STUDENT: JOSEPH BROWN (2231416)

MODULE: LEXIS & CORPUS LINGUISTICS (4000)

TUTOR: CLARE ODONOGHUE
DATE: 2/05/03
W/C: 6088


Joseph Brown Yusuf 1
Introduction

In the language sciences a corpus is a body of written text
or transcribed speech which can serve as a basis for
linguistic analysis and description. Over the last three
decades the compilation and analysis of corpora stored in
computerized databases has led to a new scholarly enterprise
known as corpus linguistics (Kennedy, 1998: 1).

Corpus-based linguistic analysis did not begin with the
advent of electronic machine-readable corpora; its roots
can be traced back as far as the 18
th
century in scholarly
fields such as: the Bible and literature
1
; lexicography
2
;
dialect studies
3
; language education studies
4
; and
grammatical studies
5
.

Corpora compilation at that time was undertaken by hand. It
was a tremendous task that required a lot of time,
patience, energy and dedication. A text consisting of some

1
Alexander Cruden, born in Aberdeen in 1701, produced the most famous of Biblical concordances the
Cruden concordance for the authorized (King James) version of the bible, which was first published in
1736 and went through 42 editions before 1879. Thereafter followed the concordance of the works of
Shakespeare for scholarly purposes.
2
The completion of Samuel Johnsons Dictionary of the English Language (1755), compiled from a
collection of 150,000 illustrative citations for approximately 40,000 headword entries in his dictionary.
Likewise, the publication of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in 1928 is the culmination of 71 years
of continuous work of mainly written English literature dating back to AD 1000.
3
The English Dialect Dictionary (Wright, 1898-1905) and The Existing Phonology of English Dialects
(Ellis, 1889) was two monumental results of specialized corpus-based studies of lexical variation in
dialects of the United Kingdom.
4
Some of the most influential corpus-based research in the first half of the 20
th
century had a pedagogical
purpose. Thorndike (1921) compiled a 4.5 million word corpus from 41 different sources, in order to
improve curricula materials for teaching literacy to native speakers of English in the USA. It was updated
during the 1930s in collaboration with Lorge (Thorndike & Lorge, 1944) and increased to 18 million
words. Following Thorndikes pioneering work other corpora were put together in various countries for
the purpose of teaching languages such as: Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, Russian and Spanish.
Others were compiled in the 1950s and 1960s amongst them is H. V. Georges half a million word corpus
of written British English assembled in Hyderabad, India, to study the lexico-grammar of English.
5
Jefferson (1909-49), Kruisinga (1931-32) and Poutsma (1926-29) are among the major descriptive
grammarians of the early 20
th
century. The latter two basing their grammars on informal-corpora of
various sizes as appose to introspection. Fries assembled a more structured and systematic corpora for
grammatical studies in the USA, compiled from letters written to the government by people of various
educational and social backgrounds as a basis for describing social differences in usage in his American
English Grammar (1940) and in a later study for The Structure of English (1952), he used a 250,000
word corpus of recorded telephone conversations. (the above taken from Kennedy, 1998).

Joseph Brown Yusuf 2
300,000 words, which is small by todays comparison
6
, would
take a dedicated researcher and his team, six years of data
management and analysis to complete.
The advancement of computer technology has enabled the
compilation of latter-day corpora to greatly surpass their
predecessors in size such that by the 1990s 100-million
word corpora became a reality. The latter part of the 1990s
saw the creation of The Bank of English Corpus, an
expansion of the Cobuild reserve corpus which in 1997 was
reported to be over 300 million words and growing
(ibid, 47).
Latter-day corpora have also become more sophisticated
in that they are now annotated. In the past they were
merely a collection of texts. This simplicity only served
to restrict the type of analysis that could be performed.
Today, every word token is grammatically tagged and with
the aid of advanced concordance programmes it is now
possible to differentiate between the personal pronoun I
and the Roman numeral I. Between the noun minute and
the adjective minute. Between lying (the telling of
untruths) and lying as in a recumbent posture or between
the preposition to and the infinitive marker to.

Once a computer corpus has been annotated with some kind of
linguistic analysis, it becomes a springboard for further
research; it enables a concordance programme...to search for
grammatical abstractions such as instances of the passive
voice, of the progressive aspect, [and] of noun-noun
sequences, etc. (Leech, in Aijmer & Altenberg, 1991: 19).



6
[O]ne million running words became a kind of unofficial standard size from 1964 until the early
1990s (ibid, 22).

Joseph Brown Yusuf 3
Over the years, the benefits of corpora in language
pedagogy have become more apparent. This could not be more
so than in the field of lexicography where [t]he sheer
wealth of authentic examples that corpora provides enables
dictionary compilers to have a more accurate picture of the
usage, frequency and, as it were, social weight of a word
or word sense (ibid, 4). The benefits of these learner
dictionaries to both native and non-native learners of
English need no expounding.
Likewise, the advancement of computer technology has
afforded us the ability to compile a variety of corpora for
specialised purposes
7
from which a more accurate and
reliable account of how languages are structured and used
can be realized, thus allowing for better syllabus design
and more effective materials which better facilitate
learning.

