A corpus based analysis of the collocates of the word homeland in the 1990s 2000s and 2010s

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE Triệu Tuấn Anh Title: A corpus-based analysis of the collocates of the word “homeland” in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s (Nghiên cứu đồng định vị từ “homeland” qua thập niên 1990, 2000 2010 sở ngôn ngữ học khối liệu) Major: English Linguistics Code: 60.22.15 Supervisor: Assoc Pro Tran Xuan Diep Hanoi, Sep 2013 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The fulfillment of this thesis would not have been possible without the support, assistance, and encouragement of a number of people First, I owe my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Assoc Prof Dr Trần Xuân Điệp, for his valuable guidance and advice throughout every stage of this study His support has enabled me to develop an understanding of the subject and contributes to the fulfillment of the study My sincere thanks also go to all the lecturers at University of Foreign Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University (Hanoi), who helped me build up a solid theoretical background studies and research methods through their invaluable lessons Furthermore, I wish to express my thanks to all of my colleagues at Faculty of English, Hanoi National University of Education for supporting me in my job during the time I took this course Without their support, I could not fully concentrate on my study ii ABSTRACT This study is intended to describe a corpus-based analysis of the collocates of the word “homeland” The data for the analysis were taken from two popular corpora which are Corpus of Contemporary American English and Time Magazine Corpus The analysis suggests the frequency of the use of the word, and will show how similarly or differently it is used over periods of time In order to analyze the data, both qualitative and quantitative methods were employed Significant conclusions were drawn: (1) There was a great increase in the use of the word “homeland” over the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, and this trend tends to go upward in this decade (2) There was a shift in the use of the word “homeland” This word was almost used as a noun in the 1990s to refer to the geographic space related to a particular group whereas it was mainly used as a noun or adjective to modify the word “security” or to refer to a political department in the 2000s and 2010s iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Part I: Introduction Rationale of the study 1-2 Objectives of the study Scope of the study Design of the study Part II: Development 4-5 Chapter I: Literature review Chapter II: Theoretical background What is a corpus? Notable corpora 7-9 Corpus linguistics 9-10 Corpus linguistics and DA 10 Collocations 11 Collocation analysis 12 Chapter III: Methodology Subjects of the study 13-14 Research methodology 15 Data collection instrument 15-16 Chapter IV: Findings and Discussion The frequency of the use of the word “homeland” 18-19 The meanings of the word “homeland” 19-30 Discussion 30-31 Implications 32-33 Part III: Conclusions 34-35 References 36 iv PART I: INTRODUCTION I Rationale of the study It is clearly seen that the homeland is the common topic in people‟s conversations; especially, it is an endless inspiration for the authors and the writers Although one may travel or have to live in different places all over the world, the homeland still plays an important part and exerts such certain influences on his life as the appearance or the characteristics, and that is the place that one often feels the most comfortable This fact can explain why it is normally said that “One‟s homeland is even greater than the heaven.” To the American, the homeland has a great importance because the American have different values from people from other countries, and they seem to be proud of their country This importance is normally expressed through language Meanwhile, language is shown in corpora where not only various forms of language but also a significant number of written and spoken texts are stored electronically Studying linguistic features of texts discloses the writers‟ and speakers‟ intention The Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Time Magazine Corpus are among the biggest corpora which cover authentic language use on different fields and language use over time By using these two corpora, how the language has been used and how the language has changed over periods of time can be revealed In the linguistic research field, there are a huge number of works using corpus-based approach; nonetheless, only a few scientific studies related to homeland have been conducted Consequently, this study, employing authentic texts and exploring the topic “homeland”, is carried out with the aim at filling that gap Another important factor is corpus linguistics, despite its long history, seems to be quite new to me and attracts my attention There are so many problems which can be dealt with by using corpus-based approach, one of which is collocation analysis This personal interest as well as the