• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.151-170
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• 2009

Recently speech texts have been increasingly used for English education because of their various advantages as language teaching and learning materials. The purpose of this paper is to analyze speech texts in a corpus-based lexical approach, and suggest some productive methods which utilize English speaking or writing as the main resource for the course, along with introducing the actual classroom adaptations. First, this study shows that a speech corpus has some unique features such as different selections of pronouns, nouns, and lexical chunks in comparison to a general corpus. Next, from a collocational perspective, the study demonstrates that the speech corpus consists of a wide variety of collocations and lexical chunks which a number of linguists describe (Lewis, 1997; McCarthy, 1990; Willis, 1990). In other words, the speech corpus suggests that speech texts not only have considerable lexical potential that could be exploited to facilitate chunk-learning, but also that learners are not very likely to unlock this potential autonomously. Based on this result, teachers can develop a learners' corpus and use it by chunking the speech text. This new approach of adapting speech samples as important materials for college students' speaking or writing ability should be implemented as shown in samplers. Finally, to foster learner's productive skills more communicatively, a few practical suggestions are made such as chunking and windowing chunks of speech and presentation, and the pedagogical implications are discussed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.9-18
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• 2018

This paper presents an acoustic and phonological study of the alveolar flaps in American English. Based on the Buckeye Corpus, the flapping tokens produced by twenty men are analyzed at both lexical and post-lexical levels. The data, analyzed with Pratt speech analysis, include duration, F2 and F3 in voicing during the flap, as well as duration, F1, F2, F3, and f0 in the adjacent vowels. The results provide evidence on two issues: (1) The different ways in which voiced and voiceless alveolar stops give rise to neutralized flapping stops by following lexical and post-lexical levels, (2) The extent to which the vowel features (height, frontness, and tenseness) affect flapping sounds. The results show that flaps are affected by pre-consonantal vowel features at the lexical as well as post-lexical levels. Unlike previous studies, this study uses the Praat method to distinguish flapped from unflapped tokens in the Buckeye Corpus and examines connections between the lexical and post-lexical levels.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.239-265
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• 2010

This study investigates the effects of corpus-based vocabulary tasks on the acquisition of English vocabulary in an attempt to explore the influence of corpus use on EFL pedagogy. For this to be realized, a total of 40 Korean high school students participated in the study over a 4-week period. An experimental group used a set of corpus-based tasks for vocabulary learning, whereas a control group carried out a traditional task (i.e., the L1-L2 translation) for vocabulary learning. To assess learning gains, the students were asked to complete the pre- and post-treatment tests measuring the word form, meaning, and use aspects of target lexical items. Results of the study indicate that in the experimental group the corpus-based vocabulary tasks were beneficial for the learning of word forms and use. In particular, corpus-based benefits were greatest in the low-proficiency EFL learners' collocational aspects of vocabulary use. On the other hand, in the control group, the traditional vocabulary tasks benefited the meaning aspects of target vocabulary items the most. In addition, survey results revealed that most students were positive about the corpus-based learning experience although some expressed reservations about the heavy cognitive load and the time-consuming nature of the analysis of corpus data primarily due to learners' lack of language proficiency.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.35-45
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• 2021

With the wide spread of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) scales, many studies attempt to apply them in routine teaching and rater training, while more evidence regarding criterial features at different CEFR levels are still urgently needed. The current study aims to explore complexity features that distinguish and predict CEFR proficiency levels in oral performance. Using a quantitative/corpus-based approach, this research analyzed lexical and syntactic complexity features over 80 transcriptions (includes A1, A2, B1 CEFR levels, and native speakers), based on an interview test, Standard Speaking Test (SST). ANOVA and correlation analysis were conducted to exclude insignificant complexity indices before the discriminant analysis. In the result, distinctive differences in complexity between CEFR speaking levels were observed, and with a combination of six major complexity features as predictors, 78.8% of the oral transcriptions were classified into the appropriate CEFR proficiency levels. It further confirms the possibility of predicting CEFR level of L2 learners based on their objective linguistic features. This study can be helpful as an empirical reference in language pedagogy, especially for L2 learners' self-assessment and teachers' prediction of students' proficiency levels. Also, it offers implications for the validation of the rating criteria, and improvement of rating system.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.31-41
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• 2021

This paper makes a quantitative analysis of the diachronic evolution of ancient Chinese vocabulary by constructing and counting a large-scale rough annotated corpus. The texts from Si Ku Quan Shu (a collection of Chinese ancient books) are automatically segmented to obtain ancient Chinese vocabulary with time information, which is used to the statistics on word frequency, standardized type/token ratio and proportion of monosyllabic words and dissyllabic words. Through data analysis, this study has the following four findings. Firstly, the high-frequency words in ancient Chinese are stable to a certain extent. Secondly, there is no obvious dissyllabic trend in ancient Chinese vocabulary. Moreover, the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420-589 AD) and Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368 AD) are probably the two periods with the most abundant vocabulary in ancient Chinese. Finally, the unique words with high frequency in each dynasty are mainly official titles with real power. These findings break away from qualitative methods used in traditional researches on Chinese language history and instead uses quantitative methods to draw macroscopic conclusions from large-scale corpus.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.12
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• pp.132-139
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• 2021

