1,721,062 research outputs found
Semantic Change, Intersubjectivity and Social Knowledge in The Sydney Morning Herald
No full textAs Salikoko Mufwene contends, all language ecologies consist of a large pool of features and linguistic options to choose from (Mufwene 2001). Yet in post-colonial societies, selecting from language ecology pools entails that speakers constantly redefine and express a social linguistic identity, an alignment with other individuals and an accommodation of speech behaviour. In particular, lexical semantic shift in Australian varieties of English can be analysed in relation to change in culture/society related to Indigenous sovereignty issues: cultural factors and historical events have given rise to highly unpredictable semantic changes. The paper will analyse two corpora of articles from the Australian newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and Koori Mail, based on the years 2000 and 2008, which have been pivotal in the definition of the Australian National Apology to Indigenous peoples, through the tools of discourse analysis
From English to Twenglish: A New Language Variety?
No full textThe aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on language behaviour in Computer Mediated Communication, and on Twitter in particular, from the linguistic point of view, so as to account for possible linguistic changes the new technologies aiding interpersonal communication (may) have brought about. More specifically, we intend to investigate (a) if and to what extent the twitterer’s linguistic choices are affected by the character limitation of the medium, and, most importantly, (b) if anything like Twenglish, that is, the English of Twitter, actually exists, as one might expect from a technological setting that is likely to motivate users to write in a particular way. To this aim, a corpus has been specifically compiled, which will be analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively, so as to draw attention on linguistic traits that may be qualified as potentially distinctive of the messages produced on the Twitter platform
Resignifying Standard English: Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s She tries her tongue her silence softly breaks
Full text linkThere is no other field such as that of postcolonial literature in which creative writing acts as a fundamental device to dismantle the central Imperialnorm. Among the huge post-colonial production, Caribbean literature can be considered an outstanding example of how language contact can result in highly imaginative changes in language structure. The new english resulting from such a contact, widely shifting from the acrolect to the basilect, unfolds the starring role of linguistic transformation – by means of neologisms, innovations, semantic distortions etc. – in the constant process of re-affirming identity, a process that shows ‘the ironic inability of the English language to ward off [the linguistic]invasion by those whom they invaded (Ashcroft, 2009:9)’.
English is my father tongue. A father tongue is a foreign language, therefore English is a foreign language not a mother tongue. What is my mother tongue my mummy tongue my mammy tongue my momsy tongue my modder tongue my ma tongue? (Philip, 1988:30)
The extract is taken from Discourse on the Logic of Language, an emblematic chapter of the book chosen for analysis, which perfectly suits the purpose of this work, that is to show how the linguistic changes in the writer’s Mother tongue, Tobagonian Creole English, code-switched with and embedded in the Father tongue, the colonizer’s standard English, are used to shape the search for identity, rebellion, the deafening silence of black people forced to slavery, the inhuman treatments and the sexual violence to which black women were subjected
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Variations on the Author
Full text link“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
Full text linkWe 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
Full text linkWe 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
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