above-stated reasons has inspired me to conduct this paper, entitled “A corpus-based analysis of the collocates of the word “homeland” in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s The corpora used for the analysis are the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and Time Magazine Corpus II Objectives of the study The study are carried out with two purposes, which are exploring the words which collocate in the highest frequency with the target word “homeland” in the period of three decades in the COCA Corpus and Time Magazines Corpus Also, it is intended to find out whether the use of that word remained unchanged over three decades or changed In order to achieve the objectives, two specific research questions were raised: What are the words collocating in the highest frequency with the word “homeland” in the periods of 1990s, 2000s and 2010s in the COCA Corpus and Time Magazine Corpus? How has the use of the word “homeland” changed during the last three decades? III Scope of the study As the title of this paper suggests, the aim of the research is exploring the collocates of the word “homeland” over three periods of time There exist so many corpora in the world now; therefore, the writer of this paper has little intention of employing all the corpora available Instead, he merely analyzes the collocates based on the data in three selected corpora, namely COCA and Time Magazine Corpus The data of these two corpora are gathered from both spoken and written language through different sources Furthermore, the use of each word may stay unchanged all the time, or it may change over time However, the writer of this paper does not wish to look at the trend over many periods of time, but only the use of the word in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s are explored IV.Design of the study The study includes three parts which are as follows: Part I: Introduction This part aims at providing the readers with basic information including rationales, objective of the study, scope of the study and its design Part II: Development:  Chapter 1: Literature review: this chapter presents what other linguists have done before related to the field  Chapter 2: Theoretical background: This part serves to provide the theory to the study, which pays attention to corpus linguistics and collocation analysis  Chapter 3: Methodology This chapter introduces the subjects of the study, the research approach, the instrument of data collection and procedures implemented in the study  Chapter 4: Findings and Discussion This is considered the most important part of any research This chapter will show which words collocate in the highest frequency with the word “homeland” in the COCA corpus and Time Magazine Corpus Also, this part will also confirm whether there is a shift in the use of the word “homeland” or not Part III: Conclusion This part summarizes all the important points discussed in the research; also, it will give some suggestions for further research PART II: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW In this part, the writer of this paper will review what other linguists have done before associated with the field of corpus linguistics Corpus-based techniques have been employed in many studies which have attempted to investigate the differences in language use Pearce (2008) carried out a study using corpus-based approach He looked at collocates of the lemmas “man” and “woman” He used the corpus analysis tool Sketch Engine in order to distinguish which verbs tend to co-occur with “man” and :woman” He then came up with the conclusion that women tended to take the object of verbs which denoted sexual violence, coercion and observation such as „rape”, “categorize”, “monitor” and “define”, and women co-occurred as the subject of verbs which constructed them as irritating: “fuss”, “annoy” or “nag” In contrast, men were both the object and subject of non-sexual violence verbs This word normally collocated with words like “oppress”, “betray” or “raid” Baker (2010) conducted a study named “Will Ms ever be frequent as Mr” with the aim at exploring frequency and context of usage of gender marked language In this study, he collected the data from four equal sized and equivalently sampled corpora of British English in a range of written genres (press, fiction, general prose and learned writing) from 1931, 1961, 1991 and 2006 He investigated terms related to male and female pronouns, man, woman, boy and girl, gender-related profession and such role nouns as chairman, spokesperson and policewoman, and terms of address as Mr and Ms The writer finally drew the conclusion that there were some reductions in frequencies of male terms, particularly decreases of male pronouns and Mr It was also found that while there were some reductions in gender stereotypes, others were being maintained (such as a lack of adjectives associated with women‟s success or power) Additionally, the term “girl” was still more likely than the term “boy” to refer to adults, and it was often used in a sexual way Fang (2008) conducted the research discussing the meaning of the text segment international