Corpus-based Method Research Articles

A New Approach to the Interpretation of Geotourism Texts

The importance given to geotourism reflects public awareness of the urgency of environmental conservation that includes geomorphological, ecological, and cultural knowledge. The recent growth of geotourism has increased the demand for high-quality geotourism interpretation to ensure accurate data communication. Nonetheless, the lack of systematic theoretical guidance has meant interpreters frequently resort to haphazard and ineffective interpretation strategies. Therefore, to enhance interpretation, (Geoheritage 14:1-24, 2022b, Geoheritage 14:1-20, 2022c and J Sustain Tourism 2024) established the Semantic, Style and Cultural (SSC) equivalence Model and the taxonomy of geotourism interpretation strategies (hereafter, Taxonomy) based on a corpus-based method and the theoretical framework of Hu’s (Perspectives 11:283-291, 2003) Eco-Translatology. Since this research is so recent it remains untested in the field. This paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of these models using new geotourism data concerning Abiotic, Biotic and Cultural elements from three Chinese UNESCO Global Geoparks (UGGps)—Fangshan, Xiangxi, and Mount Kunlun, the corpus-based method and Eco-Translatology. Quantitative and qualitative analysis findings support the validity of both the SSC Model and the Taxonomy. Firstly, we found that most of the geotourism interpretation strategies employed to interpret geodata were derived from the Taxonomy in alignment with principles of Eco-Translatology to attain the SSC equivalence. Secondly, with the new data, we were able to find usage patterns that were previously missing in Li et al.’s (Geoheritage 14:1-24, 2022b; J Sustain Tourism 2024) Taxonomy. Thirdly, we identified a completely new strategy used in interpreting geological processes. Finally, this paper further illustrated how potentially ineffective geotourism interpretations can be optimised by effective interpretation strategies from Li et al.’s Taxonomy (Geoheritage 14:1-24, 2022b; J Sustain Tourism 2024 to achieve SSC equivalence.

Variation-Based Distance and Similarity Modeling

Abstract We present a corpus-based method — Variation-Based Distance and Similarity Modeling (VADIS) — that calculates distances between registers as a function of the extent to which the probabilistic conditioning of variation differs across registers. When language users have a choice between different ways of saying similar things (e.g., cut off the tops versus cut the tops off), what is the extent to which these choices are regulated differently in different registers? In this spirit, we re-analyze pre-existing datasets that cover the genitive, dative, and particle placement alternations in the grammar of English. These datasets cover five broad register categories: spoken informal English, spoken formal English, written informal English, written formal English, and online/web-based English. Analysis shows that (a) the registers under analysis are relatively but not entirely homogeneous in terms of the probabilistic grammars conditioning grammatical choices, and (b) more often than not we see a split between spoken and written registers.

Comparative Analysis of Representations of Feminism Across Chinese Social Media: A Corpus-Based Study of Weibo and Zhihu

Studies on representations of feminism have seldom addressed the variance across social media platforms, leaving the underlying dynamics that shape feminist portrayals within this important digital context unexamined. This research contrasts representations of feminism on Weibo and Zhihu, China’s leading microblogging and question-and-answer platforms, using a corpus-based method. Employing Sketch Engine, I extracted and analyzed noun bigrams containing feminism from self-compiled corpora to explore the similarities and distinctions in representation. The results indicate that both platforms predominantly portray feminism as seeking female privilege via radical and aggressive approaches, despite Weibo’s emphasis on methods and Zhihu’s on purposes. In addition, the Weibo discourse more frequently presents feminism as an emerging social movement and employs a greater variety of distinguishing attributes to describe the movement. The findings reveal a shared public perception of feminism, while also highlighting the influence of distinct user demographics and platform architectures. This research augments the current literature by identifying the varied representations of feminism on different social media platforms and providing novel insights into its perception within the Chinese context.

“China’s Foreign Aid” and “China’s National Image” in the Eyes of Foreign Media: A Corpus-Based Discourse-Historical Analysis

China’s foreign aid implements the concept of a community with a shared future for mankind and promotes the common progress of China and developing countries. News about China’s foreign aid released by foreign media is quite significant for overseas audiences to perceive China’s image. This study adopts Ruth Wodak’s discourse-historical approach and corpus-based method to interpret foreign news reports on China’s foreign aid. The macro-level news themes, meso-level discourse strategies and national images, as well as micro-level discourse features are explained with examples. Research shows that news themes reveal the objects, fields and methods of China’s foreign aid. Foreign media widely adopt discourse strategies of nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivation, intensification and mitigation to shape China as a friendly international donor. A few characteristics of news discourse indicate that several media misunderstand or smear China’s foreign aid, which has a negative impact on China’s international public opinion environment. Therefore, building an effective external voice platform to convey China’s international responsibilities and contributions is necessary, which helps establish a favorable international public opinion environment for China’s development and call on other countries to make efforts to reduce human poverty.

