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1 Introduction

With this contribution we wish to put forward the results of an initiative of collaborative work between a team of teachers of Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) and teachers of specialized translation who decided to combine their efforts to design and implement two LSP courses which form part of the degree programme in Translation and Interpreting of the University Jaume I in Spain. On their third year, students have to take two courses of legal and business English, a prerequisite for their enrolment in the fourth year courses of legal and business Translation.

The practice of specialized translation requires not only a very high command of general English but also a high command of professional English. The texts specialized translators work with are characterized by stereotyped structures, complex syntax, standard phraseology and genre specific vocabulary. In fact, dictionaries and other terminology-based resources have proved insufficient, since they need to transfer from one language to another, texts patterns which are extremely conventionalized.

This problem prompted us to use authentic professional documents as a starting point to design a new teaching approach based on the hypothesis that the application of textual genres to the teaching-learning of LSP can provide both teachers and learners with culture-dependent codes in their progress towards the acquisition of language for special purposes. Each specialized genre presents its own features, purposes and cultural conventions. Once learners know how to recognize and use genres (terminology, phraseology, macrostructure, rhetorical devices, etc.) they will be able to develop the necessary strategies to cope with new and unfamiliar text types. This is crucial in the context of current Information Society Technologies since genres, as well as reality, are constantly changing, evolving and appearing in new forms. They reflect the evolution of specific socio-cultural interactions and, therefore, of specialized linguistic performance and expertise.

In the following sections we will analyse the impact of corpora on LSP teaching, present the GENTT example corpus of specialized discourse full-text documents and discuss how LSP teachers and learners can efficiently exploit this tool.

2 The Use of Corpora in LSP Teaching: Contextualizing LSP

Until recently, language-teaching materials were based mostly on non-authentic sentence examples. However, access to authentic texts (in an electronic format) has improved significantly in the area of LSP thanks to the Internet and to the rapidly evolving electronic text and corpus analysis methodologies. Tribble (1997) shows how even small corpora of fewer than one million words can be of considerable benefit in the LSP context. The applications of corpus technologies to LSP range from the identification of high frequency lexis in a specific domain, collocation, colligation and semantic prosody, grammar and discourse, to the contrastive analysis of lexical items in different domains or the contrastive analysis of genres (text-types) in different sublanguages.

Since the 1980s, the application of textual genres to language teaching and, in particular, to LSP teaching, has become one of the most dynamic lines of research in the area of genre theory. Regarding the process of second language acquisition, Bazerman (1988), Bazerman and Russell (2002), Bhatia (1993, 2004) and Swales (1990, 2004), among others, emphasize the importance of understanding communication codes that are specific to the culture of individual fields of specialization and the structure of its textual genres to acquire linguistic expertise in a particular field of knowledge. In order to maximize the advantages of a genre-based approach to LSP learning, the large number of documents that can be found for each genre within the different fields of knowledge must be efficiently stored, classified and managed. Electronic corpora have proved to be useful and dynamic tools for specialized knowledge and collaborative information management within the LSP context.

Adolphs (2006) points out that a key advantage of the use of corpora within the context of LSP is that they can supply data regarding specific phraseology, word frequencies and distributions in different discourse contexts, thereby providing important information for the language learner and instructor. The co-text reveals information about the specific phraseology that surrounds a particular word and contributes to its functional interpretation. Word frequency information can be used to design syllabuses based on the needs of particular learners with regard to both the sequence of specific vocabulary items that are being taught and the overall size of the restricted vocabulary that is required to achieve an adequate coverage of a specialized domain. This kind of information derived from corpora provides LSP learners with a list of words that make up the core of the language domain and that can be used to analyse and deal with numerous vocabulary acquisition problems such as polysemous words, learnability or interference with the learner’s first language and decontextualisation.

3 The GENTT Corpus of Specialized Genres

The GENTT Research Group has been working since 2000 on the concept of textual genre and its relevance to the drafting and translation of specialized texts in professional settings. The main focus of GENTT is the multilingual study of genres in professional legal, medical and technical contexts, three domains that occupy a central position in LSP Teaching and Translation Studies. The GENTT project has focused on mapping the textual performances of these fields and compiling a multilingual (English, Spanish, French, German and Catalan) example corpus of specialized discourse full-text documents in the fields of law, medicine and technology.