Flowerdew (1993)...argues that such specially designed
corpora are far more relevant to many sorts of language
teaching than larger general corpora. His example is a
collection of Biology lecture texts used to teach the
English of this particular sector to science undergraduates,
in which word and structure frequencies are radically
different from those of a large corpus of general English
(Partington, 1998: 4).

The aim of this paper is not to conduct an in-depth
analysis of language in use but rather to observe a
particular discourse community (DC): the community of the
science of human cloning (SHC) to show how collocation,
which in...many genres of writing, pre-cooked expressions
are still diagnostic vital elements... (ibid, 20), is used

7
Corpora for lexicography (dictionaries). Studying spoken English (lexis, grammar, prosody and
discourse analysis). Diachronic corpora (language change). Language acquisition (Child Language Data
Exchange System, i.e. CHILDES, which consist of some 20 million English words).

Joseph Brown Yusuf 4
in this particular register through a corpus-based
analysis.
It is hypothesised that within this domain, a number
of common words will have acquired specialised meanings and
collocations will not only be unusual
8
outside of their
register-specific habitat but also opaque until explained.
The paper is organised into the following six parts.
Part 1 defines a discourse community (DC) and the
justification for considering the community of the science
of human cloning to be a DC. Part 2 discusses the data;
the method employed in collecting the data; and the
compilation of the SHC Corpus. Part 3 outlines the
procedure of the analysis. Part 4 presents the first level
of the analysis; Part 5, the second level of the analysis;
and part 6, the conclusion.

8
Collocational normality is dependant on genre, register and style i.e. what is normal in one kind of text
may be quite unusual in another. Firth makes this point when he talks of general or more usual
collocations as apposed to more restricted technical or personal collocationsSinclair (1966) also
stresses the relationship between collocation and register. He points out how collocations such as
vigorous depressions and dull highlights may seem odd out of context but that, placed in their register-
specific habitats of, respectively, meteorology and photography, they are quite normal
(Partington, 1998: 17).

Joseph Brown Yusuf 5
PART 1

1.1 What Constitutes a Discourse Community (DC)

[A] discourse community consists of a group of people who
link up in order to pursue objectives that are prior to
those of socialization and solidarity, even if these latter
should consequently occur. In a discourse community, the
communicative needs of the goals tend to predominate in the
development and maintenance of its discoursal
characteristics. (Swales, 1990: 24).

According to Swales (ibid, 24-27), in order to identify a
group of individuals as a DC, six key elements must be
present. He states that:

1. A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of
common public goals.
2. A discourse community has mechanisms of
intercommunication among its members.
3. A discourse community uses its participatory
mechanisms primarily to provide information and
feedback.
4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one
or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its
aims.
5. In addition to owning genres, a discourse community
has acquired some specific lexis.
6. A discourse community has a threshold level of members
with a suitable degree of relevant content and
discoursal expertise.





Joseph Brown Yusuf 6
1.2 Identifying & Justifying the DC
In identifying and justifying the community of the science
of human cloning as a legitimate DC, I have appropriated
the above criterion both as a benchmark and a justification
in respect of my observations.

1. The DC of the science of human-cloning, has an
agreed set of common public goals in that they seek
to ...dent the research front in an academic
department (ibid, 26). They present their findings
to the public by way of publications, seminars and
debates, in order to inform and convince them of
the benefits of human cloning. To this end it is a
collective body of scientists, doctors and writers,
frequently communicating with each other
irrespective of locality, all the while expressing
and exchanging ideas.
2. The mechanisms which establish inter-communication
amongst its members are meetings, seminars,
lectures, newsletters and telecommunications. As
for the general public, then communication is
established by way of books, articles, interviews
and public-debates, in a variety of media for
specialist and general population consumption.
3. Human-cloning has been the centre of much
controversy in recent times. Consequently, the
community uses its communicative mechanisms in
order to counteract the controversy and to quell
the fears of the general public with positive
information as well to ascertain feedback.
4. This community shares communicative purposes which
are recognized by the members of its community and
likewise shapes the discourse, as well as

Joseph Brown Yusuf 7
manipulating and restricting its choice of content
and style. Thus its members in the use of their
communicative mechanisms, exhibit various
similarities in terms of structure, style, content
and intended audiences.
5. As mentioned above, the aim of this paper is to
observe whether or not this community exhibits any
genre-specific lexis such as: specialised technical
terminology, acronyms and unusual collocations and
metaphors which are puzzling to the outsider. It is
hypothesised that they do and the corpus-based
analysis will serve to substantiate or refute this
claim.
6. I am not able to present any statistical evidence
as to the number of members this community may
boast, however, the numerous writings that exist on
the subject
9
, as well as the seminars and debates
that have taken place, is an attestation that:
(1) it does display a threshold level of
membership, (2) it does have a suitable degree of
relevant content (3) it does display discoursal
expertise and (4) its membership continually
changes as individuals enter as apprentices and
leave by death or in less involuntary ways
(ibid, 27).