community in two different discourse communities: GuCorpus (British) and PdCorpus (Chinese), which are somehow typical for two discourse communities in Western and Asian countries By exploring the different collocates and grammatical structures within each community, he could figure out the different ways in which the phrase was used These studies mentioned above have proposed outstanding findings which again confirm the fact that the meaning of a word can only be understood and interpreted through its collocation collected by a corpus of authentic data The writer of this paper has found that despite the availability of a huge number of research papers employing corpus linguistics approach, no corpus-based study affiliated with homeland has been conducted before This paper, hence, is carried out aiming at filling that gap The data used for analysis will be taken from the authentic data CHAPTER II: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND What is a corpus? According to Crystal (1991), corpus is “a collection of linguistic data, either written texts or a transcription of recorded speech, which can be used as a starting point of linguistic description or as a means of verifying hypotheses about a language” Sinclair (1991) states that “a corpus is a collection of naturally occurring texts, chosen to characterize a state or variety of a language” Similarly, Reppen (2010) defines that “a corpus is a large, principled collection of naturally occurring texts (written or spoken) stored electronically He then clarifies the terms used in his definition: - “naturally occurring texts” is the language that is from actual language situations, such as friends chatting, meetings, letters, class assignments and books rather than surveys, questionnaires or just made-up language - “a principled collection”: the design of the corpus must be principled The texts in the corpus need to represent the type of language that the corpus is intending to capture For example, if a corpus is to be representative of written language, then the corpus designer would need to make a comprehensive list of the different written language situations - Stored electronically: the corpus can be saved in text format, rich text format or web-based format Although each scholar has a different view of the definition of the corpus, many of them share the same following characteristics of the corpus: - The language must be authentic rather than made-up - The collection of data must be principled - The corpus is electronically saved meat, potatoes and daikon because most other vegetables are rarely available He's made a concession at Lhasa Moon, where diners will discover many excellent vegetarian dishes # In most cases, however, the flavors are authentic One nonmeat dish, tsel shogok ($ 7.50), consists of spinach, slices of al dente potatoes and snow peas flavored with a broth infused with dried chiles On the meat side of the menu, shogok ngopa ($ 8.50) blends beef” (San Francisco Cronicle, 1996) This is a text related to food and dining out The writer of this article wished to advertise an interesting dish named “lephing” Then, he quoted the words of a customer “in his homeland people eat mainly meat, potatoes and daikon because most other vegetables are rarely available” “His” in this sentence is a possessive anaphoric referent which talks about that customer‟s hometown, and “homeland” here is also a noun which describes the customer‟s hometown In brief, it can be seen from the table above and three examples that the word “homeland” in the 1990s often collocated with the articles and possessives to state whose hometown it was Moreover, the word “homeland” in this period was almost always a noun used to refer to a geographic space The same process is applied to investigate the collocates of “homeland” in the 2000s in the COCA corpus Here come the results: Security 1349 Defense 473 Their 161 His 98 A 88 Our 73 22 her 26 my 18 10 ancestral 13 (The collocates of “homeland” in the highest frequency in the 2000s) The screen shot above shows that in the period of the 2000s, “homeland” most co-occurred with “security” and “defense”; additionally, “homeland” also collocated with the possessive adjectives as they did in the 1990s, but with lower frequency The following examples are supposed to demonstrate and clarify the points: Example 4: “too GRACIA HILLMAN, U.S ELECTION ASSIST COMM I think that we've been lucky so far that nothing has ever occurred to disrupt the presidential election, but that doesn't mean that something couldn't happen 23 And we believe prudent planning is the thing that should be done FOREMAN These government officials are mindful of the Spanish train attack, which killed nearly 200 people Three days later, Spain's prime minister, who supported the war in Iraq, was voted out Now officials say intelligence suggests something like that could happen here TOM RIDGE, HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: Al Qaeda is moving forward with its plans to carry out a large scale attack in the United States in an effort to disrupt our democratic process FOREMAN The political