The following list shows the objectives (partly achieved at the moment) of a team of 14 people, who have been working together under the funding of various public institutions:

  • To build up a catalogue (mapping) of the genres of law, medicine and technology (GENTT field trees).

  • To relate, classify and define the features of the professional texts in these three fields, from a formal and communicative perspective (GENTT Genre Template).

  • To build up a multilingual (Catalan, English, German, Spanish and French) example corpus of specialized discourse texts (GENTT Example Corpus).

  • To provide LSP learners and other users of professional texts (translators and technical writers and proofreaders) with text models and templates that could be used as textual, conceptual, linguistic and terminological reference.

  • To build up a repository of teaching materials with real life texts for LSP

  • To create an electronic tool to manage all the information related to the genres contained in the corpus (GENTT Corpus Management System).

The GENTT Corpus includes currently more than 1,000 full-text documents, which contain over three million words in total, all fully searchable and easily retrievable in electronic format. In the creation of this corpus, an empirical-descriptive methodology has been applied. The identification and compilation of each genre and subgenre example is based on the analysis of “the function, the cultural context, the situational context and the existence of a differentiated linguistic performance” (Borja 2005: 16).

The representativeness of the corpus does not lie in the amount of texts or words it contains, but in the number of different genre examples provided. In fact, its design is intended to create a knowledge management system (a genre tree), similar to terminological knowledge representation systems, structured around the notion of genre, for learners and users of professional specialized genres (Borja 2005). As our project is open and dynamic, the corpus is constantly evolving subject to the creativity and input of those participating in its development.

3.1 Main Functionalities of the Corpus

Although the system distinguishes between various types of users (Administrator, GENTT member, Basic User…), here we shall approach it from a Basic User learning LSP point of view. The functions Basic Users can perform are the following:

  • document search,

  • document download,

  • word and collocations search,

  • subcorpora (smaller corpus document collections created attending to the individual needs of the user) creation and download and

  • editing of the individual searches and findings.

GENTT members may also upload documents and modify genre classifications. In addition to the functions available to basic users, administrators can also create reports on the state of the corpus. Finally, users with higher privileges have the option of giving other researchers/students access to the corpus.

In order to log in to the corpus, participants in the LSP learning context (from now on, users) should have registered previously. A corpus Administrator can carry out the registration process. Alternatively, an invitation might be issued by another user. Once registered, users can log in to the system and perform different functions depending on their role. Users may also add collaborators, who can search, create, download and edit their subcorpora. This functionality enhances greatly collaborative work on the LSP classroom (Fig. 9.1).

Fig. 9.1
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The GENTT Corpus interface

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Users can browse data according to their needs. The search may be either simple or advanced, but in both cases users can customise the results display by selecting the columns they wish to view. Searches may be narrowed down through the Advanced Search option by choosing among the categories shown in several drop-down menus: title, author, source, status, year of publication, genre, textual and language.

The system offers the option of saving searches, so that the user can later refine and exploit them as personal subcorpora. After saving the subcorpus, the column of operations in the results table allows the selection and de-selection of documents to modify subcorpus contents. Users can download the documents selected in several formats: plain text, HTML and jpg. One of the most interesting options for users is to upload documents into the corpus. Once a new document has been added, an identification card should be filled in (Country; Genre; Thematic field; Title; Author; Source; Year of publication; Translator; Suggested Genre; Related documents). All the documents in the corpus have been organized according to a hierarchical genre classification that can also be modified by users.

3.2 A See-Through Learning Approach

As stated by Adolphs (2006), in order to build up a suitable corpus or subcorpus for specific needs in the LSP context, it is essential to establish the basis for its design criteria, that is, what the role of the corpus is; who uses it; what the particular learning objective is; or what the particular genre that is being explored is. The GENTT Corpus embraces the web 2.0 philosophy, providing a collaborative environment that permits users interested in legal, medical and technical domains to browse, feed and manage a collection of texts on line so that participants in the teaching-learning process, depending on their aims and needs, can easily create and manage their own subcorpora in different languages and in different specialized domains. It offers unique and powerful information sharing and collaboration features which facilitate asynchronous communication and group collaboration across an open Internet platform. The see-through, transparent technology approach implemented affords users the added advantage of reducing the technical skill required to use these features, by allowing them to focus on the language and collaborative tasks.