This corpus-driven research expounded the compilation of the most frequently occurring academic words in the domain of syntax and compared the extracted wordlist with Academic Word List(AWL) of Coxhead(2000) and General Service List(GSL) of West(1953) to examine their distribution and coverage within the syntax corpus. A specialized 546,074 token corpus, composed of widely used must-read syntax textbooks for English education majors, was loaded into and analyzed with AntWordProfiler 1.4.1. Under the parameter of lexical frequency, the analysis identified 288(50.5%) AWL word forms, appeared 16 times or more, as well as 218(38.2%) AWL items, occurred not exceeding 15 times. The analysis also indicated that the coverage of AWL and GSL accounted for 9.19% and 78.92% respectively and the combination of GSL and AWL amounted to 88.11% of all tokens. Given that AWL can be instrumental in serving broad disciplinary needs, this study highlighted the necessity to compile the domain-specific AWL as a lexical repertoire to promote academic literacy and competence.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.3 no.6
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• pp.1588-1597
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• 1996

This paper describes an estimation method for lexical probabilities in Korean lexical disambiguation. In the stochastic to lexical disambiguation lexical probabilities and contextual probabilities are generally estimated on the basis of statistical data extracted form corpora. It is desirable to apply lexical probabilities in terms of word phrases for Korean because sentences are spaced in the unit of word phrase. However, Korean word phrases are so multiform that there are more or less chances that lexical probabilities cannot be estimated directly in terms of word phrases though fairly large corpora are used. To overcome this problem, similarity for word phrases is defined from the lexical analysis point of view in this research and an estimation method for Korean lexical probabilities based on the similarity is proposed. In this method, when a lexical probability for a word phrase cannot be estimated directly, it is estimated indirectly through the word phrase similar to the given one. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is effective for Korean lexical disambiguation.

• Language and Information
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.81-102
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• 2014

The purpose of this paper is to provide corpus-based quantitative analyses of HEART and HEAD in order to examine their actual usage status and to consider some cognitive linguistic aspects associated with their use. The two corpora COCA and COHA are used for analysis in this study. The analysis of COCA corpus reveals that the total frequency of HEAD is much higher than that of HEART, and that the figurative use of HEART (60%) is two times higher than its literal use (32%); by contrast, the figurative use of HEAD (41%) is a bit higher than its literal use (38%). Among all four genres, both lexemes occur most frequently in fictions and then in magazines. Over the past two centuries, the use of HEART has been steadily decreasing; by contrast, that the use of HEAD has been steadily increasing. It is assumed that the decreasing use of HEART has partially to do with the decrease in its figurative use and that the increasing use of HEAD is attributable to its diverse meanings, the increase of its lexical use, and the partial increase in its figurative use. The analysis of the collocation of verbs and adjectives preceding HEART and HEAD, as well the modifying and predicating forms of HEART and HEAD also provides some relevant information of the usage of the two lexemes. This paper showcases that the quantitative information helps understanding not only of the actual usage of the two lexemes but also of the cognitive forces working behind it.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.265-275
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• 1994

Lexical disambiguation is one of the most basic areas in natural language processing such as speech recognition/synthesis, information retrieval, corpus tagging/ etc. This paper describes a Korean lexical disambiguation mechanism where the disambigution is perfoemed on the basis of the statistical information collected from corpora. In this mechanism, the token tags corresponding to the results of the morphological analysis are used instead of part of speech tags for the purpose of detail disambiguation. The lexical selection function proposed shows considerably high accuracy, since the lexical characteristics of Korean such as concordance of endings or postpositions are well reflected in it. Two disambiguation methods, a unique selection method and a multiple selection method, are provided so that they can be properly according to the application areas.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.549-557
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• 2001

Morphological analysis and POS tagging require a dictionary for the language at hand . In this fashion though it is impossible to analyze a language a dictionary. We also have difficulty if significant portion of the vocabulary is new or unknown . This paper explores the possibility of learning morphology of an agglutinative language. in particular Korean language, without any prior lexical knowledge of the language. We use unsupervised learning in that there is no instructor to guide the outcome of the learner, nor any tagged corpus. Here are the main characteristics of the approach: First. we use only raw corpus without any tags attached or any dictionary. Second, unlike many heuristics that are theoretically ungrounded, this method is based on statistical methods , which are widely accepted. The method is currently applied only to Korean language but since it is essentially language-neutral it can easily be adapted to other agglutinative languages.