fallout from such an attack is wildly uncertain After 9/11, support for President Bush rose GEORGE W BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I can hear you FOREMAN It is also unclear whether the election can be moved Homeland Security says, " It would take an act of Congress to amend the Constitution, possibly…” (CNN_LiveSun, 2004) This article was written in the context of the United States in 2004 In this period, it was known that there were a large number of terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom, which caused a huge number of people‟s deaths After the attack to the Pentagon in 2001, the US government decided to establish The Department of Homeland Security in 2002 combined 22 different federal departments and agencies into a unified, integrated cabinet agency (dhs.gov) This department was founded with the aim to prevent terrorist attacks in the US In this example, the word “homeland” is used as a proper noun to refer to a political department Example 5: “services for homeland security will continue to rise " As long as we have a war on terrorism, national security is going to trump deficits, " says Peter Arment, aerospace and defense analyst for JSA Research Some investors have cashed in Homeland security stocks have doubled in the past three years * THE CATCH The homeland security sector is populated by small companies 24 whose shares tend to swing wildly Stungun maker Taser International, for example, recently dropped from $32 to $8 in less than four months Although the government is indeed spending more on homeland defense, it's not easy to forecast where the funds will go or how quickly they'll get there As T Rowe Price analyst Tim Bei puts it, " the manner in which capital is being allocated to the private sector is inefficient and will take some time to play out " * YOUR MOVE Take a step back and look at the bigger picture What's appealing about homeland security is the possibility of years of very strong earnings growth, the kind that a large company can't” (Money, 2005) This is an abstract from an article written in the year of 2005 This article was written after several terrorism had taken place, and this article discussed the funds spent on terrorism wars by the US government The amount of money spent on national defense is predicted to continue increasing The author of this article used “homeland defense” to mean the US government‟s attempt to protect the US from the attackers, and the word “homeland” in this article was used as a noun or adjective to modify the noun “defense” Example 6: “Wash your towels in Clou-oud Ni-i-n-e Molly loved ads They showed how comfortable and happy life could be-filled with friends-friends who were always happy to see Molly when she visited them in her mind Wrap yourself in luxury time Clou-oud Ni-i-n-e (Continues ) 898 Chapter One A Fake Foreign Devil " Returnee " is a popular word nowadays in China, especially since the Chinese government called on all " patriotic overseas Chinese " to return to their homeland to build a " modern, strong China " These returnees have a number of common traits First, they don't normally wear miniskirts or makeup, like so many local girls They often don't look very fashionable and seem to care little about such frippery Second, they have usually obtained advanced degrees somewhere in the West and often like to say, as casually as 25 possible, " I went to school in Boston " (But they never forget to wear their Harvard or…” This article, written in 2001, told about a campaign called “patriotic overseas Chinese” held by Chinese government In this period, a huge number of Chinese people went abroad for living and studying, and the government was trying to encourage them to come back to China to make contributions to their country and to build “modern and strong China” This article also described how these returnees were like They looked quite different from domestic girls, and normally said in an informal way In this example, “homeland” co-occurs with the word “their” which is an anaphoric possessive referent, referring to something belong to the Chinese‟s In addition, “homeland” here was used as a noun associated with the place where these Chinese people were born Interestingly, the analysis shows that the use of this word from 2010 to 2012 remains the same To sum up, the table above and the examples indicate that the word “homeland” in the 2000s was still used to refer to a geographic space where someone was born However, the frequency of the word “homeland” used with that meaning was lower; furthermore, the use of this word shifted It can be clearly seen from the above instances that the word “homeland” in the period of the 2000s was almost used as a noun or an adjective to modify the noun “security” or to refer to a political group (the Department of Homeland Security) Time Magazine Corpus With the aim at investigating the top ten collocates of “homeland” and the use of this word over time as well as confirming the results collected by COCA Corpus, the writer of this paper continues his search with the Time Magazine Corpus The similar process is