Grant application abstracts represent a high-stakes academic genre, serving as a sales pitch targeting broad audiences. Using an approach that considers both rhetorical structure and appraisal resources, the present study contributes to our understanding of this under-researched genre, with a particular focus on its promotional nature. Through a manual analysis of a corpus of 120 abstracts of grant applications spanning a 12-year period in the domain of humanities, which have successfully secured funding from the largest governmental research funding body in Sweden, the study reveals a clear move structure, which seems stable across time. In addition, it provides evidence for the interaction between moves and appraisal resources. The implications for all stakeholders are discussed in the current context of scientific communication, which has become increasingly promotional.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government used TV press briefings, involving government ministers as well as scientific and medical experts to update the public on the spread of the virus, advances in understanding the disease, and preventive measures. These briefings provide a valuable linguistic resource to study how science is disseminated and used by scientists and politicians in emergency risk communication. To this end, a corpus has been compiled, consisting of transcripts of 150 briefings of approximately 100 h, with a total of 996,040 words. This study uses text dispersion keyness to derive keywords that characterize the discourse of scientists and politicians, respectively. Focusing on stance markers, the study reveals different rhetorical strategies for persuasion used by the two parties in public health emergency communication. Specifically, the scientists employ cautious reasoning and restrained confidence, while the ministers use a war-on-coronavirus narrative with unrestrained confidence, in the framing of the disease and scientific development.

This paper introduces the Swedish Learner English Corpus (slec), which consists of argumentative texts in English that are written by Swedish junior and senior high school students. slec includes rich metadata, enabling empirical studies of various extra-linguistic variables. Most noteworthy is the inclusion of detailed information on students’ extramural English activities (ee), such as reading, watching, conversing, gaming and engaging in social media in English. In addition, a sub-set of texts from slec have been assessed for proficiency using the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (cefr). This paper provides an overview of the corpus compilation process, the metadata, and the available versions of slec. Researchers, teachers and students can access this resource to investigate various aspects of second language use and development, such as the impact of extramural language activities on linguistic complexity. 

Frequent engagement in English extramural activities (i.e., activities that take place outside the classroom) has been found to have a positive impact on EFL learners’ vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. In the present study, we aim to extend our knowledge of the possible impact of extramural activities into the realm of second-language writing. Specifically, we investigate the relationship among a number of English extramural activities and two aspects of writing development: lexical diversity and noun phrase complexity. The data are drawn from the Swedish Learner English Corpus (SLEC) which includes texts produced by Swedish secondary school students. The corpus also includes information on how many hours per week students (i) engage in conversations in English, (ii) communicate in English while playing computer/video games, (iii) read in English, (iv) spend time on social media with English content, (v) and watch TV shows or movies in English. The results show that reading in English leads to higher frequency of adjectival modification, whereas conversing in English and watching TV programs positively impact lexical diversity. The results of the study have implications for discussions about the role of L2 classroom instruction vis-à-vis learners’ extramural activities. 

Formulaic language is seen as a major hurdle for second language (L2) learners to achieve native-like fluency (Pawley and Syder 1983). The term ‘formulaic sequences’ (FSs), that is, fixed or semi-fixed word combinations that have ‘an especially strong relationship with each other in creating their meaning’ (Wray 2008: 9), has been used in the literature to mean anything from idioms (e.g. in a nutshell), through collocations (e.g. highly significant), to clusters or multi-word units (e.g. at the end of). Despite their differences in terms of idiomaticity, formal variability and frequency of occurrence, most FSs seem to be ‘stored and retrieved whole from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar’ (Wray 2002: 9), making them particularly difficult for L2 learners to grasp. Over the last decade, corpus studies have revealed that FSs are particularly prevalent in academic discourse, providing an important means for discourse building (e.g. on the other hand, as a result, as can be seen) and stance taking (e.g. we argue that, to some extent), among other things (e.g. Biber, Conrad and Cortes 2004; Cortes 2004). Important as they are, most attention has been paid to academic writing and the challenges L2 or novice writers face thereof, whereas research on spoken academic genres has lagged behind in general (Basturkmen 2016)....

This chapter analyzes a large corpus of spam emails spanning a six-year period (2016–2021) with the following two main goals: firstly, to uncover the linguistic features of these texts, and secondly, to connect the linguistic and textual analysis with the discursive and cultural contexts in which these spam emails are embedded. The corpus-based analysis performed in the chapter shows the different topics that predatory publishers’ spam emails focus on, and the ways in which these topics have changed and evolved over time. The main argument in the discussion is that predatory publishers are acutely aware of some of the key features structuring present-day academic publishing. In conclusion, in order to enable more effective ways of tackling the challenges posed by predatory publishing, both analyses and discourses about them should be shifting from a focus on the danger and risks they represent to the actual structuring features that make the existence of predatory publishing possible and viable.

The ongoing coronavirus outbreak has caused a public health emergency of international concern. During public health emergencies, effective risk communication plays an indispensable part in a country’s emergency response. This paper explores the use of Structural Topic Modelling, a machine learning technique that automatically identifies key topics and their content in textual data, in analysing emergency risk communication (ERC) practice at the state level. The data is from the UK government’s COVID-19 press briefings televised between March 2020 and June 2021, totalling approximately 1 million words. The study identifies the prominent topics covered in those briefings as well as their distribution over time, which in turn reflect the UK government’s priorities in handling the public health emergency. Close scrutiny of the use of a selection of key words in context sheds further light on the government’s ERC practice from a linguistic point of view. 

This article explores the application of corpus linguistics methods in dealing with an underexplored area concerning predatory publishing, with a focus on lexical bundles and formulaicity. Using a comparative approach, the study employs two corpora of more than 1,6 million words, consisting of 220 research articles drawn from two comparable journals in the field of political science, one predatory and one top-ranking. The results show that writers publishing in the top-ranking journal use a more limited range of lexical bundles with a higher frequency, giving further evidence for the highly formulaic nature of the genre. The two groups of writers also display different preferences for lexical bundles with particular functions and/or forms. While the top-ranking journal articles feature more disciplinary-specific bundles with noticeable variation across the main sections of the research article, the predatory journal articles highlight in particular a set of common-core lexical bundles typical of general academic language use. Our findings also demonstrate the potential of lexical bundles in revealing the amount of scientific information research articles contain as well as the level of scientific literacy of the authors.

Formulaic sequences (e.g., on the other hand, for example, as can be seen) are prevalent in academic discourse. Apart from their various functions, research in the field has uncovered a range of contextual and individual factors associated with the use of formulaic sequences, including genre, discipline, and the user's L1 as well as expertise level. However, most previous studies focus on written discourse and employ a frequency-based approach (e.g., lexical bundles, n-grams). The inherent limitations of the approach are of particular relevance to ELF communication, which involves a high degree of flexibility adaptability. The present study aims to explore features of formulaicity in spoken ELF academic discourse. Through a close examination of the phraseological patterns of one verb SAY in a one-million-word corpus of spoken ELF communication in academic settings, the present study is able to overcome some of the limitations of the frequency approach, thereby shedding further light on formulaicity in language use characterising this particular community and its relationship with factors such as event type, discipline, and individual preference.