Therefore based upon the above observations, I have
concluded that the community of the science of
human-cloning is indeed a DC; a view shared by Swales who
...sees science as comprising various international
discourse communities (cited in Stubbs 1996: 18).

9
[T]here are perhaps 100,000 research journals in the world, [on] science [and] technology (Stubbs,
1996: 18).

Joseph Brown Yusuf 8
PART 2

2.1 The Data
Once it has been established that the community of the
science of human-cloning is indeed a DC, the next stage is
to collect the data (i.e. the text). The kind of data that
a linguistic researcher collects, and the method in which
it is collected, depends upon the type of research and
analysis that is to be conducted.
As with all electronic corpus-based analysis, the data
has to be electronically readable. This can be achieved in
several ways: (1) converting texts with an optical scanner,
(2) inputting texts via a word-processor, (3) copying texts
from CDs (books, journals, magazines: The New Scientist,
etc) and (4) downloading texts from the internet (books,
journals, articles, etc).
I chose to download the data from the internet because
of the following reasons: (1) it (the internet) is a rich
source of information which is readily at hand and (2), it
(the data) is instantly machine-readable; hence there is no
need to engage in any lengthy process of converting the
data. Once sufficient data has been acquired it is then
inputted into a corpus-analysis tool such as Wordsmith
ready for analysis.

2.2 The Compilation of the SHC Corpus
The data that comprises the corpus presented in this paper
is a collection of ten articles totaling 116,152 running
words
10
downloaded from several internet sites; dated 2001
and 2002; on the issue of human-cloning by journalists,

10
[A] word-form is close to, but not identical to, the usual idea of a word. In particular, several different
word-forms may all be regarded as instances of the same word. So drive, drives, driving, drove, driven,
and perhaps driver, drivers, drivers, drivers, drives, make up ten different word-forms, all related to the
word drive. The word-forms can be counted, so that the length of the text, measured in word-forms can
be calculated. This is often called the number of running words in the text (Sinclair, 1997: 28).

Joseph Brown Yusuf 9
science-editors, doctors, scientists, The Presidents
Council on Bioethics
11
, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor,
Archbishop of Westminster and a Catholic ethicist.

List of articles
12

Artificial sperm plan to avoid human cloning.
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor, (Filed: 12/11/2001)

This cloning is inhuman.
By Alasdair Palmer, Science Editor, (Filed: 07/04/2002)

As 'cloned baby' flies into US...
Oliver Burkeman in New York and Jacqui Goddard in Miami
The Guardian newspaper - Tuesday December 31, 2002

Human cloning is immoral and Parliament should ban it.
By Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Archbishop of Westminster
(Filed: 23/11/2001)

Human Cloning and Human Dignity An Ethical Inquiry.
The President Council on Bioethics
http://www.bioethics.gov/cloningreport/fullreport.html
2/10/02

The Ethics of Cloning.
By Russell B. Connors, Jr a Catholic ethicist.
http://www.americancatholic.org/Messenger/Mar1998/Feature2.asp
4th October 2002

The First Successful Clone of a Sheep.
http://www.truthtree.com/clone.shtml#human
4th Oct 2002

Cloning mistakes (Filed: 21/11/2001)

Re: Weapon against disease.
Date: 27 November 2001




11
The Presidents Council was established by George. W. Bush on November 28
th
, 2001. On January
16
th
, 2002, the President named 17 leading scientists, doctors, ethicists, social scientists, lawyers and
theologians to serve on the Presidents Council on Bioethics. The Council is to consider a range of
bioethical matters connected with specific biomedical and technological activities, such as embryo and
stem cell research, assisted reproduction, cloning, use of knowledge and technique derived from human
genetics or the neurosciences, and end-of-life issues. The Councils paramount objective is to develop a
deep understanding of the issues that it considers and to advise the President of the complex and often
competing moral positions associated with biomedical innovation.
12
I am not able to provide all the internet sites pertaining to the articles, but I have provided a list of the
articles as regards the various authors.

Joseph Brown Yusuf 10
PART 3

3.1 The Procedure
Corpus research involves two levels of analysis:
(1) the analysis of the data and (2), the analysis of the
results. The first level of analysis in respect of this
paper is to identify the following:
The high frequency lexical items in the science of
human-cloning (SHC) corpus. For this a wordlist of the
200 most frequent words is thus required. This is
created by using the wordlist function in Wordsmith
tools.
The single collocates of the most significant common
words in the SHC wordlist. This is achieved by using
the show collocates option of the concord function.
The unusual collocates and their meanings, and
the most significant clusters of collocates using the
cluster option.
The second level of the analysis is to analyse the findings
of the above.