Technology that is opaque and requires a lot of investment in time, mental energy and effort will be rejected in favour of something easier. On the other hand, transparent technology, which is easy to use and has little demands on the cognitive energy of the user, is often referred to as ‘user friendly’ in that it allows the user to ‘see through’ the device into what it is able to do for them (John and Wheeler 2008).

The structure of the GENTT Corpus incorporates genre templates that provide formal, communicative and cognitive information about the genres it contains, e.g. macro- and micro-linguistic features, function and rhetorical devices. Previous research in the area has shown that when in possession of this information, LSP learners can improve progressively their professional competence, both linguistic and extralinguistic, through a self-directed learning process. In fact, one of the objectives of this paper is to show how the incorporation of both corpus-based and genre-based approaches into text analysis as part of LSP teaching can, in some respects, overcome the criticism that corpus linguistic analyses apply bottom-up rather than top-down methodologies and that the use of decontextualized corpus data does not take into account the socio-cultural context.

The GENTT Corpus also provides learners of professional languages with text models and patterns to be used as cultural, conceptual, textual, linguistic and terminological reference. The possibilities of applying the work on genre-based corpora to LSP teaching are evident. Following Bhatia (1997), work with genres pertaining to the student’s professional background and interests causes learners to develop an explicit desire for conscious participation in the professional community and a feeling of shared ownership of their communicative resources, rather than learning words and structures mechanically and out of context. According to Bhatia et al. (2008) learners of a specialized language need:

  • to understand the specialist’s communication code,

  • to familiarize themselves with rhetorical resources and those that occur in specialized genres,

  • to understand the various socio-cultural contexts in which specialized communication takes place, and

  • to be capable of using specialized genres to respond to new and unexpected situations.

All these four skills can be enhanced by using the GENTT Corpus and by becoming familiar with the textual mapping and genre characterizations it provides. Another advantage of this electronic tool, based on genres extracted from real life communication, is that language is learnt in its actual context and learning programmes can be designed with very specific needs in mind. It is possible, for example, to design a course focused on the discourse of a particular professional and communicative situation (e.g. the documents of a judicial process which might be of interest for a student of legal English), treating it as a single genre (a judgment) or as a system of genres that would include all the documents that accompany that particular genre (claim, counterclaim, injunction, judgment, appeal, etc.) and even the oral genres related to them (witness deposition transcripts).

Within this context learners become the centre of the process as they improve their linguistic and extralinguistic competences according to their own learning styles. Teachers, on the other hand, are facilitators of the instruction process and can also tailor their syllabus—from very controlled to more complex learning tasks design—towards the needs of a diverse range of learners. Both sides benefit from the use of corpus technologies by means of a hypothetical deductive approach, helping LSP students learn to communicate effectively and fully understand the realities of the world of specialized discourse.

Bearing these factors in mind, a constructive teaching-learning approach based on the concepts of corpus and genre can be implemented, applying a methodology in which learners use language actively in a given context, monitor their own learning progress and develop new skills and competences such as hypothesis testing and data analysis. This approach allows learners to explore language data and to derive patterns of language use, which promotes creativity and innovation in the language classroom.

In the following sections we present practical learning activities for the teaching of legal and business English using the GENTT Corpus, in which the teacher instructs students in analytic strategies, both rhetorical and textual. Both legal and business English serve very specific professional purposes and affect the daily lives of virtually everyone in our society. The activities and materials presented here are designed to give students a broader linguistic perspective including comparative insights into the particular knowledge systems and procedures of law and business, which are the basis of these two areas of specialized discourse.

4 The GENTT Corpus in the Legal English Classroom

4.1 Legal English

Among the various specialized languages, legal language is one of the most formulaic, frozen and conservative. The possibilities of language performance are considerably restrained given that legal language is subject to special rules which do not apply to general texts and which are limiting with respect to the possible forms of expressing terminology, phrases and even to the drafting and macrostructure of legal instruments. Legal language can be defined as (1) the language which is used in those communicative situations in which public power is enforced, regardless of whether the manifestation of this power (legislative, executive or judicial) is directed towards the citizen or is used by citizens to communicate with public institutions; and (2) the language employed by private parties in legally binding relations.

The legal system is, possibly, one of the most normativized systems and one which relies largely on words and texts: statutes are decreed, meetings are called to order, contracts are entered into, search warrants are issued, etc. In all these cases there is a fixed, conventional form of expression that is exceedingly precise and depends on the legal functions of these texts. The extreme formality of legal language can also be attributed to its long sentences, complex constructions, archaic and hyper-formal vocabulary and a focus on content to the exclusion of reader needs.

