1,720,959 research outputs found
Signaling Transitions in Academic Writing
Get PDFThis corpus lesson is designed to familiarize students of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) with a wide range of transition words. Using the Corpus of Contemporary American English, students distinguish transition words by finding differences in meaning, grammaticality, and sentence position. The inductive inquiry focus of this lesson can heighten student interest in the lexical nuances and grammatical behavior of these highly frequent words, better equipping students to use transitions effectively in their own writing
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Nations united through discourse: a corpus analysis of UN general assembly addresses
Get PDFThe overarching goal of this dissertation is to investigate the linguistic features of United Nations (UN) General Assembly (GA) General Debate addresses delivered in English during 2015. In order to describe UNGA addresses with the greatest accuracy, breadth, and depth, the study explores typical linguistic features across texts as well as variation within the register. Thus, the dissertation also examines the geographic, political, economic, and social profile of the countries represented in the UNGA in order to identify any country-related characteristics associated with systematic linguistic variation. The dissertation uses two corpus-informed methodologies: register analysis and Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS), with a secondary goal of discerning the ways in which methodology affects the nature of findings.
The study is based on a corpus of all 92 UNGA addresses delivered in English during the General Debate in 2015. In the examination of linguistic features across UNGA addresses, the UN texts are contrasted with the British National Corpus as well as four comparable registers: prepared speeches, spontaneous speeches, official documents, and conversation. The analysis begins with a description of situational characteristics for the UNGA and the four comparison registers. Then keywords and Multi-Dimensional scores for the five principal dimensions found in Biber (1988) reveal the lexical and grammatical features that characterize the UNGA. The second part of the investigation looks at variation among UNGA addresses, with texts divided into groups based on country-specific characteristics such as region and Gross Domestic Product. Keyword analysis, key feature analysis, and Multi-Dimensional analysis are used to identify systematic variation of linguistic features based on country group. The final analysis is a CADS study of three frequent and politically salient terms (terrorism, Security Council, and women) with keyword and collocational analyses to determine how the terms are conceptualized generally in the UNGA and also whether any variation can be identified for country groups.
Results show a remarkable consistency across the UNGA not only in what lexical and grammatical features are preferred and dispreferred but also in how they are used. Lexical features reveal the importance of topic, purpose, and discourse structure. Grammatical features are greatly influenced by written-to-be-spoken production circumstances and purpose. In spite of the large number of features (126) and country groups (31) explored, very few exhibit any systematic patterns of variation. The variation that does occur is primarily associated with level of development and region. The CADS analysis supports the register analysis, showing that UNGA texts tend to conceptualize politically charged terms in similar ways with only occasional variation based on country group. These findings have important implications for the field of political discourse analysis, furthering our understanding of the linguistic features of international organization spoken discourse. In addition, the CADS analysis demonstrates some important methodological considerations, with consequences for the design of future corpus-informed research
Exploring Terms in English for Specific Purposes
No full textStudents of English for specific purposes (ESP) require technical vocabulary with which instructors may not be entirely familiar. Moreover, ESP textbooks tend to present the most frequent technical vocabulary across specializations (e.g. the most common dictionary definitions for dimension and argument rather than their specific meanings in Mathematics, Psychology, or Law) and rarely address the lexical needs of specific fields (e.g. actuator in Mechanical Engineering and free on board in Business). This lesson helps teachers use AntConc to locate essential vocabulary from one or more documents and offers several ways for students to learn how to use the words through authentic materials
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Motivating Student Reading Through Post-Reading Book Creation
Get PDFThe Intensive English Program (IEP) high-beginners looked proud for the first time since they had started the course months earlier, their e-books projected dazzlingly on the wall of the classroom. The adult-education class turned into a sea of raised hands and smiling faces, each learner eager to stand in front of the class and read the unique, colorful paper book they had created. The preschoolers clamored to read another story so they could draw a new ending to that one as well. What do these three groups of learners have in common? They are all excited to read more because they have been reading with a purpose: to create a new book based on the text they had just read and share their creation with their peers
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