Joseph Brown Yusuf 11
PART 4
1
st
Level of Analysis
(initial findings)

4.1 The Wordlist
In order to identify the high frequency words in the SHC
Corpus, a wordlist of the 200 most frequent lexical items
was created (app, 1). When compared to the general English
Guardian and Observer (G&O) wordlist
13
(app, 2) it became
apparent that amongst these items were technical-scientific
words such as: human, cloning, research, cloned, embryos,
biomedical, genetic, scientific, embryonic, science, IVF,
clone, scientists, nuclear, organism, somatic and
blastocyst.
This suggested that the texts which comprised the SHC
Corpus belonged to the register-specific habitat of
science. The words human and cloning indicated a specific
area of science while the word research specified the
register; thus I was able to conclude that the texts were
related to the research of the science of human-cloning.
Many kinds of lexical items, including prefabs
14
, function
as powerful indicators of register, and in most
circumstances it is important for a writer to signal the
register to which the texts belong (Partington, 1998: 20).
Likewise, several lexical items in the SHC wordlist
are indicative of a debate taking place on the moral and
ethical issue, and the pros and cons (i.e. harm/benefit) of
human-cloning, such as: ethical, morally, questions,
reasons, benefits, concerns, thus, therefore, consider,
debate, diseases and destruction. There also seems to be a

13
The G&O Corpus used in this paper, is a collection of written articles of various registers (i.e. arts,
sports, politics, education, book reviews and news items) totalling 100,664 running words, representative
of written English printed in the year 2003.
14
What Sinclair (1987a: 320) and Bolinger (1976) refer to as chunks of language (collocations).

Joseph Brown Yusuf 12
legal element to the debate which is indicated to by the
words, ban, policy, case, and moratorium.

4.2 Single Collocates
In order to test the hypothesis that common words when
placed in a register-specific habitat produce unusual
collocations outside of which they may appear semantically
odd, an analysis of the single collocates of the most
significant common words in the wordlist was undertaken.
The words chosen for analysis were cell, stem, egg, nuclear
and human.
It was not possible to provide authentic evidence of
the common collocates of the above words
15
because access
to a large enough GE corpus was problematic; nevertheless,
according to Hymes (1971) [t]he knowledge of which
collocations are normal in which environments, is...part
of...[ones] communicative competence... (cited in
Partington, 1998: 18); and so I have intuitively provided
the following collocates:

Cell: (prison, police, terrorist, sleeper and human).
Stem: (plant, flower, cell and from).
Egg: (scrambled, fried, boiled, chicken, and duck).
Nuclear: (war, bomb and weapons).
Human: (beings, intervention, frailty, and mind).

When the above collocates were compared to that of the same
items in the SHC Corpus, several unusual collocates were
observed which confirmed the initial hypothesis.


15
The GE Corpus used in this paper is a collection of articles of various registers from the Guardian and
Observer newspaper. They are representative of written English printed in the year 2003. The size of the
corpus (approximately 100,000 running words) meant that it was too small to show instances of the
aforementioned words.

Joseph Brown Yusuf 13
4.3 Unusual Collocates

(1) Cell (app 3, example, 1)

activated or totipotent cell.
diploid cell.
primordial cell.


(2) Egg (app 3, example, 2)

enucleated egg.
reconstructed egg.
oocyte egg.



(3) Nuclear (app 3, example, 3)

nuclear transplantation.
nuclear DNA.
nuclear genes.


(4) Human (app 3, example, 4)

human children.
human adult.
human people.


(5) Stem (app 4, examples 1&2 respectively)

There are 185 instances of the noun stem collocating
with the noun cell as an adjective (stem-cell) and 100
instances with the plural form (stem-cells). A total
of 285 instances.




Joseph Brown Yusuf 14
4.4 Cluster of Collocates
It is hard to conceive, at least in the contemporary
English speaking world, of a group of well established
members of a discourse community communicating among
themselves on topics relevant to the goals of the community
and not using lexical items puzzling to outsiders (Swales,
1980: 26).
The next phase of the analysis is to observe the most
significant cluster of collocates which according to
Sinclair (1991), the environment wherein collocation is
most likely to occur is a span of up to four words either
side of a word (cited in Kennedy, 1998:114).
In observing the collocational environment of the
lexical item cell I noticed that there were 31 instances of
the collocational cluster somatic cell nuclear transfer
(app, 5). Intuition prompted me to conduct a further
analysis, and as a result of this I unearthed 66 instances
of the acronym SCNT (app, 6). I then decided to check the
wordlist for other acronyms and unearthed a further 113
instances of the acronym IVF
16
(app, 7).

