Song lyrics reflect the society linguistically and ideologically and in turn have a social and linguistic power to influence the society. Thus, lyrics can be used to gain insights into social beliefs, namely gender representations and stereotypes. This study sets out to investigate the representations of male and female in lyrics using a corpus-based approach. Focusing on the lemmas GIRL, WOMAN, BOY, and MAN, it examines what these gender-marked items refer to and the way males and females are portrayed in hip-hop and country music. The results show that the lemmas refer to a number of different things that are not limited to their literal meanings. In fact, some of them may not even be easily found in the definitions provided in the dictionary. Although they frequently refer to adult males and females in the lyrics of both types of music, it was revealed that some uses of the lemmas were unique to a particular music genre. Additionally, stereotypical representations of gender seem to prevail in song lyrics; although some differences can be found across music genres, females are often sexually objectified and are associated with beauty and emotional intemperance whereas males are portrayed as active, aggressive, and confident. This suggests that, as a type of text that reflects social beliefs, lyrics can be useful for raising awareness of the aspects of society, such as prevalent gender stereotypes. Therefore, lyrics may be used as an authentic material that contains rich sociolinguistic information on gender representations for linguistic and cultural lessons.

This article examines the relationship between sentential subjectival position and sentential syntactic complexity using the written section of the ICE-GB as the data source. The information the subject bears is generally regarded as given, with new information provided by other functional classes after it. This means that generally the part of the sentence after the verb would more elaborate, hence longer, than the one before it, manifesting the principle of end weight. Since the English language is basically an SVO language, this seems to suggest that the position of the subject in the sentence would have a certain relationship with sentence length, hence sentence complexity. The result shows the relationship between sentential syntactic complexity and sentential structural variation in number of sentences with different structures is bell-shaped, which can be described with Nemcová and Serdelová’s synonyms and word length model. The sentential subjects appear in 46 different positions in the sentence, but the predominant position is sentence initial. Generally, the sentential subjectival position is an indicator of sentential syntactic complexity; the larger the sentential subjectival position, the more syntactically complex the sentence. This phenomenon, apart from rhetorical and stylistic reasons, is due to the principle of end weight and communication dynamism in the sentence.

This paper investigated English modal auxiliary verbs can and may in three East Asian EFL learners’ writings (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). For the investigation, two different types of corpora were adopted. One is the ICE-USA corpus which included the writings of the English as a Native Language (ENL) speakers and the TOEFL11 corpus which contained the writings of the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Among the eleven sections of the TOEFL11 corpus, three components were selected in the analysis. This paper was theoretically based on Bates and MacWhinney’s Competition Model (1982, 1989), and four language models were statistically constructed. These models were constructed as follows. From the four different corpora, all the sentences with can and may were extracted, and twenty linguistic factors were manually encoded. Then, the statistical models were constructed based on the encoded corpus data, and similarities and differences were analyzed in the statistical models. Two different types of statistical analyses were adopted. One was a logistic regression, and the other was a Behavioural Profiles analysis. Through the analysis, the following facts were observed: (i) six linguistic factors were involved in the choice of alternation, (ii) eight linguistic factors were interact with L1 which made three East Asian EFL learners’ writings non-native, and (iii) the uses of can and may by the three East Asian EFL learners were different from those of the ENL speakers.

Recent years have witnessed increasing attention to L2 creative writing not only in language classrooms but also in various disciplinary settings, in this case, an English scriptwriting module for Chinese university students doing Communication Studies. This text-based L2 writing study investigates the stylistic characteristics emerging from 54 pieces of film scripts written in English submitted by the students upon completion of the module. The above investigation is done through comparison of the student scripts to 16 selected professional English film scripts representing different genres. The particular pedagogical approaches for this scriptwriting module are briefly explained. Nevertheless, the study is corpus-driven. It utilises Keyword analysis (Scott, 2015) and Key Semantic Domain analysis (Rayson, 2008) to locate noticeable ideological and discoursal features of the student scripts particularly concerning: the attempts at dramatic tension; effort at visual details; and deviation from conventions of scriptwriting in English. Two focal students were selected to see the trajectories of changes regarding individual writers’ textual features throughout the workshops to the final film script. The above is facilitated by Cluster analysis which reveals ‘local textual functions’ (Mahlberg, 2007). In addition, qualitative interpretation of the focal students’ writing and their reflective comments was also performed. The results hold pedagogical implications particularly regarding: the modelling of certain stylistic aspects of English scriptwriting; and the design of more targeted future ESL/EFL scriptwriting course in China.

The purpose of this presentation is to examine the use of connectors in English writing of Korean undergraduate students. Compared with intermediate or advanced level English writers in EFL contexts, not much has been explored in what beginning EFL writers tend to do in their writing. In this study, the authors aim to find out what types of connectors are most widely used (i.e., additive, causal/ resultative and sequential) by the beginning Korean writers of English and whether or not they are influenced by their L1 use. The participants will be 40 sophomores who are taking the pre-intermediate English writing course during the spring semester of 2016. As for the instruments, the questionnaire survey and the pre- and the post-tests on the use of the connectives by the students will be conducted. The participants are going to write 5 different kinds of paragraphs (i.e., definition, process, description, opinion, and narration) consisting of approximately 120 words in length respectively during the 15-week semester. Because the kinds of writing the beginning participants will produce are paragraphs not essays, it is expected that the use of connectors will be somewhat limited to certain kinds. The students’ works will be analyzed in terms of the frequency of the connective use using AntCon. The results will shed light on pedagogical implications and suggestions for how to teach beginning writers the use of connectors more effectively.

