Comparative Approaches to Data and Methods in Corpus Linguistics

In this paper, the military term combinations and military metaphors in the official documents are identified and analyzed by the methods of corpus and cognitive linguistics. The comparative approach was pursued to show their common usage in the unified official document of NATO. The purpose of the study is to recommend the methodology for statistical and automated identification of term combinations in the parallel corpus of the official texts and to recommend the methods of cognitive linguistics such as the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (hereinafter – CMT) and the Conceptual Blending Theory (hereinafter – CBT) for the analysis of the military metaphor in the parallel corpus of official texts. The ultimate aim of the study is to analyze NATO’s military terminology and understand the military conceptual metaphor in official business documents to demonstrate a deep understanding of military-political discourse. The removal of the highly specialized terminology from NATO’s official business documents is conditioned by the presence of language units with the semantic structure indicating military, political and humanitarian features that distinguish NATO from other organizations. In our research, the sampling of nominative units used to denote the military concept of NATO as an international organization evidenced a wide reproduction of the accurate and definite content that deprives its components of the semantic ambiguity. At the same time, the speech expression is fixed in texts from positions of observation of the language that allows us to identify the dynamics of language changes in general and on the general scale in particular. The analytical method of observation in the context of our research envisages the collection of scientific information and identification of linguistic characteristics of NATO’s official business terminology. In particular, we separated a number of two-, three- and four-component phrases from OBD. The sampling included the following phrases used to denote: 1) nuclear-powered rocket weapons system: nuclear cruise missile submarine; wire guarded missile; nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine; rocket-assisted projectile; 2) radio-electronic and other technical tools: artillery radar complex; beam rider guidance; uninterruptible – power supply; laser range finder; ambush detection device; on-board electronic computer system; 3) reorganization of ground forces and senior management units: paramilitary mining rescue unit; logistics operations center; emergency unit; 4) change of some fundamental provisions (doctrines) in tactics and operational art: nuclear detonation detection; electronic countermeasures; protection of safety information. Thus, the semantic dominance of the highly specialized terminology in NATO’s official business documents is confirmed by a large sampling based on features identified as a result of monitoring of their extralingual indicators. The research value of the sampling consists in the fact that the selected terminological phrases lead to an improvement of their understanding and the effective practical application of the research. We also used the statistical and automated methods of a NATO term combination separation from the collocation to not hinder the presentation and perception of the corpus of UN parallel texts. The quantitative expression of results of the corpus analysis of the NATO’s term combination and the commonly used phrase encourages to choose the optimal way to single out a referent of a certain military sphere, and in such event its nomination corresponds to the official business document assigned to this term combination. As the research showed, the mechanism of use of CBT for the analysis of the cognitive model of a metaphor with the author’s conceptualization demonstrates condensed intra-domain properties. By singling out four spaces, we traced their mutual designing that indicates a shorter distance between the domains than originally expected. In comparison, the military term combinations in these fragments are used to provide specific information about the military, such as the shoestring budget and the cavalry regiment. On the other hand, the military metaphors are used to convey complex ideas and comparisons, such as the sitting duck and tank battalion. Both the military term combinations and metaphors contribute to the overall effectiveness of the language used to describe NATO’s land forces and their challenges. Conclusion. The study was focused on the identification and analysis of the term combination and metaphor in the official document by the methods of corpus and cognitive linguistics to confirm their common usage in the unified official document of NATO. We tried to justify the hypothesis according to which these subjects have common features in the lexical form and the military lexical meaning. The first of the two linguistic analyses was aimed at giving the global perspective on the most frequent term combinations and comparing them with the most commonly used word combinations in the parallel corpus of the official texts to identify the coefficient of their informational value. Statistical and automated methods of the linguistic analysis confirmed the high reproducibility of the NATO’s term combination in the parallel corpus of the official texts. Taking into consideration the results, the field-specific military term combinations serve as a joining link that will provide the unity of the content plan and its expression [Solano, 2013, p. 167–180] as had been stated before. On the other hand, the second analysis was created to illustrate the cognitive model of the metaphor through the military expression. As the conducted study found, the mechanism of the usage of the TCB for the analysis of the cognitive model metaphor showed short intradomain properties. This identification helped to determine four spaces where we traced their mutual projection which showed the shorter distance between the domains than had been expected at the beginning of the study. At the final phase of the study we focused on the identification of the field-specific term combination and military metaphor in the official document under the title “NATO’s Land Forces: Losing Ground”. Though the term combination and metaphor are different categories, their common usage in the official document shows the similarity which can create a common category, the military metaphor in the official terminology of NATO. As far as specific results are concerned, the following conclusions can be drawn referring to the official business document dealing with training mission in Afghanistan (2019): 1) The similarity between the term combination and metaphor is found in the chain of semantic dependence between the terms in the fragment of the official document. The meaning of the language units (the term combination, the metaphor) colors the fragment content with the military and identification sense. 2) The difference between the military term combination and the military metaphor lies in the usage of them in text. On the one hand, military term combinations used in the text convey meaning related to military operations rely on technical language to convey specific information, while on the other hand, military metaphors use imagery and comparisons to convey abstract concepts in a more relatable way.