4.5 Word Meaning
Meaning is determined by the company a word keeps. [We]
learn word-meaning from what occurs alongside (Aitchison,
1994: 21, cited in Partington, 1998: 16). It is only by
observing the company of a word that we can fully
appreciate its various usages and meanings. As Firth once
said, you shall know a word by the company it keeps
(1957: 11).
Investigating the various usages and meanings of words
can be problematic if the corpus that one is working with
is not annotated. When studying a word, it is often

16
Incidentally, the acronym IVF is now common among non-members of the DC of science.

Joseph Brown Yusuf 15
useful to consider the different forms of a word
collectively. This enables us not only to highlight the
various senses of a word but also its most common usage as
different registers select different lexical items to
express the same sense.
In the SHC Corpus there are 16 instances of the lemma
yield as follows:

yield 9
yielded 1
yielding 6

The prominent meaning of yield in these instances are
produce as indicated to by the concordance listings
below.

N Concordance
1 may in fact, as we said above, yield knowledge and benefits
2 techniques. Human cloning could yield numerous identical
3 genetic diseases, and might eventually yield transplantable
4 as to whether the research will in fact yield the benefits
5 beyond fourteen days might yield additional medical
6 nonproblematic approaches might yield comparable benefits.
7 mentation should be "such as to yield fruitful results for
8 known, most researchers believe it will yield very useful and
9 he hope that new knowledge will yield new medicines and new c
10 ing adult cell DNA have not yet yielded live offspring. In
11 seriously its potential for one day yielding substantial (and
12 vitro fertilization of an egg, yielding a zygote and deve
13 the human body [in vitro = "in glass"], yielding a zygote that is
14 been removed or inactivated, yielding a product that has a
15 ucleus has been removed or inactivated, yielding a product that
16 ity for research, it must be capable of yielding stem cells while

In the Bank of English Corpus, which is 7.3 million words
in length, the lemma yield occurs 125 times as follows:

yield 51
yielded 25
yielding 20
yields 29



Joseph Brown Yusuf 16
The two foremost meanings of yield in these instances are
give way and produce.

give way

...But we did not yield then and we shall not yield
now.
...means to prevent it. Ovid recommends: Love yields
to business,
...as once the masculine province of the area but is
yielding and its glamour has been somewhat...
In Sweden the authorities yielded at once to the
threats which swiftly...

produce

Last year 400,000 acres of land yielded a crop worth
$1.75 billion.
The shallow sea bed yields up an abundance of food.
...improving the yield of the crop ...Polluted water
lessens crop yields.
This research has been in progress since 1961 and has
yielded a great number of positive results.
(Collins Cobuild English Dictionary)

The lemma produce occurs 517 times (app, 8) in the SHC
Corpus as follows:

produce 363
produced 78
producing 64 (app, 8a)
produces 10
producers 2


Joseph Brown Yusuf 17
[Although] the meaning is restricted to production by a
pre-arranged process, it is often found in technical usage
(Sinclair, 1997: 54) as in the SHC Corpus.
The infinitive form of the verb is most frequently
used by this DC. One reason for this could be that the
acceptance of human-cloning is one that is still being
contested and as such production is still in its infancy.
In order to justify this claim, I looked at both written
and spoken data
17
.
Produce occurred 363 times in the written data; and
of those 363 instances, 95 was preceded by the infinitive
marker to (app, 8b).
In the spoken data there were 189 instances of the
lemma produce (app, 9). Produce occurred 118 times as
indicated below:

produce 118
producing 38 (app, 9a)
produced 33
produces 10

Of those 118 instances, 89 were preceded by the infinitive
marker to (app, 9b). In both the written and the spoken
data, produce is predominantly preceded by the infinitive
marker to, which could support the hypothesis that matter
is one that is still being contested.
There are no instances of the lemma yield in the
written data denoting a sense of give way (see p.15).
There are, however, in the spoken data, 8 instances of
yield (app, 10). Of those 8 instances there are 4 senses of
give way and 4 senses of to produce.