The current study explores the characteristics of frequently-used multi-word expressions (i.e., lexical bundles) in spoken and written Russian. Lexical bundles are retrieved from a one million word Russian National Corpus (RNC) sample. The lexical bundles in spoken and written sub-corpora of the RNC are analyzed quantitatively regarding discourse functions of reference expressions, stance bundles, and discourse organizers. The analysis confirms that the spoken and written Russian corpora exhibit significantly different lexical bundle distribution patterns: there are more referential expressions in written Russian; while there are more stance bundles in spoken Russian. The study also suggests future study calling more in-depth investigation for developing language-specific discourse functions.

SOLAS Convention, as the most important international maritime treaty regulating ship safety, sets up the minimum safety levels for construction, equipment and operation. Due to the development of technology, safety understanding and management, all three safety standards are undergoing revision over time. This paper aims to explore and explain the trend of these changing standards by employing a keyword analysis on SOLAS Convention based on the idea that keywords are indicative of changes in writing style, which can ultimately be linked back to social change. To achieve this objective, five consolidated versions of SOLAS Convention covering the period from 1974 to 2015 were targeted to collect data. Keywords of three safety standards in each version were extracted respectively using WordSmith tools. For discovering the degree of diachronic changes in each safety standard, statistical measures like frequency count and type-token ratio were adopted to compare the lexical distribution and density of each keyword list. The findings suggest that all three safety standards have been revised over time and the changes vary in terms of degree and content. This study is believed to be useful for understanding the safety concerns in maritime industry and to contribute to the literature in the diachronic research conducted by keyword-based approach.

Vocabulary is one of the crucial factors for students’ academic comprehension (Anderson, 2008; Grabe, 2009; Laufer, 1992; Nation, 2001; Qian, 2002). Thus, academic vocabulary lists have been created for research and materials of English as a foreign language (EFL) and English for specific purpose (ESP). Although the academic vocabulary lists have been widely used, few studies have probed into the reliability of the lists. Miller and Biber (2015) pointed out this gap and suggested that the reliability of word lists would be investigated by simply dividing a corpus into random smaller sub-corpora. A thirty-million-word corpus was created with 900 academic articles across nine disciplines of humanity, social sciences and sciences. Then the corpus was divided into two sub-corpora and sixteen criteria sets of register frequency, range, discipline measurement and dispersion were applied to each sub-corpus for vocabulary list creation. The replicability of the vocabulary lists was examined to find a set of criteria extracting the most reliable vocabulary list. The results showed that the combination of the lenient register frequency and discipline measurement, and the strict dispersion was the most desirable condition to create a reliable academic vocabulary list. This result was similar to Gardner and Davies (2012)’ methodology to create their vocabulary list called Academic Vocabulary List, but does not show the impact of range on the replicability of an academic vocabulary list. The implications and limitations were also addressed.

Compared to conversations and other written genres, written academic prose favours heavy nominal groups, in which the head noun is typically accompanied by premodifiers such as adjectives or nouns, and/or by postmodifiers such as prepositional phrases (Parkinson & Musgrave, 2014). In particular, a Noun Complement structure, a relatively neglected means of stance expression has been underresearched in the study of stance and the way writers to convey an attitude to their compositions and readers. The current study examines this structure as a nominal stance construction related to students’ advanced academic literacy (Jiang, 2015). By means of corpus-based contrastive analysis, this study compares the uses of this stance construction in problem-solution essays of 70 Korean university students (L2) with those of English native students (L1) of similar age (20s) and educational level (undergraduate students). The findings observe that EFL students employ fewer examples of nominal stance constructions compared to native English ones and that they showed the use of limited types of this construction. It might be caused by lack of the EFL learners’ L1 proficiency and the inherent difficulty of noun phrase constructions in the acquisition of syntactic structures. This research can also make suggestions for EAP (English for Academic Purposes) writings and instructions.

Adopting an audience-centred approach in business writing is considered fundamental to successful business communication and is widely advocated by leading textbooks of the field targeted at both university students and professionals. Thill and Bovee (2013) explain this approach embraces a ‘you’ attitude whereby the emphasis of the message is placed on the reader rather than the writer. Although a large pool of literature on writer-reader interaction has developed under concepts such as metadiscourse, appraisal, stance, and evaluation; these generally place a focus on writer as opposed to reader-orientated aspects of language. Moreover, the attention from linguists have overwhelmingly been directed towards academic writing. This study uses corpus analysis to explore features of audience involvement in the letter to shareholders of Chinese and U.S. companies. Utilising the engagement framework (Hyland, 2005), I examine how corporate leaders attempt to explicitly recognise the presence of their readers and construct relationships with this complex and diverse set of stakeholders. The results reveal engagement features are an integral element of both Chinese and U.S letter to shareholders; however the density was noticeably lower in the Chinese sample. While this does not necessarily render the Chinese discourse less audience-centred, it does represent a cultural divergence that has implications for the learning and teaching of business communication and ESP. Currently, U.S.-centric textbooks and guides dominate but with China’s prominent commercial position entrenched there is a need to develop a greater understanding of Chinese business communication styles so that students and professionals globally can benefit from such insights.