Words, Corpus and Back to Words : From Language to Discourse

The aim of this issue of is to bring together investigation into the lexicon in a variety of languages, in a diversity of manifestations – both at the word level and beyond the word level – and from a variety of perspectives, including not only those which focus on how the vocabulary is internally organized, but also those which deal with the role that lexical units and lexical relations play in the organization of other language levels, particularly in the organization of the discourse. These issues are approached from a variety of perspectives that include not only developments in several disciplines of theoretical and descriptive linguistics, particularly in lexicology, phraseology, word…

Persuading consumers: The use of conditional constructions in British hotel websites

Hotel websites display textual and non-textual strategies with the aim of turning online visitors into customers. This article focuses on two related textual aspects: how consumers are discursively construed and how conditional constructions are used in order to persuade and convince consumers of the adequacy of the hotel. The framework adopted for the analysis combines Stern’s notion of ‘implied consumer’ with a corpus-driven approach. The corpus data comprises 114 British hotel websites and totals half a million words. This is a subcorpus of COMETVAL, a database compiled at the University of València. The results reveal the importance of a number of words that address consumers directly o…

Ubicación del elemento romance medieval en el inglés actual

Learning from learners: a non-standard direct approach to the teaching of writing skills in EFL in a university context

Corpora have been used in English as a foreign language materials for decades, and native corpora have been present in the classroom by means of direct approaches such as Data-Driven Learning (Johns, T., and P. King 1991. 'Should you be Persuaded'- Two Samples of Data-Driven Learning Materials. In Classroom Concordancing,1-16. Birmingham University. English Language Research Journal 4.). However, the suitability of using learners' output in classroom tasks remains controversial. This paper describes a pilot study in the application of a non-standard direct approach where Spanish university students are invited to reflect on their production. In the experiment, carried out in several sessions…

Target frames in British hotel websites

This article centres on four-word phrase frames in British hospitality websites. Our aim is to identify those frames that are specific to this website genre, which we call target frames. Each phrase frame represents an identical sequence of words except for one variable word, that is A*BC or AB*D. The words that fill the slot, marked with an asterisk, are called fillers. We used a corpus-driven approach using KfNgram software to identify the phrase frames in our corpus (COMETVAL). We regard phrase frames as genre-specific when they are significantly more frequent than those found in the written section of the BNC, which represents General British English. We further filtered our selection o…

Imperatives in voice-overs in British TV commercials: ‘Get this, buy that, taste the other’

Television commercials are often thought of as bothersome multimedia artefacts that by their very existence spoil our viewing pleasure at regular intervals. Not only that, but they seem to have the habit of ordering us around. This aspect of TV ads has often been commented on by experts and laypersons alike. Therefore, we decided to tackle this issue and look at the prototypical expression of directives, that is, imperatives in voice-overs in television commercials. To this end we have carried out an empirical analysis of imperatives in voice-overs in the MATVA corpus (Multimodal Analysis of TV Ads) which contains transcriptions of nearly 800 voice-overs in British TV ads recorded on six d…