17
Spoken data taken from several transcripts of seminars held by the Presidents Council on the issues of
human-cloning - downloaded from their site: http://www.bioethics.gov/cloningreport/fullreport.html


Joseph Brown Yusuf 18
give way

N Concordance
1 either find consensus or beat down the opposition to such a point
where they have to yield and, if they do not like it, write minority reports. I would
much rather -- I think w
4 be that what I am being told is that is not possible and if it is not
then I would certainly yield to wiser heads. CHAIRMAN KASS: Gil? PROF. MEILAENDER:
Yes, I w
6 cause I understand about slime molds but I was just trying to say basic
science. I yield, Janet. I would never oppose you about anything. DR. ROWLEY: Well, no,
8 was going to -- PROF. MAY:: -- going to give a wonderful rhetorical
answer. I yield. CHAIRMAN KASS: Well, I was going to, I think, explain at least to
those people

to produce

N Concordance
2 r and whether other promising and morally non-problematic approaches
might yield comparable benefits. We simply do not know." The Council, reflecting the
diffe
3 by what are for now unanswerable questions as to whether the research
will, in fact, yield the benefits hoped for and whether other promising and morally
nonproblematic
5 So one could argue that overall that you would expect to have a low
efficiency yield with respect to taking in embryo and deriving a line from spare embryos
in an IVF
7 n the road, although things could change where you might be able to
enhance the yield. But could you give us a preliminary sense of this? DR. VERFAILLIE:
I think we

There are no occurrences of the progressive form of the
verb yield in the spoken data.





Joseph Brown Yusuf 19
PART 5
2
nd
Level of Analysis
(results of findings)

5.1 The Wordlist
Amongst the 200 most frequent words in the SHC wordlist
were those that were technical and scientific by nature
(refer to initial findings 4.1). This is indicative of the
fact that the texts which comprise the SHC wordlist are
specific to that subject matter and not general.
The issues presented in these texts are arguments for
and against human-cloning. Central to the debate is the
collocation human-cloning. The word human is an adjective
that is common to general English; however, in this
specific register it has acquired a technical-scientific
classification and usage, and collocates most frequently
with the word cloning (app, 11).
Further analysis of the word human found that it
displayed favourable and unfavourable connotations
(app, 12). Often a favourable or unfavourable connotation
is not contained in a single [word], but is expressed by
that word in association with others, [i.e.] ...its
collocates (Partington, 1998: 66).

5.2 Unusual Collocates
The word human was also found to collocate unusually with
the following nouns: adult, children, and person.

N Concordance
13 The embryo and the human adult are the same organism at different stages of growth and maturity. The embryo may
not evoke the same emotional reaction as the picture of a developed foetus in the womb.

N Concordance
316 It is also true that cloned embryos produced for research could be used in attempts to produce cloned human
children, and the availability of such cloned embryos for research and the perfection of cloning techniques might increase the
likelihood that people will succeed in cloning children.

N Concordance
1369 We acknowledge the difficulty of setting perfectly clear lines marking when an embryo's moral status goes from
"less than a human person" to "like a human person" to "fully a human person."

Joseph Brown Yusuf 20
In general English it is intuitively understood that a
human being is a person. The word human is denotative of an
adult, a teenager, a child or a baby, male/female, neither
of which needs to be modified by the adjective human. It is
not quite clear what the collocations human adult, human
children and human person signify in this register, it may
be that they are the idiosyncrasy of an individual member
of the DC and not the DC as a whole since all three
collocates are located in the same text. Nevertheless,
[i]t is hard to conceive...of a group of well established
members of a [DC] communicating among themselves on topics
relevant to the goals of the community and not using
lexical items puzzling to outsiders (Swales, 1980: 26).
Also unusual is the collocation human good/s which
seems to denote several senses.

(1) a sense of benefit.
N Concordance
1065 Questions therefore arise about the need for limits on scientific
pursuits and technological activities, and, conversely, about the meaning of such limits
for the scientific and technological enterprises. To address these questions, we must
appreciate the human good of biomedical science in its fullness,

(2) a sense of quality or attribute, and
N Concordance
1066 The shadow of the cloned child's "original" might be hard for the child
to escape, as would parental attitudes that sought in the child's very existence to
replicate, imitate, or replace the "original." It may reasonably be argued that genetic
individuality is not an indispensable human good, since identical twins share a common
genotype and seem not to be harmed by it.

(3) a sense of value, i.e. importance.
N Concordance
1070 The third moral argument for cloning-to-produce-children is that it
would contribute in certain cases to the fulfillment of human goods that are widely
honored and deeply rooted in modern democratic society.

N Concordance
1071 Given the complex course of science and the drive to its development,
any moral assessment of cloning for biomedical research (CBR) must describe the central
human goods it seeks to preserve, the range and boundaries of these values, and the
broad implications for science and society implied by them.

In General English, the word good/s is normally
associated with concrete nouns, in particular, saleable
commodities, such as farming, industrial, and commercial

Joseph Brown Yusuf 21
products. However, in this register, the word good/s
appears to be associated with abstract nouns.
Other unusual collocates are the adjectives nuclear,
cell and egg. Nuclear collocates with technical-
scientific nouns such as: DNA, genes and transplantation,
and appears to denote two senses:

(1) when describing the stage/state of cells or organisms.

N Concordance
5 Remove the nuclear DNA from the egg cell, to produce an enucleated egg.
Insert the nucleus of a donor adult cell into the enucleated egg, to produce a
reconstructed egg.