applied in this corpus, and the result is displayed as in the following table: 26 Their 30 His 28 Her A The 6 Black Kwazulu New Independent 10 ancestral (The collocates of “homeland” in the highest frequency in the 1990s) The above chart is the results achieved in Time Magazine Corpus The table shares nearly the same results as those collected in COCA corpus That is the word “homeland” most collocated with the possessive adjectives or the article in the 1990s, and this word normally expressed the meaning of someone‟s native land On the other hand, this table also presents several differences Some adjectives like black, Kwazuly, New, Independent could also go with the word “homeland” The following examples reveal the meanings of this word “homeland” when they co-occur with these adjectives Example 7: “the congress, as a sellout They accuse him of abetting apartheid by serving as chief minister of KwaZulu, one of the ten "homelands " where blacks can exercise their political rights The A.N.C also condemns Buthelezi for opposing the " armed struggle " and international sanctions against Pretoria # But, as at least Mandela appears to understand, Buthelezi 27 can not be wished away He has built up a solid constituency, though it is less representative than he would admit Most of Inkatha's estimated 1.7 million members are Zulus residing in the KwaZulu homeland within Natal And some of Buthelezi's policies make sense Mandela's adherence to socialism seems outdated compared with Buthelezi's advocacy of free enterprise The Zulu chief's repeated calls for compromise are now being loudly echoed by Mandela And Buthelezi's pioneering Natal-KwaZulu Indaba, a formula for black-white power sharing in local government, is a concept that could be tried nationally 970050 Lithuanians had been hoping” (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,970049,00.html) Kwazulu-Natal is a province of South Africa According to Wikipedia.org, Kwazulu-Natal, prior to 1994, was made up of the province of Natal and the homeland of KwaZulu In this situation, the author of this writer used “homeland” to refer to the land in the Republic of South Africa under the Apartheid system This was, in this case, one of the areas with some selfgovernment that were intended for a group of black African to live in Example 8: far south as Santa Barbara For farmers the safest solution is to rip out their AXR and replant with one of a dozen or so other rootstalks that appear to be more resistant to the mutations, at least so far After replanting, it takes three years for a vine to produce mature, harvestable grapes 976551 The grisly outcome was predictable The 60,000 African National Congress supporters who marched to the border of South Africa's so- called independent homeland of Ciskei were not unexpected The chanting A.N.C demonstrators had vowed to storm the capital, Bisho, and unseat the military government of Brigadier Oupa Gqozo When they broke through a gap in a razor-wire fence at the border, trigger-happy troops of the Ciskei army began shooting directly into the crowd After two 28 prolonged bursts of gunfire, 28 people lay dead in pools of blood; another 400 were wounded, either by gunfire or in the stampede that followed # The retributions were equally predictable (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,976551,00.html) This example could be understood in the context of Africa in the 1990s In this period, many countries Africa rebelled, and then people in these countries managed to gain the independence Consequently, the newspaper all over the world recorded these events and used the phrase “independent homeland” quite regularly This instance mentioned the word “homeland” as the country of the black people in Africa who had just gained independence The word “homeland”, hence, was used to refer to the land associated with a particular group The results for the use of the word “homeland” in the 2000s are shown as below: Security 145 The 61 a 25 His 15 Her 12 Their 12 Department 10 Secretary Defense (The collocates of “homeland” in the highest frequency in the 2000s) It is noteworthy that the use of the word “homeland” in the 2010s is nearly the same as it was in the 2000s 29 The above table suggests that the results for the use of the word “homeland” collected in Time Magazine corpus be the same as that in COCA Corpus, that is the word “homeland” in the 2000s and 2010s was almost used as an adjective to modify the noun “security”, or as a proper noun to refer to a political office (the Department of Homeland Security) Discussion: Baker (2006) suggests that after deciding how many collocates we want to look at, we should consider whether these collocates can be grouped semantically, thematically, grammatically and so on The collocates of the word “homeland” in the period of the 1990s, gathered in COCA corpus can be classified grammatically into three groups:  possessive adjectives, including “my”, “his”, “her”, “our”, “their”, denoting the meaning of the word “homeland” as a place where some particular people were born  the article, including “a” and “the”  the adjective associated