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SYNTACTIC COMPLEXITY IN INDONESIAN GRADUATE-LEVEL WRITING: A CORPUS STUDY OF MASTER'S THESES VERSUS DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS

Syntactic complexity is an essential indicator of English Foreign Language (EFL) students' academic writing quality. Previous studies analyzed and compared syntactic complexity in published research articles through large-grained measures. However, the study of syntactic complexity unpublished research at graduate level gains less attentions. Thus, this study tried to fill the gap by analyzing and comparing syntactic complexity of master theses and doctoral dissertations that written by Indonesian students through fine-grained measures. This study conducted a quantitative design of a corpus-based method. The corpus data consists of two sub-corpora that selected through stratified sampling technique based on years and issues. Those were 52 doctoral dissertations and 74 master theses from English Language Education of Universitas Negeri Malang. The twelve phrasal complexity measures were employed through Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity (TAASSC) tool created by Kyle (2016). The finding showed the characteristics of Indonesian graduate-level writing that they were intended to utilize more dependents per direct object (standard deviation) measures, and fewer dependents per nominal (standard deviation) measures in their writing. It also showed doctoral dissertations have higher quality than master theses which reflected significant difference in most of phrasal complexity measures. These outcomes offer syntactic complexity insights of Indonesian context. The study highlighted the need more attention to syntactic complexity at graduate-level writing for improving writing quality.

Translation Research in the Arabic Language: A Bibliometric Study

Over the past two decades, Translation Studies has experienced exponential growth in published articles, with bibliometric analysis increasingly used to explore research trends. This study employs corpus-based bibliometric method to analyse translation research output in the Arabic language from 2000 to 2020. A total of 1043 articles published in the Arabic language were obtained and classified using research area classification proposed by Williams and Chesterman (2014). The results indicate a substantial focus on Genre Translation as the primary interest within the Arab world, while the Translation Process and Interpreting Studies have received less attention. Keyword analysis further highlights Quran Translation as the most prevalent topic among these publications; however, it remains largely isolated from English-language research, which rarely cites Arabic studies. Moreover, the study examines the geographical distribution of the research, highlighting significant disparities in output across the Arab world, which can be attributed to publishing practices that favour English over Arabic. This pattern suggests a disconnect that might impede the global discourse in Translation Studies, particularly concerning the integration of insights across linguistic divides. The study provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of Arabic Translation Studies and stresses the need for further comprehensive explorations into underrepresented areas within Arabic translation research.

Certainty Stance Adverbs in Chinese Linguistic Academic Writing: A Corpus-based Study

This study delves into the intricate usage of certainty stance adverbs in the academic writings of the Chinese. The object of this study is to conduct a contrastive analysis of certainty stance adverbs between Chinese linguistic MA novices and linguistic experts. The subject of this study is to explore the similarities and differences in the use of these adverbs within the academic discourse of the two groups mentioned. In addressing these disparities, the study seeks to analyze them from the perspective of interlanguage and interpersonal function, with the ultimate goal of enhancing the production of high-quality academic papers by the Chinese. The study employs two key methods: the contrastive analysis method and the corpus-based method. The novelty of the study lies in its contrastive examination of certainty stance adverbs between Chinese linguistic MA novices and experts. Through an in-depth analysis of theoretical frameworks and linguistic data extracted from the MA theses of Chinese linguistic novices and research articles of linguistic experts, the study underscores the importance of considering the similarities and differences in the use of certainty stance adverbs within the realm of second language acquisition and pragmatic studies. This consideration aims to refine learners’ syntactical and pragmatic command of certainty stance adverbs to align with expert academic discourse, ultimately fostering effective interpersonal communication in academic writing. The findings of this research offer valuable insights into the specific linguistic challenges encountered by the Chinese, thereby laying a solid groundwork for the development of targeted pedagogical strategies to bolster their academic writing skills.