N Concordance
7 Still, these cleavages do not occur if the embryo's nucleus is not
present, and so the nuclear genes also control these early changes.

(2) when describing a technique/a procedure of human
cloning.
N Concordance
44 "Attempting to clone" will mean either somatic cell nuclear transfer
itself or the transfer of the resulting cloned embryo to a woman's uterus.

N Concordance
82 "The experimental procedures required to produce stem cells through
nuclear transplantation would consist of the transfer of a somatic cell nucleus
from a patient into an enucleated egg, the in vitro culture of the embryo to the
blastocyst stage, and the derivation of a pluripotent ES cell line from the inner cell
mass of this blastocyst."

Cell collocates with technical-scientific adjectives such
as activated, totipotent, diploid, and primordial. Egg
collocates with technical-scientific adjectives such as
enucleated, reconstructed, and oocyte.
All of the above collocates appear odd outside of
their register-specific habitat, as well as being opaque
until explained which confirms the initial hypothesis that
common words will acquire specialised meanings and
collocations will appear odd and opaque outside of their
register-specific habitat.





Joseph Brown Yusuf 22
5.2 The Moral and Ethical Element
There is also a moral and an ethical element to the debate
which is indicated to by words such as: moral, ethical, and
concerns. The word moral is used to exhibit different
senses of morality and can be found collocated as follows:

(1) a sense of advocacy.
N Concordance
5 To have moral status is to be an entity toward which human
beings, as moral agents, have or can have moral obligations.


(2) a sense of evaluation.
N Concordance
58 Given the complex course of science and the drive to its development,
any moral assessment of cloning for biomedical research (CBR) must describe the central
human goods it seeks to preserve,

(3) a sense of decadence.
N Concordance
70 Yet the creation of such chimeras, even in embryonic form, shows how
ready we seem to be to blur further the boundary -- biological and moral -- between
human being and animal. As history so often demonstrates, powers gained for one purpose
are often used for other, less noble ones.

(4) a sense of argument/concerns.
N Concordance
110 In this chapter, Council Members have presented as best we can the
moral cases for and against cloning-for-biomedical-research,

(5) a sense of thought, and
N Concordance
117 In our view, the possible existence of a law requiring the destruction
of cloned embryos at or before fourteen days of development would force moral clarity
about what we are doing -- and the burdens of doing it.

(6) a sense of divide, i.e. boundary/gap.
N Concordance
192 but once you countenance the very creation of human embryos for
no other purpose than for their parts, you have crossed a moral frontier.

The word concerns collocates most frequently with the
word moral (app, 13) and seems to suggest that a lot of the
anxieties expressed in the various texts are of a moral
nature as mentioned above.
The word ethical seems to express concerns in respect
of the legal framework, guidelines or principles in which
the science of human-cloning should operate.



Joseph Brown Yusuf 23
N Concordance
60 to regulate and limit the use of cloned embryos -- both in the
interest of preventing cloning-to-produce-children, and in the interest of establishing
a clear ethical framework for undertaking cloning-for-biomedical-research and
allowing that research to flourish.



N Concordance
130
Strengths of the Proposal Bans Cloning-to-Produce-Children The strong ethical verdict
against cloning-to-produce-children, unanimous in this Council (and in Congress) and
widely supported by the American people, is hereby translated into clear and strong
legal proscription.

N Concordance
61 Provide enforceable ethical guidelines for the use of cloned embryos
for research.

N Concordance
94 Other people will hold that research on any human embryo, cloned or
not, is either morally acceptable or morally unacceptable, regardless of what ethical or
legal guidelines may or may not be in place,

N Concordance
105 It therefore makes sense to consider the safety and health concerns that
arise from cloning-to-produce-children in light of the widely shared ethical principles
that govern experimentation on human subjects.

5.3 The Debate
There are seventy-eight occurrences of the word debate in
the texts (app, 14). Of those seventy-eight occurrences, 25
are collocated with the prepositions about, on and over.
The various issues discussed in these texts are indicated
to by the said prepositions, which in this register, are
denotative of the subject-matter (app, 15).
The word question is central to the debate and
constitutes several of what are known as fixed phrases. The
following are observations of the number of occurrences of
such phrases.

A question of (x2)
N Concordance
1 It is almost a question of psychological probability.
3 This is not a question of principle; it is a question of prudence.

A simple question (x1)
N Concordance
43 This fact becomes evident when we ask a simple question: Do we
assign the same moral blame to harvesting organs from a newborn infant and from
a seven-day-old blastocyst?




