by Bauer, Greenbaum, Meyer/Tenney, Burnard, Knowles and Piepenbrock, deals with the progress made in individual corpus projects or with general issues arising in the compilation of corpora and language databases. Part 2, ‘Corpus applications in linguistics,’ represents the philological side of the field, with papers by Wichmann, Schmied, (Christine) Johansson, Noel, Wikberg and de Haan exploring fine points in English structure and usage with the help of available corpora. Part 3, ‘Corpus-based syntactic and semantic analysis software,’ with contributions from Gorman/Hardy, Souter, Atwell, Wilson/Rayson, Guthrie, Cowie and Meijs, discusses advances in tagging and parsing. In a short review it is obviously impossible to discuss the individual contributions in detail. This is bad but not entirely disastrous as many of them are progress reports on projects already familiar from previous ICAME proceedings. In what follows, I shall essentially provide some selective comment where I consider it useful. In terms of novelty, the highlight of Part 1 is Laurie Bauer’s introduction to the long-awaited Wellington corpus, the New Zealand Brown/LOB clone. Discussing a selection of usage problems, Bauer shows that our knowledge of New Zealand English norms is minimal and likely to be extended greatly through corpus-based research, but at the same time ICAME Journal No. 18