Chapter 3 considers different approaches to data collection. Three case studies are included. The first study involves a purpose-built corpus of news articles about obesity. We focus on theoretical considerations attending to corpus design, as well as practical challenges involved in processing texts provided by repositories such as LexisNexis to make them amenable to corpus analysis. The second study focuses on how corpus linguists might work with existing datasets, in this case, transcripts collected by research collaborators conducting ethnographic research in Australian Emergency Departments. We discuss the ways in which data collected for the purposes of different kinds of analysis is likely to require some pre-processing before it becomes suitable for corpus-based analysis. The third study is concerned with the creation of a corpus of anti-vaccination literature from Victorian England. We discuss the challenges involved in sourcing historical material from existing databases, selecting a principled set of potential texts for inclusion, and using optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert the texts into a format that is appropriate for corpus tools.

Chapter 1 introduces the context and aims of the book, and provides a brief introduction to corpus linguistics for readers unfamiliar with it. It finishes by providing a chapter-by-chapter overview of the book.

Chapter 11 introduces the concept of legitimation in discourse and considers how it might function, and be studied, in the context of health(care) communication. First, we look at how contributors to the online parenting forum Mumsnet use labels denoting attitudes towards vaccinations. We point out how labels that involve opposition to vaccinations, such as ‘anti-vaxxer’ tend to collocate with negation, and then consider how people justify negating the applicability of the label to themselves. This reveals a range of different concerns around vaccinations. We then draw on a study of patient feedback in which we examined how patients legitimate their perspectives and the evaluations they gave in their feedback. For example, this included patients representing themselves as experienced users of healthcare services. Additionally, some patients used aspects of their identities to position themselves as requiring attention, while others used techniques such as employing second person pronouns to imply that their experiences could be generalised to other patients.

In this chapter I present the main elements of the theory of bare phrase structure: principally the basic operation Merge. This operation replaces phrase-structure rules of all kinds, including the X′-theoretic ones, as the generative component of the theory. We will see that c-command can be directly derived from the effects of Merge. We will also see that Merge can give us a notion of projection. We look at the relation between Merge and LCA, and also introduce the Labelling Algorithm.

Chapter 7 considers how language change over short timespans can be examined using corpus-assisted methods. We present three case studies. The first study involves a corpus of patient feedback relating to cancer care, collected for four consecutive years. A technique called the coefficient of variation was used to identify lexical items that had increased or decreased over time. The second study considered UK newspaper articles about obesity. To examine changing themes over time, we employed a combination of keyness and concordance analyses to identify which themes in the corpus were becoming more or less popular over time. Additionally, the analysis considered time in a different way, by using the concept of the annual news cycle. To this end, the corpus was divided into 12 parts, consisting of articles published according to a particular month, and the same type of analysis was applied to each part. The third case study involves an analysis of a corpus of forum posts about anxiety. Time was considered in terms of the age of the poster and in terms of the number of contributions that a poster had made to the forum, and differences were found depending on both approaches to time.

This chapter provides an overview of digital communication’s transformative impact on human interaction. It begins with Web 2.0, enabling users to upload and engage with content, fostering a participatory culture that creates and shapes knowledge and authority. This phenomenon has significantly changed how we communicate, interact, and seek information. For instance, people often turn to Google for answers to various queries, from recipes to medical conditions. Researchers studying digital health social networks (DHSNs) agree that the Internet has transformed the experience of illness. Web 2.0 has introduced new sources of expertise, where user-generated content challenges traditional, static, and institutional expertise. These new sources often shape our initial and sometimes sole impression of issues, influencing our perception of reality and engagement with knowledge. In this digital landscape, participants compete for attention, legitimacy, and influence with peers and institutional entities.

Additionally, online platforms have provided minority groups with representation, visibility, and public debate opportunities, promoting awareness and inclusion. This digital revolution has undoubtedly reshaped fundamental aspects of human communication and the nature of information sources.

In this chapter, we introduce the concept of phases, a further development of the islands/subjacency/barriers line of investigation, but with many other consequences. We look at the notion of phase and the Phase Impenetrability Condition, in particular Chomsky’s original rigid definition of phases as CP, v*P and DP, which contrasts with Bošković’s contextual definition. We also look

at the consequence of the PIC that successive-cyclic movement has to pass through SpecvP and adduce a range of cross-linguistic evidence in support of this. We then turn to the question of the driver for successive-cyclic movement. The Labelling Algorithm (LA) can provide an elegant account of this. Finally, we see the evidence for a new set of islands and how the contextual definition of phases, the antilocality condition on movement and the PIC conspire to give a narrow window of movement-targets.

Here the focus is on covert cases of wh-movement, i.e. cases where the movement takes place in such a way that it cannot be directly observed in the output of PF, but only in terms of its effects on the semantic interpretation. The best-known example of this kind of wh-movement is found in Mandarin Chinese; accordingly we focus on that language. Next, we look at cases of covert movement in English: Quantifier Raising and wh-movement in multiple questions. Then we turn to the nature of the copies of movement, showing how copies can provide an account of reconstruction of binding-theory relations at the CI interface, as well as of partial movement and doubling at PF.

In this chapter we continue our investigation of hierarchical structure by focusing on the structure of TP and VP, concentrating on the latter. We first look at the structure of the clause. We then turn to the evidence that the subject is generated inside the VP (the VP-internal subject hypothesis, VISH) and raises to SpecT′ in English and many other languages. This leads to further discussion and examples of raising. Finally, we further elaborate the structure of VP, introducing VP-shells, structures where one VP is embedded in another.

In this chapter we continue our investigation of hierarchy by looking at head-movement, i.e. how heads of phrases may move and combine. In addition to seeing how this kind of movement works in technical terms, and what the empirical motivation for it is, we also introduce a major locality condition, the Head Movement Constraint. Then we return briefly to the topic of passives, and introduce raising. Finally, we make a first attempt at formulating a general notion of locality which unifies the Head Movement Constraint with a locality condition applying to both passives and raising.

In this chapter we observe that syntax is mostly silent; given the overall organisation of the grammar, there are good reasons to expect this to be the case. Furthermore, among the silent elements there are, in addition to copies, empty pronouns and covert movement, various kinds of ellipsis. VP or predicate-ellipsis is quite rich in English, while NP-ellipsis is meagre. Ellipsis displays a number of departures from absolute identity of the antecedent and elided constituent, notably but not only sloppy readings and voice mismatches. We also look at the distinction between deep and surface anaphora and, following on from this, evidence that radical prodrop in East Asian languages appears to involve NP- or argument-ellipsis.

Chapter 6 shows how it is possible to use demographic metadata to study identities in health-related corpora. We present two case studies, based on research on patient feedback on NHS services in England. The first study compares how cancer patients of different age and sex groups evaluate healthcare services and, specifically, how they use distinct linguistic and rhetorical strategies to do this. The corpus was encoded with demographic metadata which allowed the researchers to explore the language used by people of different age and sex identity groups. For the second study, a different corpus of more general patient feedback was used, one which did not contain demographic information metadata. Instead, targeted searches were used to identify patients’ demographic characteristics based on cases where they made those characteristics explicit within their feedback. In contrasting these case studies, we also evaluate the two different approaches taken, considering the affordances and limitations of both. Taken together, the case studies demonstrate how language and identity can be explored in corpora with and without reliable demographic metadata.