Key words and translated cohesion in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and one of its Italian translations

The role of repetition in perceptions of discourse coherence

<i>Pursuing Meaning</i>

This paper reports preliminary results. from an ongoing project investigating the alignment between coherence structure and lexical cohesion in thematically organized expository texts (encyclopedia entries) and intentionally structured persuasive texts (fundraising letters) at the global level of discourse organization. A genre-specific description of the coherence structure is achieved by mapping genre-specific moves onto the top levels of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) trees. Networks of lexical cohesion are formed by word repetition, systematic semantic relations (e.g. hyponymy, meronymy, and synonymy) and collocation relations between lexical items. By comparing the centrality of text parts in the coherence and cohesion structures, we show that coherence is more closely aligned with lexical cohesion in the expository texts than in the persuasive texts.

In the age when environmental sustainability is among the chief concerns and goals of communities around the world, a number of linguistic studies have been conducted to illuminate the roles of language in protection and destruction of ecological systems. Most of the studies, however, focus on written and/ or formal discourses. The present study aims to fill the gap regarding text varieties in ecolinguistic research by exploring informal conversation, focusing on text meanings of lexical items in the semantic domain of environmental issues. The spoken component of the British National Corpus 2014 was employed as data and concordance lines for lexical items tagged as related to environmental issues were extracted and analysed. Drawing on the concept of local textual functions in corpus linguistics (Mahlberg, 2007), the given lexical items were examined in terms of their lexicogrammatical patterns and associated functions before each functional category was interpreted and discussed from an ecolinguistic perspective on the basis of the interrelatedness concept proposed by Goatly (2022). The analysis reveals 10 local textual functions of the given domain of lexical items in British English informal conversation. Through an ecolinguistic lens, these functions suggest that environmental lexis is part of the discursive construction of individuals’ social identities and personal stories, reflecting an inseparable relationship between humans and the environment. It is thereby suggested that informal conversational discourse is not less important than other discursive practices in its potential for promoting environmental sustainability.

Language managers in their different forms (language planners, terminologists, professional neologists …) have long tried to intervene in the lexical usage of speakers, with various degrees of success: Some of their lexical items (partly) penetrate language use, others do not. Based on electronic networks of practice of the Esperanto speech community, Mélanie Maradan establishes the foundation for a new method to extract speakers’ opinions on lexical items from text corpora. The method is intended as a tool for language managers to detect and explore in context the reasons why speakers might accept or reject lexical items. Mélanie Maradan holds a master’s degree in translation and terminology from the University of Geneva/Switzerland as well as a joint doctoral degree in multilingual information processing and philosophy (Dr. phil.) from the universities of Geneva and Hildesheim/Germany. Her research interests include planned languages (Esperanto studies) as well as neology and corpus linguistics. She works as a professional translator and terminologist in Switzerland.

This paper is a tentative and incomplete exploration into whether there are any grounds for believing that the way cohesion is utilised and recognised is the result of priming. As a necessary consequence of the first goal, it is an investigation into the relationship between two ways of looking at lexis in text, the one associated with cohesion, the other associated with corpus linguistics. It is only perhaps because cohesion studies have taken a back seat in 21st century linguistics that there has not been more attention given to the terminological embarrassment that the term ‘collocation’ is currently used in two apparently quite separate ways in the linguistic literature, to mean in corpus linguistics the semi-arbitrary co-occurrence of two or more words and in cohesive studies the relationship between different lexical items in a text that contributes to the creation of coherence in the text. Such an investigation is also an investigation into the compatibility of the methodologies employed in corpus linguistics and cohesive studies, and this is an investigation in which I have a personal investment, since I have at different times been a student of cohesion and a corpus linguist.