Despite claims about the precision and exactness of legal language, lawyers often opt for deliberate ambiguity—usually of a syntactic type—which the LSP learner must be able to recognize. The constructions that most lend themselves to ambiguity are nominalizations, passives and multiple adjectivation, as well as the distinction between adjective clauses being restrictive or non-restrictive. Many legal disputes revolve around textual ambiguity and the possible interpretations that any one sentence can have. In this context, learning objectives may include: getting familiar with legal lexis, understanding complex structures and rhetorical devices and learning to disambiguate vague constructions (where possible). Furthermore, legal language users will need to have an excellent command of genre conventions. The acquisition of these abilities and competences can greatly benefit from the analysis of the legal documents contained in the GENTT Corpus.

Linguists and social scientists that have turned their attention to legal language have remarked its complexity as a distinctive feature. However it should be noted that the complexity of this language does not come solely from the grammar, but is a consequence of the pragmatic aspects which contextualize it as authors like Danet (1985) and Gunnarsson (1984) uphold. Therefore, its apparent complexity cannot be attributed only to linguistic factors but rather to the combination of a complex conceptual structure that lends it a very sophisticated form of expression. As previously mentioned, the GENTT Corpus is built upon the idea of genre, which constitutes a key element to understand the legal conceptual framework.

An additional difficulty for students of legal English is the cultural anisomorphism between legal systems, meaning the losses and gains that always occur in interlinguistic transfer. Sometimes the legal terms and concepts do not exist in the students’ mother tongue or the concepts are completely different (e.g., the term company limited by shares in English carries legal and commercial implications which are different from those of the Spanish sociedad limitada, the popular English trust is inexistent in Spanish legislation, etc.). The number of false friends is significant: in Spanish statute does not mean estatuto but rather ley; ley does not mean law but rather statute or Act, to name only a few English-Spanish cognates. The multilingual nature of the GENTT Corpus affords the possibility of using a comparative law approach to the study of legal concepts and language.

4.2 Corpus-Based Activities in the Teaching of Legal English

The activities proposed in the following sections are aimed at reinforcing receptive reading and productive writing. Of course, listening and speaking should also be considered when designing legal English course contents but our corpus is an excellent tool for reading and writing activities so we shall focus on the former. Regarding language systems, we propose two grammar activities, one on modals (Activity 1) and one on suffixed prepositions (Activity 2). The third activity deals with the macrostructure of legal instruments and is aimed at improving reading subskills, speed and comprehension (Activity 3).

4.2.1 Activity 1

Learning to identify expressions of obligation, permission and prohibition in business agreements.

Task: Students are asked to identify all the Business Agreements in the corpus and find clauses expressing three particular categories of language: obligation, permission and prohibition (Fig. 9.2).

Fig. 9.2
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Search findings for business agreements

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Aims: To make students aware of the importance of using the right verbs and categories of language to convey the exact meaning and purpose in legally binding agreements.

Methodology: The students are provided with tables containing one or more examples of a particular category of language, with each example being followed by variations on that example (e.g., obligation clauses using shall, must, agrees to, undertakes, covenants, is obligated to, etc.). The table is introduced by the teacher and discussed in the classroom to highlight the typical dysfunctions in the use of these expressions and the problems a deficient use may bring about. Students then work individually to identify and download the Business Agreements contained in the corpus and create a subcorpus. Working in small groups, they are asked to find examples in the subcorpus similar to the ones provided. Each group works on one category and presents its findings to the class (Fig. 9.3).

Fig. 9.3
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Hand-out 1. Categories of contract language

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Teaching rationale: A clause or sentence in the body of the contract can serve a number of purposes. Each purpose requires its own category of language and each category raises its own issues of usage. Commercial litigation frequently has its roots in mishandled contract language and this activity is aimed at raising students’ awareness of the importance of seeking consistency in written usages with very specific purposes (Fig. 9.4).

Fig. 9.4
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Different forms of expressing obligation

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4.2.2 Activity 2

Understanding and using suffixed prepositions (hereby, hereto, therein, thereto …).