Data and Methods in Corpus Linguistics: Comparative Approaches, edited by Ole Schützler & Julia Schlüter

This article explores the application of corpus linguistics methods in dealing with an underexplored area concerning predatory publishing, with a focus on lexical bundles and formulaicity. Using a comparative approach, the study employs two corpora of more than 1,6 million words, consisting of 220 research articles drawn from two comparable journals in the field of political science, one predatory and one top-ranking. The results show that writers publishing in the top-ranking journal use a more limited range of lexical bundles with a higher frequency, giving further evidence for the highly formulaic nature of the genre. The two groups of writers also display different preferences for lexical bundles with particular functions and/or forms. While the top-ranking journal articles feature more disciplinary-specific bundles with noticeable variation across the main sections of the research article, the predatory journal articles highlight in particular a set of common-core lexical bundles typical of general academic language use. Our findings also demonstrate the potential of lexical bundles in revealing the amount of scientific information research articles contain as well as the level of scientific literacy of the authors.

This article is related to the study of specialized translation, specifically to lexical and phraseological variation in legal translation. In fact, this study arises from the need to delve deeper into the study of Spanish phraseological units using larger corpora, considering the varieties that reflect the convergences and divergences of this language throughout the places where it is spoken. To this end, the paper approaches sentences using a comparative corpus-based approach analysing phraseological units used in Argentine and Spain. The research provides a brief contextualization of the legal systems of the selected countries, and, by using corpus linguistics, the PUs are extracted and compared. The main objective is to detect similarities and differences at the phraseological level in both languages and to provide functional equivalents in German that can be useful for students and translators. The findings show that at the methodological level corpus linguistics is a useful tool for the identification of PUs in specialized texts. Furthermore, the analysis of the examples from the corpus of sentences shows the evidence of lexical variants referring to the same reality both within a single variety of Spanish and between different varieties. This consequently determines the need to further study the PUs of Spanish by using a more extensive corpus, considering the different countries in which Spanish is an official language.

European Identity examines how Europe is represented linguistically in the news media of four EU countries, France, Italy, Poland, and the UK, through the use of an electronic corpus built from newspapers and television news transcripts. This multilingual comparable corpus, is composed of the entire contents of four newspapers published in each country, collected over two periods of three months, and the transcriptions of two TV news broadcasts, collected over two periods of two months. The theoretical and methodological frameworks adopted include discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The individual chapters investigate various aspects of European identity as it is discursively construed in the news media of the different countries, such as Europe as a political and geographic entity, European Union institutions, European history, citizenship, and immigration. Based on a bottom-up orientation and using both quantitative and qualitative methods, all chapters but one use a comparative approach to the data, juxtaposing the journalist representations of Europe in two or more languages. The fundamental aim of the volume is to demonstrate how linguistic analysis, and in particular the study of large amounts of linguistic data, can make a vital contribution to the analysis of political and social issues

In the digital age, the transformation process of information into ‘knowledge’ is characterized by hyper-connected communities, where a potentially infinite amount of information is ubiquitously accessible to individuals or community users and is instrumental in the creation of shared knowledge, but also in building consensus across community participants, societal membership and grouping, through the argumentative ideological representation of assumptions, values and practices. This Special Issue of “Lingue e Linguaggi” on the theme Argumentation, Ideology and Discourse in Evolving Specialized Communication explores the interface between these three dimensions and combines an array of perspectives into a distinctly unified volume, offering synchronic, diachronic, comparative, interlinguistic and intercultural approaches over a range of specialized knowledge domains. The volume integrates quantitative and qualitative approaches, making use of Corpus Linguistics, alongside other methods incorporated in theoretical approaches such as Critical Discourse Analysis, Appraisal Theory and Argumentation Theory, focusing on the pragma-linguistic features of different texts and genres, together with their ideological purposes for different audiences in various contexts of use. The collection of essays investigates argumentative styles and patterning along with the discursive socio-construction of ideology in the dynamics of recontextualization, rescripting and remediation which affect the multi-faceted nature of contemporary communication.

The study explores the adaptation of emotional metaphors in the translation of English texts into Ukrainian, focusing on linguistic strategies and the influence of cultural differences on metaphor interpretation and usage. Emotional metaphors play a crucial role in human communication, shaping the expression of feelings and attitudes within a given cultural context. However, their translation poses significant challenges due to conceptual and cultural discrepancies between languages. This research investigates the ways in which translators handle these challenges and examines the impact of cultural differences on the perception and transmission of emotional metaphors in translation. The study is based on a combination of cognitive linguistics, translation studies, and corpus analysis. The research employs a comparative approach, analyzing English-language literary and journalistic texts alongside their Ukrainian translations. The methodological framework includes conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), which provides insights into the cognitive basis of metaphors and their cultural variations. Additionally, the study utilizes corpus linguistics to identify translation patterns and strategies used in rendering emotional metaphors. The primary goal of this research is to determine the key linguistic strategies for adapting emotional metaphors in translation while maintaining their communicative and cultural functions. The study categorizes these strategies into four main types: (1) preserving the original metaphor, (2) modifying the metaphor’s imagery or intensity, (3) neutralizing or de-metaphorizing the expression, and (4) replacing the metaphor with a culturally equivalent phrase. Through a detailed analysis of translated texts, the study assesses the effectiveness and frequency of these strategies in different contexts. The findings reveal that while some metaphors can be directly translated without significant changes, others require substantial modification due to cultural differences in emotional conceptualization. The study highlights the importance of cultural sensitivity in translation, as certain metaphorical expressions may evoke different connotations in the target audience. Moreover, the research identifies common errors in metaphor adaptation, emphasizing the risks of misinterpretation or loss of emotional intensity in translation. In conclusion, the study underscores the necessity of a nuanced approach to translating emotional metaphors, advocating for the balance between linguistic fidelity and cultural appropriateness. The results provide valuable insights for translators, linguists, and researchers in the field of translation studies, contributing to a deeper understanding of how cultural factors shape metaphor adaptation. Further research may expand the scope of this analysis by exploring other language pairs and conducting experimental studies on reader perception of translated metaphors.