with a particular group, including “Palestinian” and “Jewish” These collocates help the readers identify the meaning of the word “homeland” in the period of the 1990s These collocates help denote the meaning of the word “homeland” That is, “homeland” is a geographic space affiliated with some particular people or with a particular group, and “homeland” in these circumstances function as a noun This investigation has confirmed the definition in the dictionary which defines the word “homeland” as “the country where a person was born” Similarly, the collocates of the word “homeland” in the 1990s found in the Time Magazine Corpus can be divided into three sub-groups:  possessive adjectives, including “his”, “her”, “their”  the article, including “a” and “the” 30  the adjective associated with a particular group, including “Black” or “Kwazulu” The two first groups are exactly the same as those found in the COCA corpus Nonetheless, there is a small difference in third group Instead of collocating with adjectives like “Palestine” or “Jewish”, “homeland” in Time Magazine Corpus is found to co-occur with “Black” or “Kwazulu”, the groups of people in African countries This can be explained by the fact that in this period, many African countries succeeded in gaining independence from other countries; as a result, this word was normally related to these countries rather than other countries This can denote the second meaning of the word “homeland”: (in the Republic of South Africa under the Apartheid system), one of the areas with some selfgovernment that were intended for a group of black African people to live in (Oxford Advanced Learner‟s Dictionary) From the two corpora, it can be concluded that the word “homeland” in this period was used with two meanings, and it was used a noun Over the period of the 2000s and 2010s, the collocates of the word “homeland” can be grammatically categorized into three smaller groups:  the nouns related to security, including “security” and “defense”  the possessive adjectives  the articles The second and the third group stay the same as the second and the third group in the period of the 1990s In other words, the meaning of the word “homeland” in the 2000s and 2010s remained the same as it did in the 1990s However, in the 2000s, the word “homeland” was most used with nouns as “security” and “defense” to refer to US protection against the terrorists Additionally, this word was combined with “security” to refer to a political office called “Homeland Security Department”, which is responsible for preventing terrorist attacks in the US (Oxford Advanced 31 Learner‟s Dictionary) In these cases, the word “homeland” was used as a noun or an adjective This can be partly explained by the events in the US In 2001, the US had to suddenly suffer from an attack which they had never thought of, and that was beyond their imagination After that, the US government as well as its citizen raise more awareness of their security, and the “Homeland Security Department” was established with its own mission Furthermore, concerning with the frequency of the use of this word over two decades, the writer of this paper discovered that in the 1990s, the word “homeland” was used with high frequency regardless of the genres; however, in the 2000s and 2010s, in the context of the US after the attack analyzed above, the use of the word “homeland” increased greatly, and this word was used much more frequently than ever before All in all, the use of the word “homeland” grew significantly over three selected periods of time, and there was also a shift in the use of this word In the 1990s, it was almost used as a noun to refer to the geographic space where someone was born; nevertheless, it was frequently utilized as a noun or an adjective to refer to a political office instead in the 2000s and 2010s Implications The study contributes to the field of developing materials as well as education First and foremost, it is quite normal for the dictionary designer to utilize the corpus-based to gather the data He needs to collect the data from different sources of information to explore which words often collocate with the target words Then, he needs to analyze the collocation to investigate the meanings of the target word in the context If the use of the word changes, he needs to update the information with relevant examples Regarding to the word “homeland”, some advanced learner‟s dictionaries using their own corpus have updated the new use of the word “homeland” 32 such as Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (Longman Corpus Network), Macmillan English Dictionary of Advanced Learner (Center for English Corpus Linguistics) or Oxford Advanced Learner‟s Dictionary However, some dictionaries like Collins Cobuild Advanced Learners‟ English dictionary need to update the new use of this word Consequently, this paper is somehow useful and somehow can contribute to the development of the next versions of the dictionary Also, the finding of this study shows that the meanings of the collocation with the word “homeland” vary in different contexts This study can serve as a