1,721,041 research outputs found
Persuasion in Poetry: a linguistic analysis of To His Coy Mistress
No full textThe immediate aim of this work is to show that a good many of the persuasive techniques taught and studied in the analysis of political language are applicable to other kinds of everyday persuasion. A second underlying objective is to attempt to show how linguistics can be relevant to the study of poetry
Mind the gaps: The role of corpus linguistics in researching absences
No full textThis paper addresses the charge sometimes made against corpus linguistics that CL cannot deal with absences, that is, information not to be found in a corpus. We begin by examining what absence means in a linguistic sense and distinguish among different varieties of absences, e.g. ‘known absence’ compared with ‘unknown absence’, absence from a sizeable corpus, from a limited set of texts or from a position in a single text, relative absence and absolute absence, and absence defined as ‘hidden from open view’, that is, hidden meaning. We then examine how CL can address each of these kinds of absences. We demonstrate too how certain concepts arising from CL, especially evaluative (semantic) prosody and lexical priming, are extremely relevant to research into absence. Overall, corpus techniques can be invaluable in not only locating absence but in identifying types of absence, in quantifying it and in assisting the researcher to evaluate the relevance of absences
Modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies: methodologies fro tracking language change over recent time.
Full text linkThis paper presents a description of the tools and methodologies employed in the novel discipline of modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies. The main instruments are a set of three ‘sister’ corpora of parallel structure and content from different moments of contemporary time, namely 1993, 2005 and 2010, along with a number of corpus interrogation tools. The methodologies are the particular techniques devised by the research team to which the author belongs (the SiBol group) for employing these interrogation tools to shed light on the various research questions treated in the paper.
The first part of the paper outlines ways in which these tools and techniques can be used to track changes in the grammar, lexis and discourse practices of UK broadsheet or ‘quality’ newspapers. Given the important role of newspapers, some of these changes may well be indicative of general changes in UK written English. The second part, instead, describes a number of studies conducted by the research group into how the reporting of various social and cultural themes and issues, ranging from what is seen as a moral issue, to the rhetoric of appeals to science, to how antisemitism is debated, has developed over the time period in question. The concluding section discusses the relationship between the methodologies employed in modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies and wider scientific research methodology.
SiBol is a portmanteau of Siena and Bologna, the two universities involved in initiating the project. http://www3.lingue.unibo.it/clb
Reading Concordances. John Sinclair; London: Longman,
No full textProf. John Sinclair’s pioneering role in the field of ELT as editor-in-chief of the
Collins-Cobuild dictionaries and grammar is well known. Just as remarkable has
been his contribution to the development of modern language theory, particularly as
regards the relationship between grammar and lexis. He has successfully illustrated
how technological developments, principally the advent of electronic corpora and
the software to interrogate them, influence and refine perceptions of language and
how these clearer perceptions affect both linguistic theory and pedagogical practice.
The present volume also has a dual impetus: one pedagogical, the other theoretical.
On one level, it is a textbook which aims to introduce corpus work to ‘students,
researchers and workers in the language’, more specifically, to show them how
to ‘interrogate a corpus in order to retrieve evidence that is relevant to a linguistic
enquiry‘ and then to refine those queries further until a ‘neatly organised body of
evidence’ (p. ix) is available as a report on the findings. On the second, a large
number of theoretical points are made, and despite the disclaimer that ‘they are not
gathered and organised into a specific stance’ (p. ix), the reader is guided in Socratic
question-answer fashion to an appreciation of what, elsewhere, Sinclair has called 'lexical grammar'
Journal of Corpora & Discourse Studies
No full textThe Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies showcases research into language as a vehicle of communication which incorporates the use of corpus techniques. The Journal is highly interdisciplinary in nature, first, in combining discourse analysis with corpus linguistics and, second, in accommodating an ever-increasing number of other disciplines which employ the analysis of spoken or written texts beyond linguistics proper which use corpus techniques to help analyse the texts they employ, including political science, sociology, history, literary criticism, business studies, healthcare, and many more. We particularly welcome papers which address methodological issues concerning the use of corpora in these and other fields.
The journal is on-line open-access with the opportunity to store research data on the publisher’s server. The language of publication is English, but we welcome submissions on all other languages.
Published by Cardiff University Press.