The poetry of the First World War bears poignant testimony to the unprecedented tragedies of human destructiveness. It has been the subject of numerous studies that looked at it from diverse perspectives, drawing from various contemporary psychological, historical, and literary theories. The present study can be regarded as yet another contribution to the existing picture of this rich and enduring field where literature and history are explored alongside. Informed by the emerging field of digital literary studies, this article aims to revisit the war experience through a computational analysis of the poetry of the Great War and explore how soldier-poets conveyed their emotions in the face of traumatic war experience. We adopted a top-down corpus-driven approach that moved from key semantic domains to lexical items and then to their collocates. First, we detected the key semantic domains of the genre through a corpus tool, Wmatrix. ‘Anatomy and physiology’, ‘religion and the supernatural’, and ‘senses’ were identified as the key semantic domains in our corpus. The unusual abundance of binaries led us to group and treat these lexical items as a separate category: ‘binary oppositions’. In the second phase of the research, we analysed these key semantic domains to foreground the frequent lexical items under each domain and explored the surrounding context of those items through their collocational networks exploiting another corpus tool, Lancsbox. Finally, we further investigated the frequent items and corresponding concordance lines to identify the common stylistic features in the Great War Poetry.

Abstract: Semantic preference and semantic prosody are two notions that were carefully analysed in post-Firthian corpus linguistics and in the past few years there has been a growing interest in them. As corpora have become larger in size, and tools for extracting different lexical items for different purposes have been developed, the two terms have been addressed more frequently by linguists1. Throughout history, semantic preference and semantic prosody have sometimes been used for the same phenomenon but at other times the two were considered different but closely related. Previous corpus-based studies on the two terms have shown that they can be attached to many investigated lexical items. Therefore, this paper aims to present a detailed theoretical overview of the two terms in order to emphasise their immense importance for identifying the meaning of all the lexical items.

Discourse markers are lexical items that play the role of conveying the speaker’s attitude towards the topic of conversation. Although discourse markers have this function, they have little semantic content, yet their importance for understanding (oral) discourse can hardly be overestimated. As such, they have been widely studied in English. While the Qurʾān has a number of these discourse markers, none of them seem to have been properly noticed, let alone studied, by Arabic linguists and Qurʾān commentators. This article introduces what I believe to be the most frequent of these in the Qurʾān:araʾaytum(literally: “have you seen?”) in its various morphological manifestations. This article uses concepts from historical linguistics, pragmatics, and corpus linguistics – and in particular lexical co-occurrences – to examine the development of this form from a sense verb that simply means “to see” to a pragmatic attitudinal marker that is semantically vacuous and whose main function is to express the speaker’s dissatisfaction with, resentment at, or disapproval of the topic of conversation. While the analysis provided in this article is mainly linguistic, the findings will affect the way we read the Arabic-Islamic heritage, especially as regards the authenticity of what are known as the Satanic Verses, also known as the episode of the High-Flying Cranes(Qiṣṣat al-ġarānīq).This article also provides suggestions for the translation of this discourse marker.

Reviewed by: Pattern grammar: A corpus-driven approach to the lexical grammar of English by Susan Hunston, Gill Francis Dirk Noël Pattern grammar: A corpus-driven approach to the lexical grammar of English. By Susan Hunston and Gill Francis (Studies in corpus linguistics 4.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000. Pp. xiv, 289. Though lack of empirical evidence for the autonomy of syntax has certainly contributed to the decrease in popularity of the theory propagating it, the currently prevalent view that syntax is semantically motivated was not arrived at inductively: the replacement of the old dogma by the new one did not make linguistics less of a deductive science than it has been. Present-day linguistics is rife with assertions about the semantic import of syntactic choices whose only claim to empiricism is that they are spiced with a few well-chosen examples, often made-up rather than attested, which means that such statements are only checked by the intuitions of their audience, an infamously unreliable sort of evidence. This book by two members of the University of Birmingham’s Corpus Linguistics Group (formerly led by John Sinclair, one of the pioneers of British corpus linguistics) does not question that syntax and semantics are related, but the results of the inductive approach it advances force one to adopt a restrained view of their relationship. The book’s central concept is the pattern, defined as ‘a phraseology frequently associated with (a sense of) a word’ (3). In practice, the patterns discussed are for the most part complementation patterns: They describe what follows a particular verb, noun or adjective. Ch. 1 offers ‘A short history of patterns’, starting with the research of A. S. Hornby that inspired the Oxford advanced learner’s dictionary (1st edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), moving on to some relevant research on ‘lexical phrases’ in lexicography, language teaching, and psycholinguistics, and from there to John Sinclair’s thoughts on the association of meaning and pattern (laid down in Corpus concordance collocation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) and how these were taken up and developed by Gill Francis. Ch. 2 shows how concordance lines can be used to identify patterns in a large electronically stored corpus of written and spoken texts, explains how patterns are represented in the book (using only the simplest and most superficial word-class labels like ‘v’ for a verb group and ‘n’ for a noun group instead of functional labels such as object, complement, and adjunct) and lists the kinds of pattern there are and the forms they can take. Ch. 3 deals with ‘Problems in identifying patterns’, arguing that frequent co-occurrences of words do not necessarily indicate the presence of a pattern. Chs. 4 and 5 are no doubt the most relevant to current linguistic theory because they treat the association of patterns and meaning. This association reveals itself in two ways: (1) Different senses of words tend to be distinguished by different patterns; (2) Particular patterns tend to be associated with lexical items that have particular meanings, though it is not the case that a single pattern occurs with words of a single meaning, and not all words sharing a meaning necessarily also share a pattern. Hunston and Francis warn, therefore, that the view that a word has a particular pattern because it has a particular meaning is [End Page 345] as yet insufficiently substantiated. Ch. 5 contains a comparison with the work of Beth Levin. Chs. 6–8 cast doubt on some entrenched orthodoxies in linguistics. In Ch. 6, H & F motivate their use of formal rather than structural labels by arguing that the latter only very rarely contribute anything useful to the analysis and that only the former approach can consistently deal with all verbs (and other words) in all patterns. Ch. 7 argues that word classes are best defined as pattern sets, instead of notionally or morphologically. Ch. 8 looks at patterns from a text-linguistic perspective, offering linearity as an alternative to constituency. Ch. 9, finally, considers some of the implications of an inductive pattern approach for theories of grammar and language teaching. Such an approach indeed not only challenges much of the accepted wisdom in...

