What is literary data? This chapter addresses this question by examining how the concept of data functioned during a formative moment in academic literary study around the turn of the twentieth century and again at the beginning of electronic literary computing. The chapter considers the following cases: Lucius Adelno Sherman’s Analytics of Literature (1893), the activities of the Concordance Society (c.1906–28), Lane Cooper’s A Concordance to the Poems of William Wordsworth (1911), and the work of Stephen M. Parrish c.1960. The chapter explains how the concept of literary data was used by literature scholars to signal a commitment to a certain epistemological framework that was opposed to other ways of knowing and reading in the disciplinary field.

This chapter provides an overview of the process of conceiving, researching, editing, and publishing dictionaries, both synchronic (or commercial) and historical. Discussed methods and tools for making dictionaries range from traditional hand-copying of citations from print books and paper-and-pencil editing to sophisticated electronic technologies like databases, corpora, concordances, and networked editing software. The chapter shows how editorial conception of the needs and sophistication of the end user largely determines the dictionary’s length and headword list as well as the format, defining style, and level of detail in entries. The chapter goes on to examine how the pressures of commercial publishing, with its looming deadlines and pressing need to recoup investment by profits from sales, affect the scope of dictionaries and the amount of time editors can devote to a project, and how these pressures differ from those affecting longer-trajectory, typically grant-funded historical dictionaries. Assessing the consequent challenges for managing and motivating people working in these two very different situations, what may be the most important factor in a project’s success, concludes the survey of dictionary editing.

Dominant approaches to norm development have shaped and limited the direction and impact of the norm research programme. While early work tended to characterise norm development in relatively teleological and progressive terms, more recent work has explored how a norm’s meaning changes through processes of interpretation, contestation, and violation. In spite of this important corrective and the rich debates that have emerged from it, understandings of norm development have continued to be hampered by a focus on behavioral measures and on changes in norm content. As a result, approaches to norm development remain incomplete, most notably in their neglect of norm strength. To address these shortcomings, this chapter critically reviews existing scholarship on norm change and development, highlighting the need to consider norm content and norm strength as distinct and constitutive elements in processes of norm development. The chapter proposes a typology that identifies four forms of norm change, along with an updated conceptual framework for understanding norm development. This conceptual framework overcomes existing conceptual gaps and inconsistencies in the study of norm processes. In so doing, it promises to advance existing theoretical debates, open new directions of inquiry, and contribute to the further accumulation of knowledge about international norms.

This chapter focuses on the empirical basis of corpus linguistics, describing how linguistic corpora have played an important role in providing corpus linguists with linguistic evidence to support particular analyses of language. It opens with a discussion of how to define a corpus, and then traces the history of corpus linguistics, noting that as early as the fifteenth century, concordances were created based on the Bible. Later developments included the creation of the Quirk Corpus (print samples of spoken and written English) in 1955 at the Survey of English Usage in University College London, followed (in the 1960s) by the Brown Corpus (edited written American English). There are now online corpora, such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Tools for creating and analyzing corpora have also improved considerably: tagging corpora with part-of-speech information can be done with high levels of accuracy. The chapter closes with a description of the many different areas (e.g. lexicology and sociolinguistics) that have benefited from the use of linguistic corpora as well as a sample linguistic analysis demonstrating that corpus-based methodology and the theory of construction grammar can provide evidence that appositives in English are a type of construction.

Chapter 3 provides a brief overview of the particular approach to corpus linguistics adopted in this book: namely, corpus linguistics as a method (as opposed to corpus linguistics as a theory) (McEnery & Hardy, 2012; Tognini-Bonelli, 2001). The specific corpus linguistic analytical methods used, such as collocation and keyness analysis, and the statistical tests and cut-offs associated with each analysis type are detailed. Using data from the MI 1984–2014 Corpus (specifically the data collected during a pilot study and an illness-specific sample of the data), each analytical method used is exemplified. The utility of each analysis type for analysing ideology in texts is also discussed.

This chapter presents the meaning of concordance and examines the underpinning evidence base for effective prescribing consultations. Concordance is compared with the traditional approach of compliance in medicine taking, concluding that the evidence base for the latter has been shown to be inadequate in a number of respects. The chapter gives an overview of the evidence base for the concept of concordance and draws out the implications from research for the new generation of prescribers, outlining the reasons why practitioners who are independent (IPs) and/or supplementary prescribers (SPs) need to incorporate these principles into their practice. An overview of the skills and competencies that prescribing professionals need in order to adopt concordance in practice is then presented. This is followed by a review of research on healthcare professionals’ use of concordance in practice. The evidence to date suggest that healthcare professionals are not yet enacting this approach to medicines discussion in practice. Further research is required to both understand professional practice and develop interventions to move practice towards a partnership model of communication

This chapter reviews the transformative effects of technology on dictionary-making, focusing on four main areas: the use of databases for storing and organising dictionary text; the creation and exploitation of corpora for use as the dictionary’s evidence base; the enhancement of the value and usability of corpus data through the application of software tools developed in the NLP (natural language processing) community; and the migration of dictionaries from print to online media. During the last half-century, activity in all these areas has brought fundamental changes to the way dictionaries are created and made available to their users. We trace the development of corpus-based lexicography in English, from the early work of John Sinclair and his colleagues in the 1980s to the present day. Lexicographers working in English and other widely used languages now have access to resources which would scarcely have been imaginable thirty years ago: very large corpora (measured in tens of billions of words) and sophisticated corpus-querying tools are routinely available. The move from print to digital publication is a more recent development, but no less significant. The far-reaching implications of these changes – for dictionary-makers and dictionary-users alike – are explored at every stage.

Chapter 4 discusses corpus linguistics and how electronic corpora have informed vocabulary studies. The main insights have been in the areas of frequency and phraseology. The chapter includes an extended discussion of formulaic language, which has been shown to be a major component of vocabulary knowledge.