Editor in chief, Alan Partington. Editors, Costas Gabrielatos and Amanda Potts. Reviews editor, Sylivia Jaworska. Technical editor, Jane Johnson.
The first issue is planned for July 2018
Lexical Priming: Evolution, Evaluation and Applications to English and Japanese
No full textThis pioneering volume builds on Prof. Michael Hoey’s seminal work on Lexical Priming (LP) theory by applying it to specific varieties of Japanese, alongside English, as a first step in corroborating and expanding the validity of LP theory.
The book sets the scene by surveying LP research on specific discourse-types, inspired by Hoey in 2005, and by elucidating the ways in which corpus research, discourse, and psycholinguistics might be taken together to better understand language acquisition and production in ways neither corpus linguistics nor cognitivism alone could envisage. Drawing primarily on a web corpus of Japanese from Q&A fora as well as from data from English language sources, including Hoey’s own studies, his unpublished lecture slides given to us, and more recent corpora, we expand Hoey’s notion of priming and seek to confirm the wider applicability of LP theory. We begin by discussing the many claims of LP, regarding collocation, meaning, grammar, polysemy, cohesion, and creativity, in light of empirical corpus evidence from Japanese and English discourse-types. We also then show how LP theory has considerable explanatory value in fields not previously envisaged, principally evaluation (including evaluative cohesion), modality and politeness, all cognitive phenomena which leave their mark in the linguistic trace we call corpora.
This volume will be of interest to scholars in language teaching and learning, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, Japanese linguistics, grammar and lexicography
Varieties of non-obvious meaning in CL and CADS: from ‘hindsight post-dictability’ to sweet serendipity
No full textIn this paper, I want to examine the special relevance of (non)obviousness in
corpus linguistics through drawing on case studies. The research discussion is
divided into two parts. The first is an examination of (non)obviousness at the
micro-level, that is, in lexico-grammatical analyses, whilst the second looks
at the more macro-level of (non)obviousness on the plane of discourse. In
the final sections, I will examine various types of non-obvious meaning one
can come across in Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies (CADS), which range
from: ‘I knew that all along (now)’ to ‘that’s interesting’ to ‘I sensed that but
didn’t know why’ (intuitive impressions and corpus-assisted explanations)
to ‘I never even knew I never knew that’ (serendipity or ‘non-obvious nonobviousness’,
analogous to ‘unknown unknowns’)
Aims, Tools and Practices of Corpus Linguistics
No full textThe discipline of Corpus Linguistics, in essence, entails the compilation of very large archives of
running texts for subsequent linguistic analysis. The final ends of Corpus Linguistics lie in the
scope of Artificial Intelligence, that is, teaching machines to comprehend and produce natural
language. A vital correlated aim is to improve translation techniques, both human and machine.
Intermediate ends include furthering our knowledge of how language is structured and how humans
use it to communicate meaning, to express evaluations and to influence the behaviour of their
interlocutors (i.e. persuasion)
Lexical Priming theory: Evolution, evaluation, extension
No full textThis paper is an early step in a wider project which, on the behest of the late Prof Michael Hoey, attempts to review the evolution of Lexical Priming (LP) theory since its first appearance in the early 2000s. Hoey’s later unpublished work was characterised by his desire that LP theory be tested on discourse-types beyond newspaper texts and in languages other than English. Here, we make a first attempt to test LP theory on Japanese data from a web corpus. Referring to Hoey’s own examples, to our Japanese data and to English data from the web (enTenTen21) and newspaper (SiBol) corpora, we suggest how evaluation theory might fruitfully and seamlessly be integrated into LP theory, and how textual primings are even more powerful than originally envisaged. We demonstrate how we are primed to produce and process texts into evaluative blocks so that they cohere evaluatively as well as propositionally
Evaluative clash, evaluative cohesion and how we actually read evaluation in texts
No full textEvaluative clashes are, of course, only noticed because of the expectation that speakers will use evaluation consistently and coherently over set stretches of discourse, a process I term evaluative harmony. In this paper I first categorize types of evaluative clash and then investigate, with detailed examples, many derived from large language corpora, of how speakers and writers both construct cohesive evaluative harmony in stretches of text but also how they can sometimes exploit this harmony to surprise and engage their listeners and readers
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