document for the teachers and students to consult Specifically, the findings of this study provide the teachers and students a list of top ten collocates of the word “homeland” with its three primary meanings As a consequence, they can read this paper as a reference material for further understanding of the word in different contexts 33 PART III: CONCLUSIONS I Recapitulation: The aim of the research is to study the collocation of the lexical item “homeland” in the highest frequency in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Time Magazine Corpus in three periods: 1990s, 2000s and 2010s From that analysis, the research wishes to investigate whether the use of the words remained the same or shifted through those periods The study is expected to fill the gap in which almost no previous linguists have ever explored about the lexical item “homeland” before The writer of this paper, in order to achieve the above-stated goals, employed both quantitative and qualitative method After running the queries, the most frequent collocates of the word “homeland” were revealed; also, the frequency of the use of this word over three decades was also presented An analysis of these collocates were implemented, and it drew several important conclusions which are as follows: There was a great increase in the use of the word “homeland” over the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, and this figure tends to go upward in this decade There was a shift in the use of the word “homeland” This word was almost used as a noun in the 1990s to refer to the geographic space related to a particular group whereas it was mainly used as a noun or adjective to modify the word “security” or to refer to a political department in the 2000s and 2010s II Limitations of the study: Despite the writer‟s effort, this study has still shown some limitations Firstly, there are currently so many corpora in the world; however, the collocates of the word “homeland” were just analyzed based on the data from 34 Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Time Magazine Corpus As a result, the data from other corpora were not investigated Despite the vast majority of corpora available, few corpora show the change of the target word over periods of time Moreover, due to the problem of copyright, the writer could not gain full access to the full texts of the examples, which prevented the writer from fully understanding the background information and could have negative influences on the discourse analysis Additionally, the writer did not wish to explore the use of this word over all periods of time; and he only decided to select decades for the analysis This could lead to the incomplete comprehension of the use of this word III Further research: Further research in the field of collocation analysis should be carried out in order to provide the learners deeper understanding of lexical items Here come several suggestions for further study in this field:  What words collocate in the highest frequency with the word “economy” in the American media under George W Bush and Obama‟s presidencies?  How was the word “change” employed in Obama‟s speeches in his election? 35 REFERENCES Baker, P (2010) Will Ms ever be as frequent as Mr? Equinoxonline, 4, 125-149 Baker, P (2006) Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis London: Continuum Bennett, G.R (2010) Using Corpora in the Language Learning Classroom: Corpus Linguistics for Teachers Michigan ELT Biber, Conrad and Rappen (1998) Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use Cambridge University Press Conrad, S (2002) Corpus Linguistics Approaches for Discourse Analysis Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 22, 75-95 Retrieved from dx.doi.org/10.1017/SO267190502000041 August 25th 2013 Crystal, D (1991) A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics Blackwell Firth, J.R (1957) Papers in Linguistics 1934-1951 Oxford University Press Flowerdew, J (2013) Discourse in English Language Education Taylor and Francis Group McEnery, T and Wilson, A (1996) Corpus Linguistics Edinburgh University Press Sinclair, J (1991) Corpus Concordance, Collocation Oxford University Press Reppen, R (2010) Using Corpora in the Language Classroom Cambridge University Press Wynne, M and Prytz, Y.B (2012) Corpus Linguistics Course OUCS Hilary Source of examples: Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) Retrieved from corpus.byu.edu/coca/ Time Magazine Corpus Retrieved from corpus.byu.edu/time/ 36 ... articles The second and the third group stay the same as the second and the third group in the period of the 1990s In other words, the meaning of the word ? ?homeland? ?? in the 2000s and 2010s remained the. .. that the results for the use of the word ? ?homeland? ?? collected in Time Magazine corpus be the same as that in COCA Corpus, that is the word ? ?homeland? ?? in the 2000s and 2010s was almost used as an... describe a corpus- based analysis of the collocates of the word ? ?homeland? ?? The data for the analysis were taken from two popular corpora which are Corpus of Contemporary American English and Time Magazine