Denominal verbs in British business press: a corpus-based analysis Elizaveta A. Smirnova, PhD in Philology, Associate professor of Foreign languages department, National Research University, Perm

Literature Review Biber, D. (2003). 17 Compressed noun-phrase structures in newspaper discourse. New media language, 169 Cotter, C. (1996). Engaging the reader: the changing use of connectives in newspaper discourse. Sociolinguistic Variation: Data, Theory, and Analysis, 263, 78. Ljung, M. (2002). What vocabulary tells us about genre differences: A study of lexis in five newspaper genres. Language and Computers, 40(1), Minugh, D. C. (2000). You people use such weird expressions: The Frequency of Idioms in Newspaper CDs as Corpora David C. Minugh University of Stockholm. In Corpora Galore: Analyses and Techniques in Describing English: Papers from the Nineteenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerised Corpora (ICAME 1998) (Vol. 30, p. 57). Rodopi. Studer, P., & Schneider, P. (1999). The Zurich English Newspaper Corpus. The British Library Newspaper Library News, 27, 6-7.

Definitions A corpus –‘a finite collection of machine- readable texts, sampled to be maximally representative of a language or variety’ (McEnery and Wilson, 2001: 197). Corpus linguistics – the empirical study of language which uses computer-assisted technologies for analyzing large databases of texts (Conrad, 2000: 548).

Data FT CorpusLOB Press Corpus Size words words Time TextsBritish press

Research tasks to create and compare keyword lists of the two corpora to identify some key changes in lexis; to make up a list of denominal verbs used in the Financial Times corpus; to analyse the frequency of the denominal verbs and compare it with that of the LOB corpus; to study valency patterns of the verbs in question

Top 10 words RankFT CorpusLOB Press Corpus 1.year / yearsnew 2.newtwo 3.marketyear / years 4.company / companieslast 5.lastonly 6.cuttime 7.people 8.businessfirst 9.othermade 10.rightsgovernment

The most frequent denominal verbs VerbNumber of occurrencesFrequency per 1000 words target570,091 trade480,077 fund420,068 trigger390,063 signal300,048 place head price risk damage host rank link name test

The use of denominal verbs (frequency per 1000 words)

To brush: 1 Remove (dust or dirt) by sweeping or scrubbing 1.1 Use a brush or one’s hand to remove dust or dirt from (something) 1.2 Clean (one’s teeth) with a brush 1.3 Arrange (one’s hair) by running a brush through it 1.4 Apply a liquid to (a surface) with a brush 2 [NO OBJECT] Touch lightly and gently 2.1 [WITH OBJECT] Push (something) away with a quick movement of the hand [Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary]

Corpus examples: … growth bulls managed to brush off such concerns as hopes for further stimulus measures in Europe and Japan were fuelled by inflation and industrial production data. But can we be sure Germany will brush off sanctions against Russia so easily … Nothing much else seems to matter, certainly not shock geopolitical events that have been largely brushed aside by the market.

Countries in the FT corpus

Representation of the words Russia and Russian in the corpora

Clusters with ‘Russia’

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