The few known palatographic studies on Estonian consonants date back to the 1970s, and no research in articulatory phonetics has been practised throughout the following four decades. Recently, the Estonian EPG corpus was recorded using a contemporary EPG system. In the paper we introduce first results on contemporary palatography patterns of Estonian sonorants and compare these to results from ...

The Corpus of Contemporary American English is the first large, genre-balanced corpus of any language, which has been designed and constructed from the ground up as a ‘monitor corpus’, and which can be used to accurately track and study recent changes in the language. The 400 million words corpus is evenly divided between spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. Mo...

Historical corpora are important resources for different areas. Philology, Human Language Technology, Literary Studies, History, and Lexicography are some that benefit from them. However, compiling historical corpora is different from compiling contemporary corpora. Corpus designers have to deal with several characteristics inherent in historical texts, such as: absence of a spelling standard, ...

The English cognate object (CO) construction like laugh a nervous laugh raises intriguing analytic and empirical questions. They include (a) what kind of verb licenses the CO, (b) what is the grammatical status of the CO (including its argumenthood), and (c) what are the semantic/pragmatic contributions of the construction? In answering these questions and to see real usages of the construction...

Several works on film theory and screenwriting practice take up the question of repetition within narrative. However, few if any, have articulated theories about the relationship between the repetition of the words that comprise the screenplay itself and repetition of the themes that lend coherence to the narrative. In this study we address this gap in the screenwriting and film literature. Spe...

This study is a corpus-assisted investigation concerning the functions of the formulaic sequence just kidding and its variants (e.g., only kidding, just joking, JK) in spoken and written American English. We identified 1200 instances of this phrase from multiple corpora representing a range of modalities (Contemporary Corpus of American English, Global Web-Based English corpus, The Santa Barbar...

Perceptual and acoustic research on dialect variation in the United States requires an appropriate corpus of spoken language materials. Existing speech corpora that include dialect variation are limited by poor recording quality, small numbers of talkers, and/or small samples of speech from each talker. The Nationwide Speech Project corpus was designed to contain a large amount of speech produc...

1. Idioms are constructions 1.1 Idioms in the Chomskyan paradigm Croft and Cruse (2004:225) describe the role of idioms in construction grammar as follows: “It is not an exaggeration to say that construction grammar grew out of a concern to find a place for idiomatic expressions in the speaker’s knowledge of a grammar of their language”. The reason for this focus on idioms in early construction...

Affixation is one of the most common and productive ways to form new words in English and forming words through suffix, an affix that is placed after a base, and is a significant component of affixation. Although numerous studies on common suffixes have been conducted, relatively little attention has been paid to the seemingly less used affixes, say the suffix –esque. A thorough analysis is con...

The basic level is the level of conceptual structure at which categories are maximally informative. In this research, we investigated whether the privileged status of the basic level might be captured by the statistical properties of the Web. Using Google’s Web search programming interface, we found that frequency ratios for terms across three levels of abstraction (superordinate, basic, and su...