In legislative texts, deontic modality helps define rights, privileges, obligations, and responsibilities. Based on a corpus of Chinese civil laws from 1949 to 2015, the study investigates the development of deontic modality in Chinese civil legislative discourse and examines the variations of… read more
This paper describes the application of a corpus-driven approach to the learning and teaching of phraseology in English for Specific Purposes (ESP). It describes two specialised corpora which have been compiled, using texts from the fields of economics and financial services, with the aim of… read more
The study reported in this paper applies Sinclair’s (2004) descriptive model of lexical items, which consists of five categories of co-selection: two obligatory categories the core and semantic prosody, and three optional categories collocation, colligation and semantic preference. The study… read more
This study examines the relationship between the phraseological characteristics of language and the communicative role of discourse intonation (Brazil 1997). The findings are based on one of the four sub-corpora of the one-million-word Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE), which has been… read more
The study reported in this paper applies Sinclair’s (2004) descriptive model of lexical items, which consists of five categories of co-selection: two obligatory categories the core and semantic prosody, and three optional categories collocation, colligation and semantic preference. The study… read more
Uncovering the extent of word associations and how they are manifested has been an important area of study in corpus linguistics since the 1960s (Sinclair et al. 1970). This paper defines and describes a new way of categorising word association, the concgram, which constitutes all of the… read more
This paper examines the use of two tones by speakers across a variety of discourse types in the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE). Specifically, it focuses on the use of the rise and rise-fall tones by speakers to assert dominance and control in different discourse types. Brazil (1997)… read more
The ability to do indirectness, inexplicitness and vagueness is a key component in the repertoire of all competent discoursers and these are commonplace phenomena in written and spoken discourses, particularly in conversations. The study reported in the paper seeks to delineate and exemplify these… read more
Using a corpus of naturally occurring conversations between native and non-native speakers of English in Hong Kong, we examine the use of actually in intercultural conversations. The frequencies with which the two groups of speakers use actually and the functions it performs are compared and… read more
This paper presents the findings of a study of vague language use based on a corpus of naturally-occurring conversations between native and non-native speakers of English in Hong Kong. The specific concern of the paper is to describe the use of vague language by the two sets of speakers. The forms… read more