Corpus-based Studies in English contains selected papers from the seventeenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 17). The topics include parsing and annotation of corpora, discourse studies, lexicography, translation studies, parallel corpora, language variation and change, national varieties, methodology and English language teaching. The papers on parsing and annotation include discussions of the treatment of irregular forms, semantic/pragmatic labels in air traffic control, a comparison of tagging systems and a presentation of T-tag lexicon construction.
The papers on discourse and lexicography include a study of like as a discourse marker, thesaural relations and the lexicalisation of NPs. In translation studies one paper discusses explicitness as a universal feature of translation and the paper on parallel corpora contrasts English and Norwegian. Many papers deal with variation and change; here we find a discussions of dialogue vs. non-dialogue in modern English fiction and an account of verbal disputes in adolescent English; the historical studies deal with e.g. text type evolution, multi-verb words, normalization in Middle English prose and modalities in Early Modern English. The methodology papers discuss the use in corpus analysis of inferential statistics, probabilistic approaches to anaphora resolution and multi-method approaches to data. The ELT paper compares the use of the progressive in native and non-native compositions.