It is claimed that there are no lexical items in English which are carries of ironic meanings (Myers 1978). Thai is, to determine whether an expression is ironic or not depends on context. Similar to English, most cases of verbal irony in Thai are context-dependent (Panpothong 1996). Yet Thai has expressions which always convey the opposite of literal meaning. In this paper, I refer to them as context-free ironies. Like dead metaphors, these expressions start life as conversational implicature before by-passing their literal meaning. Thus, they are appropriately viewed as conventionalized ironic implicatures. The paper consists of three sections. In the first section, the definition of verbal irony adopted in this paper shall be provided. In the second section, examples of context-free irony in Thai shall be presented. And in the last section, the context-free ironies shall be viewed on the basis of Grice’s theory.

Idiomatic and proverbial expressions are important components of the oral tradition of Sesotho sa Leboa, and therefore a knowledge of the literal meaning of words as they appear in dictionaries without inclusion of their figurative meaning seems to be a shortcoming. An idiom or a proverb possesses one basic meaning, i.e. the meaning to which the idiom or proverb is basically meant to refer, but each idiom or proverb is made up of several lexical items. Each of these lexical items has its own meaning, which usually differs from the figurative sense of the idiom or proverb. Even though the meaning of the words in an idiomatic or proverbial expression seems to differ from the sense of the idiom or proverb, there is to a certain extent a relationship. It is this relationship which lexicographers can assist to explain in their definitions in order to clarify both the literal and the figurative meanings of words in Sesotho sa Leboa. This article aims to stress the importance of having specialized dictionaries which will give users detailed etymological explanations of the meaning of idiomatic and proverbial expressions as used in Sesotho sa Leboa. The etymological analysis of the meaning of these lexical items (idioms and proverbs) will provide a better understanding of these expressions and enrich dictionaries with detailed definitions. This will create a better understanding of the relationship between the literal meanings of the expressions and their real (i.e. figurative) meanings. Keywords: diachronic analysis, etymology, figurative expression, idiom, lemmatization, lexicology, metaphor, metaphoric expression, proverb, synchronic analysis, terminography.

