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Article published In:
English World-Wide
Vol. 40:1 (2019) ► pp.25–53

Complementing corpus analysis with web-based experimentation in research on World Englishes

| University of Freiburg

Usage-based research in linguistics has to a large extent relied on corpus data. However, a feature’s “failure to appear in even a very large corpus (such as the Web) is not evidence for ungrammaticality, nor is appearance evidence for grammaticality” (Schütze and Sprouse 2013: 29). It is therefore advisable to complement corpus-based analyses with experimental data, so as to (ideally) obtain converging evidence. This paper reviews reasons for combining corpus linguistic with psycholinguistic experimental methods, and demonstrates how research on varieties of English can profit from experimentation. For a study of conversion in Asian Englishes, the maze task (Forster, Guerrera, and Elliot 2009; Forster 2010) was implemented with a web-based, open-source software. The results of the experiment dovetail with a previous analysis of the Corpus of Global Web-based English (Davies 2013). These results should encourage researchers not to base findings exclusively on corpus evidence, but corroborate them by means of experimental data.

Keywords: converging evidence, web-based experimentation, Asian Englishes, conversion
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Corpus analysis versus psycholinguistic experimentation
  • 3.Analysis
  • 4.Gathering converging evidence for V>N conversion in Asian Englishes
    • 4.1V>N conversion in GloWbE
      • 4.1.1V>N conversion in Asian varieties of English
      • 4.1.2Methods
      • 4.1.3Results
    • 4.2Complementing corpus data with web-based experimental data
      • 4.2.1Method
      • 4.2.2Materials
      • 4.2.3Procedure
      • 4.2.4Participants
      • 4.2.5Results
      • 4.2.6Discussion
  • 5.The benefits of combining corpus and experimental data
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
Published online: 1 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00021.hor
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