Legal writing extensively uses archaic vocabulary, old words and phrases that were formerly quotidian language, but today exist mostly or only in law. A good example are herein, hereto, hereby, heretofore, herewith, whereby and wherefore. Pronominal adverbs occur in a number of Germanic languages, formed in replacement of a preposition and a pronoun by turning the latter into a locative adverb and the former into a prepositional adverb and joining them in reverse order: For that → therefore; In that → therein; By this → hereby; To this → hereto; In which → wherein. They are used frequently by lawyers primarily as a way of avoiding the repetition of names of things in the document (or sometimes as a reference to the document itself). Pronominal adverbs are considered as a feature of legal jargon.

Task: Students are asked to identify suffixed prepositions in the previously built subcorpus, extract ten examples in context and provide a translation into Spanish.

Aims: To enhance the acquisition and comprehension of complex specialized grammar compounds.

Methodology: Before starting the corpus activity, the teacher will introduce these archaic expressions and students will be provided with a hand-out including the main forms and meanings they can take (Fig. 9.5).

Fig. 9.5
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Hand-out. Suffixed prepositions 1

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Students work in pairs. A list of instructions is provided, explaining the steps that should be followed to carry out this activity. Once students are logged on to the corpus, they should browse the corpus to search for the term hereto. The screenshot in Fig. 9.6 shows the results of searching the term hereto in the corpus. It provides information about the frequency of appearance of hereto in each agreement. In the middle column the concordances contextualizing the term are displayed and on the right hand side we find the download link. By clicking on the green arrow the students get the complete text with the terms highlighted.

Fig. 9.6
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Search findings for Hereto

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After performing searches such as this one for all the expressions, students are asked to translate individually several sentences containing suffixed prepositions. To conclude this activity, each pair is asked to present their results to the rest of students in the group.

Teaching rationale: The rationale behind this activity is to provide students with a new approach to the analysis of legal language in context (Fig. 9.7).

Fig. 9.7
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Worksheet for suffixed prepositions activity

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4.2.3 Activity 3

Familiarizing themselves with the macrostructure of commercial agreements.

Task: Students are asked to identify the macrostructure of four business agreements, define a common macrostructure for all of them and compare them with the typical Spanish Agreements macrostructure.

Aims: To improve the different reading subskills: (1) predicting content of what we read; (2) identifying global meaning (GIST, skimming—terminology for reading only); (3) selecting specific detail from text (scanning—terminology for reading only); (4) inferring meaning from text; (5) guessing meaning of unknown vocabulary from text.

Methodology: Working in pairs, students are asked to analyse six commercial agreements from the corpus and decide whether they share or not a common macrostructure. Findings are presented to and discussed in the group. Figure 9.8 shows the potential results of this activity.

Fig. 9.8
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Business agreement macrostructure

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Teaching rationale: The rationale behind this activity is to make students aware of the importance of knowing the genre conventions affecting text structure. Becoming familiar with the typical sections of the most important legal instruments will help them to increase their reading speed and comprehension.

5 The GENTT Corpus in the Business English Classroom

5.1 Business English: A Trendy Cover Term?

Business English has experienced a steady growth in recent decades, becoming the main expansion area of ESP (Hewings 2002), due to various factors such as the consolidation of English as a lingua franca and the expansion of local and national markets, leading to an increase of international business relationships.

Scholars such as Pickett (1986) or Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998) coincide in the difficulty of establishing a clear definition of Business English. On the one hand, business English is learnt for a wide variety of purposes; on the other, there exists considerable overlap between business English (ESP) and general English in strictly linguistic terms. Nevertheless, it is important to establish some defining features of business English in order to maximize the pedagogical outcome of the proposed classroom activities. Given the educational setting in which we are working, the most relevant characteristics are the following:

  • Effective communication is the main concern (Dudley-Evans and St John 1998: 73).

  • Language depends on status, power and how well established the business relationship is (ibid.: 73).

  • Seven core communicative events are identified (ibid.: 63): telephoning, socializing, making presentations, taking part in meetings and negotiating (oral); and corresponding and reporting (written).

  • The communicative events above, especially those that require the written form, are carried out by means of specific genres.

  • Sharing other pragmatic features with general English, assertion and downtoning, as well as checking and confirming (Duckworth 1995) are key elements of business English.

  • Combination of general, semi-specialized and specialized lexis.