the bulk of their observations for variation in morpho-syntax, commenting on properties in flux––such as past participle agreement, verb complement structures , and negation––that continue to vary in usage today. Unfortunately, AyresBennett and Seijido present their comparative analyses of how the texts judge matters of usage in a series of tables, rather than in prose. These tables lack legends, occasionally rendering them difficult to interpret. This volume is the product of assiduous research. Astonishingly comprehensive in its scope, it reaches forward to provide an overview of the evolution of the remarqueur tradition to the present day as well as stretching back to consider the influence of Greek and Latin grammarians on the genre. The volume will appeal most and be most accessible to an audience that is already well versed in the history , culture, and intellectual movements of the seventeenth century. Copiously footnoted, it provides a wealth of detail about the form and content of its corpus. Overall, however, this contribution is stronger on documentation than it is on interpretation . Consequently, how we are to understand the various stances of the remarqueurs remains to be discovered. For example, while we learn that Vaugelas was often more accepting of variation and less prescriptive than many of his successors, we glean few insights into why this should be so. Despite certain shortcomings, this volume provides crucial and definitive information about the influence of the remarqueurs on the evolution of the French language that cannot be ignored. University of Texas, Austin Barbara E. Bullock BRUNET, ÉTIENNE. Comptes d’auteurs, Tome I: études statistiques, de Rabelais à Gracq. Paris: Champion, 2009. ISBN 978-2-74532-019-3. Pp. 395. 75 a. As the title suggests, the articles reprinted here offer statistical analyses of various features of discourse in literary texts from a wide swath of authors. This volume includes a DVD (for Windows) that contains a corpus of literary texts: “l’œuvre de trente écrivains majeurs français s’y trouve concentrée et traitée par le logiciel Hyperbase” (8). This software makes it possible to examine single lexical items, grammatical features, and co-occurrences, among other things. The first chapter provides some insight into the types of analyses that will be subsequently found. For example, it quantifies and compares lexical diversity, richness, and stability in poetry from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It then demonstrates the potential importance of closely examining the distribution of a single lexical item. As a continuation of this line of inquiry, Brunet also shows how a correlation coefficient can be used, for example, in the work of Du Bellay, to measure frequent vocabulary from texts produced during different periods as a way of demonstrating the progression or regression of lexical items. The results of this analysis of substantives indicate that “l’inspiration du poète tend à s’écarter du paysage poétique [...] et des images corporelles [et] il se tourne vers les préoccupations morales et spirituelles [...] en même temps que Rome s’efface devant la France et ses symboles” (24). Overall, this chapter—like the others— includes an impressive array of approaches and techniques that can be used to study (literary) texts from a quantitative perspective, and the writing is amply supported by the numerous tables and graphics that provide helpful and mostly easy-to-follow visual representations of results. Other chapters cover such topics Reviews 1009 as religious vocabulary in selected novels published during the eighteenth, nineteenth , and twentieth centuries; strategies for treating a relatively smaller corpus, namely the writings of Rimbaud; and an extension of previous comparisons of Proust and Giraudoux. Since each chapter is the product of a previously published article, the reader can explore them in any order. It would also be possible, in some cases, to identify a single type of analysis across chapters; this task would be somewhat difficult, however, given the lack of an index. Nonetheless, the variety of texts analyzed and the wide range of methodological and analytical strategies provide the reader with an enormous amount of valuable information at the intersection of literary studies and corpus linguistics. Although many technical terms are explained, this volume will mainly be accessible to faculty and advanced graduate students...

Polysemous lexical items have multiple senses associated with a single form, and these senses are interrelated. Polysemy is a universal and omnipresent phenomenon, providing a robust tool to convey creatively our ideas and thoughts. As a result, polysemy presents challenges for second language (L2) learners. Existing studies on the issue of polysemy in language acquisition often rely on researchers’ subjective understandings of the network of meanings around a lexical item or focus on English examples. Yet Chinese lexis exhibits greater polysemy than English and deserves its own examination. This book takes one Chinese polysemous item as an example to explore how native (L1) speakers and L2 learners perceive its multiple senses as well as how these senses are acquired by L2 learners. This book also investigates the predictive strengths of various factors that contribute to the acquisition pattern. A multidisciplinary approach is adopted to achieve these objectives, including methods from cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and corpus linguistics.

The notion of ‘textual colligation’ predicts that certain lexical items have a tendency to occur at particular points in a text, i.e. the beginning or end of texts, paragraphs or sentences. This paper describes new corpus-based methods developed to identify the profile of words, clusters (n-grams) and concgrams (non-contiguous patterns in variant order) in terms of their most common textual locations. Groups of co-occurring text-initial items are then analyzed in terms of their discourse function in relation to theories of newspaper structure. This analysis illustrates how methods from corpus linguistics, when targeted to specific textual positions, can complement text-linguistic analyses.