Joseph Brown Yusuf 24
The question of (x21)
N Concordance
63 If the question of cloning-to-produce-children were considered in isolation,
the first and stricter ban would be most prudent:

N Concordance
66 Doing so might allow us to regard the question of embryo research in its
full scope,

(see app, 16 for remaining instances).
Age-old question of (x 1)
N Concordance
36 It also provides a new means for gaining knowledge about the age-old
question of nature versus nurture in contributing to human achievement and human
flourishing, and to see how clones of great genius

The question before us (x 1)
N Concordance
50 Thus the question before us is whether cloning-to-produce-children
is an activity that we, as a society, should engage in.



5.4 The Legal Element
There is a legal element to the debate which is indicated
to by the words ban, moratorium, and policy. The word ban
and moratorium collocate most frequently with the word
cloning (app, 17) and denote a sense of prohibition. The
word ban denotes a permanent prohibition, while the word
moratorium denotes a temporal prohibition.
N Concordance
6 A permanent ban on cloning-to-produce-children, with a
moratorium, or temporary ban, on cloning-for-biomedical-research ("ban plus
moratorium").

N Concordance
63 Although an optimal policy would permanently ban all cloning, we join
in this Council's call for a permanent ban on cloning to produce children
combined with a four-year ban (or "moratorium") on cloning for biomedical research for
the reasons set forth by Gilbert Meilaender in his additional statement.

As for the word policy, then it occurs 149 times and
collocates most frequently with the adjective public
(app, 18). This suggests that the publics concerns are
most important when drawing up policies pertaining to
human-cloning as indicated to by the following.
N Concordance
80 We would therefore ask proponents of this research and the public at
large to keep these moral concerns in mind as we try to develop a sound public
policy for the whole area of embryo research. We think that the moratorium
provides needed time to do this right.

Joseph Brown Yusuf 25
5.5 The use of the modal must
The modal must conveys several senses depending on the
verb it is collocated with.

(1) a sense of responsibility
N Concordance
1 As we make our case, we will also confront and accept the
burden of what it means to proceed with such research, just as those who oppose it must
accept the burden of what it means not to proceed.

N Concordance
2 Rather, we must acknowledge that as human beings we live in a difficult
"in-between." Whether as doctors, scientists, or as patients, we all wish for the
possible renewal of life through medicine, but also acknowledge that suffering and
mortality are part of life.

(2) a sense of condition, i.e. prerequisite
N Concordance
4 Any ethical analysis of cloning-for-biomedical-research must address
the moral status of the human embryo.

(4) a sense of obligation
N Concordance
12 If the Government is serious about wishing to ban
human cloning, whether for research or for birth, then it must ban it altogether.

(5) a sense of evaluation
N Concordance
23 Other moral hazards must be considered that are either inherent in, or
possible consequences of, this line of research.

(6) a sense of regulation
N Concordance
42 Cloning-for-biomedical-research, if and when it is to be allowed, must
be preceded by the formulation of proper rules and the institution of
effective safeguards.

(7) a sense of caution

N Concordance

58 But we must consider not only the ends of science, but also the
means it employs.


Joseph Brown Yusuf 26
PART 6

Conclusion
The unusual collocates observed in this analysis are
undisputedly specific to the register of science, to be
more specific, the science of human-cloning. Most, if not
all, are unusual outside of their register-specific
habitat; and even those that are readily recognisable to
the native speaker of English have themselves acquired
specialised meanings. In order to fully comprehend texts of
this nature, one has to be familiar with the usage of
common words in a specialised way particular to this
register. In this way, the SHC corpus exhibits the features
of the 5
th
category of Swales (1970) definition of a DC.
Word-senses differ too from one register to another;
and although the various word-senses of general English
were not exhaustively compared to that of the science of
human-cloning, it is hoped that the existence of the
phenomenon and its implications in the wider sense of
language learning were shown.
Undoubtedly, the use of corpus-based analysis in
language pedagogy has given teachers the comprehensiveness
and the enhanced ability ...to (i) determine the most
frequent patterns in a particular domain; (ii) [to] enrich
their knowledge of the language, perhaps in response to
questions raised in the classroom; (iii) [to] provide
authentic data examples; and (iv) [to] generate
[effective] teaching materials (Barlow, 1996: 30 cited in
Partington, 1998: 6). In this way, the research carried out
for this assignment could be a useful source of data for
EAP teachers working with students in the biological
sciences.

Joseph Brown Yusuf 27
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aijmer, K. and Altenberg, B. (1996), English Corpus
Linguistics, Longman: London and News York

Biber, D., Conrad, S. and Reppen, R. (1998), Corpus
Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use,
Cambridge: CUP.

Collins Cobuild English Dictionary: Bank of English.
(1999). Harper-Collins Publishers.

Kennedy, G. (1999), An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics,
Longman: London and New York

Partington, A. (1998), Patterns and Meanings, John
Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam and Philadelphia

Sinclair, J. (1997), Corpus, Concordance, Collocation,
Oxford: OUP.

Stubbs, M. (1996), Text and Corpus Analysis, Blackwell
Publisher.