5.2 Corpus-Based Activities in the Teaching of Business English

The following activities are designed for Business and Administrative English for Translators, an optional course that undergraduates in their second year should take if they are to specialise in legal and business Translation. This course is aimed at providing students with some basic knowledge of business communication (correspondence, types of corporations, reports, CVs and covering letters). For the vast majority of students, this is the first contact with business English. Furthermore, it is important to bear in mind that most of them are not familiar with corpus methodologies. This implies that some initial familiarization sessions are needed, in which students get acquainted with the terminology of corpus linguistics and with the GENTT Corpus itself. The students’ average language proficiency is at an upper intermediate level.

5.2.1 Activity 1

Becoming familiar with the lexis of business correspondence.

Task: Students are asked to use the GENTT Corpus to browse the documents available in the genre Letters and to identify the most typical lexical elements of this genre.

Aims: To conduct a simple search by genre in the GENTT Corpus; to extract the most characteristic lexical elements of the genre.

Methodology: Students work in pairs. A list of instructions is provided, explaining the steps that should be followed to carry out this activity. Once students are logged on to the corpus, they should conduct a search to retrieve the information they are required to find. After retrieving the corresponding documents, it is their task to identify the relevant lexical elements, working in pairs. To conclude this activity, each pair is asked to present their results to the other students in the group.

Teaching rationale: The rationale behind this activity is to provide students with a new approach to the analysis of business language and, at the same time, to encourage them to take an active role in the study of the semi-specialized and specialized lexis of business correspondence.

5.2.2 Activity 2

Identifying typical business correspondence collocations.

Task: Students are asked to find the most frequent collocations in which the word payment occurs.

Aims: To introduce concordances; to make students reflect on the relevance of phraseology; to make students aware of genre conventions.

Methodology: Students work in small groups. First, students log on to the corpus. They are provided with instructions for every step. Students need to conduct a keyword search, explore the concordances they retrieve and analyse these results according to the task. Following this, students are expected to take part in a discussion to share their findings with the rest of the classroom.

Teaching rationale: The motivation for this activity is to raise students’ awareness of the fundamental role of collocations, phraseology and genre conventions in specialized communication. Ultimately, the rationale behind this activity is to challenge students’ restricted perception of specialized language, which is frequently equated with specialized lexis (Fig. 9.9).

Fig. 9.9
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Search findings for the term payment collocations

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5.2.3 Additional Activities

Once students have familiarized themselves with the corpus, additional activities are the identification of downtoning structures, the mapping of the business genre by means of identifying different subgenres and the analysis of more complex phraseological units.

6 Conclusions

After 2 years applying the teaching-learning approach described, we have found that the learning objectives initially established by the team of LSP and specialized translation teachers have largely been achieved and student satisfaction has increased. Not only does the implementation of this corpus and genre-based methodology enhance formal, communicative and cognitive learning within the LSP context, but it also promotes collaborative work and interaction between teacher and students and among students themselves.

The set of activities we have designed and implementedFootnote 1 ranges from very controlled to more complex and autonomous learning tasks. Typically, the teacher first provides students with a list of instructions. They then are asked to work individually or in pairs and present their work to the rest of the class. A group discussion usually follows.

The experience has revealed that through the use of the GENTT Corpus in the classroom a data-driven approach can be adopted. This approach contributes significantly to the development of autonomous learning, enabling students to identify the characteristic patterns of each genre, thereby increasing their capacity for performing critical analysis and decision-making.

Our experience also shows how students take an active role in the study of specialized lexis since they analyse legal and business language in context and have to deal with authentic and real world professional texts. Their learning becomes meaningful and they develop an explicit desire for conscious participation in the professional community and a feeling of shared ownership of their communicative resources, rather than learning words and structures mechanically and out of context.

With the implementation of this type of tools, we are moving towards new expectations in language teaching, that is, towards a dynamic corpus and genre-based approach in which learner and teacher collaborate, participate and interact in the instruction process, thus incorporating creativity and innovation in LSP teaching.

In its previous versions, the corpus was managed through an Intranet within the Universitat Jaume I. With the new 3.0 version, the group has opted for opening the system, according to the Web 2.0 philosophy, so that we can evolve towards a more collaborative environment that will enable users to search, feed and manage the corpus on line. However, due to copyright issues, access to the corpus is limited and the Administrator must give permission. Those of you interested in searching the GENTT Corpus or taking part in our investigation should contact the GENTT team at www.gentt.uji.es.