1,721,016 research outputs found
Databases, Dictionaries and Dialectology. Dental instability in Early Middle English: A case study
No full textDatabases, Dictionaries and Dialectology. Dental instability in Early Middle English: A case study
Full text linkThe early Middle English reflexes of Germanic *ik ‘I’: unpacking the changes
Full text linkThe phonological shape of the PDE first-person nominative singular pronoun ‘I’ is assumed to have a simple history. The final consonant of WGmc *ik ‘palatalises’ (i.e. fronts and assibilates), and later drops, yielding [iː], which develops through the Great Vowel Shift into something like [ai]. However, the late Old English and early Middle English evidence indicates that such a simple narrative does not match the attested data. Rather, there are significant temporal, geographical and variational aspects, including complex lexical diffusion. The Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, Corpus of Tagged of Texts contains 145 texts that include one or more variants of the pronoun ‘I’. Between them, they exemplify an intricate history. In this article we unpack the changes that have brought about the attested complexity. As a basis we use the etymology of this item created for the recently published Corpus of Narrative Etymologies (CoNE), which itself interfaces with its accompanying Corpus of Changes (CC). The history of this small grammatical word ultimately needs to be considered against the wider background of velar palatalisation in general and in relation to the reflexes of other commonly occurring items of a similar structure. But the changes visible in ‘I’ seem not to be fully replicated in any of them, and here we confine ourselves to its particular and apparently unique history
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
Variation and standardisation : the case of Afrikaans (1880-1922)
No full textBibliography: p. 335-366.Following the general model outlined in Weinreich, Labov & Herzog (1968), this study is a contribution to the historiography of Afrikaans from a variationist perspective, investigating the patterns of linguistic variability in the context of the early standardisation of Afrikaans. The work is based on a newly collected historical corpus of private documents which includes letters and diaries from 136 individuals (written between 1880 and 1922), and can be said to represent acrolectal and mesolectal usage. Several morphosyntactic, morpholexical and syntactic variables were investigated: loss of person and number distinctions in the present tense paradigm, loss of the infinitive, regularisation of the past participle, loss of the preterite, loss of gender, the emergence of a new system of adjective inflection and of a new pronoun system, the so-called 'double' negation, infinitive clauses, the use of objective vir, and the periphrastic possessive with se. The quantitative analysis of these variables makes use of a variety of methods: descriptive techniques such as distribution analysis, implicational scaling, cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling and principal components analysis, as well as inferential statistics such as the chi-square test. Variation is furthermore described from a code-switching perspective. As a study in historical sociolinguistics this dissertation is also concerned with the epistemological aspects of socio-historical research, in particular the role of speaker agency in historical explanations, the 'measurement' of the extralinguistic variables in sociolinguistic research, the nature of the relationship between sociolinguistic and social theory, and in general the ontological status of our explanatory and descriptive concepts and taxonomies. While traditionally historiographers of Afrikaans have argued that there existed a sharp linguistic and functional distinction between Afrikaans and Dutch from the mid 18th century, the patterns of variability described for the corpus indicate the existence of a complex dialect continuum (rather than diglossia) until the early 20th century. The results of the quantitative analysis suggest furthermore that the process of linguistic change was slower than hitherto assumed, and variation patterns described for the late 18th century were still found to exist in the corpus. Such continuities challenge the conventional dating of the emergence of Afrikaans as a new language or dialect (characterised by almost complete morphological regularisation and a cluster of innovative syntactic features) to around 1800. As regards the standardisation of Afrikaans the study shows that from the 1850s a relatively uniform model of what constituted the 'vernacular' (or ‘Afrikaans, as it came to be known) existed as a well-defined entity in the popular consciousness, while the actual language use of many speakers remained rather more variable. Increasingly, linguistic practices which were not in line with the propagated model of 'Afrikaans' were identified by the contemporary metalinguistic discourse (which was strongly marked by 19th century cultural nationalism) as unauthentic and thus undesirable. The diffusion of the new standard is shown to have followed the path typical for modern standard languages, i.e. via the socially (and geographically) mobile professional class or intelligentsia. After about 1914 the new standard was widely diffused, and had replaced other Netherlandic varieties in many private documents
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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