Across time, space, and genres: measuring probabilistic grammar distances between varieties of Mandarin

Abstract This paper aims to quantify distances between varieties of Mandarin (diachronic, regional, and situational) as a function of the similarity in the choice between syntactic variants in the Mandarin theme-recipient alternation (yŭ/gěi dative alternation). We use a novel corpus-based method, Variation-Based Distance and Similarity Modeling, which draws inspiration from work in comparative sociolinguistics and quantitative dialectometry. Analysis reveals that, while there is a relatively stable probabilistic grammar across the investigated varieties, historical varieties do exhibit a relatively higher degree of heterogeneity than synchronic varieties. Despite the overall high similarity of the latter, we identify substantial probabilistic differences between fictional writings of Modern Mainland Mandarin and all other synchronic varieties. Our findings thus provide evidence in support of the hypothesis that the transition from Early Mandarin to Modern Mandarin over the past two centuries has witnessed salient grammatical shifts and also empirically demonstrate the interaction between genre variability and regional variability in Modern Mandarin.

History of the development of machine translation systems (from the early stages to the beginning of the 21st century)

The article examines certain periods of machine translation development and the methods used to create various machine translation systems. To ensure correct historical periodization, the author defines the criteria for classifying the development of machine translation. Special attention is paid to the development of individual machine translation systems, as well as the events that had a significant impact on both the development and the hindrance of progress in the field of machine translation. Additionally, the author considers the ALPAC report and its subsequent “quiet period” of machine translation development, analyses the key specialists who have been involved in the development and improvement of machine translation systems and machine translation technologies, categorizing them into four large groups. The article reviews the dominant basis of machine translation research until the late 1980s, rooted in various linguistic rules such as parsing rules, lexical rules, lexical transfer rules, syntactic generation rules, morphology rules, etc.The author traces the emergence of the corpus-based method in machine translation, as well as its further expansion through experiments in computational modelling of cognition and perception, including the study of parallel computing, neural networks and connectionism, which offered the prospect of making the systems “learn” from past successes and failures. Besides, the author also examines the emergence of the interlingualapproach for multilingual translation of technical manuals and the history of the “pivot language”, along with the use of SLLP (specialized languages for linguistic programming).

Research on China’s image in Qatar’s Mainstream Media from the Perspective of Discourse-history Approach

This paper examines the features and discourse strategies presented in China-related reports by Qatari media “The Peninsula” based on Discourse-historical Approach. A corpus-based method is adopted to conduct an empirical investigation on data from 2013 to 2022 to expound Qatari media’s orientation towards China. Research results show that The Peninsular tends to maintain an objective and neutral perspective in reporting China-related affairs. Using positive predication, direct and indirect speech, median value modal verbs, the Qatari media highlights an image of China as a peace-loving and mutually beneficial major country in its pursuit of win-win cooperation.

Relational Analysis of College English Vocabulary - A Reflection Based on Semantic Association Network Modeling

Abstract Vocabulary is an essential and crucial part of college English learning. However, the lack of knowledge about the intrinsic connection between words has become a significant obstacle to vocabulary learning and teaching. In this study, we use a semantic association network to construct a relationship model between English words and introduce a tree kernel function into the syntactic analyzer to extract relationships between English words. The dictionary-based lexical semantic similarity calculation method is combined with a corpus-based English lexical semantic similarity calculation method for the extracted relations. Furthermore, the study creates datasets that relate to English vocabulary for simulation experiments. The results show that the more common sense phenomena there are, the higher the correlation value is. Furthermore, the similarity of university English vocabulary has a high degree of correlation with the type of specialized elements. The overall performance of the lexicon is ranked as synonym forest (0.431ρ/0.479r) > HowNet (0.249ρ/0.341r) > English WordNet (−0.051ρ/−0.003r), and the synonym forest method has the best performance, with the highest accuracy of 85.57% in classifying different lexical relations. The study offers valuable references and lessons for related research in natural language processing.

“PEOPLE MATTER. FREEDOM MATTERS. PEACE MATTERS”: CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR ANALYSIS OF VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY’S SPEECHES

This article draws upon the investigation of distinctive features in Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s speeches delivered during the period of the Russian invasion that started on 24 February 2022 and one month after it. The focus of the article is on the application of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) developed by Lakoff & Johnson, and Conceptual Blending invented by Fauconnier & Turner. These two leading approaches have taken a crucial position in cognitive studies and are the central methods used in conducting research in this particular domain. Consequently, in the framework of this article, these theories are regarded as essential resources for scrutinising the peculiarities of the speeches “The war of Russia is not only the war against Ukraine” dated 1 March 2022, and “Ukraine needs heavy weapons” dated 13 April 2022 delivered by the Ukrainian President. Similarly, the data for the study is analysed and processed by means of a corpus-based method and the UAM Corpus Tool, a software program that provides the necessary built-in or self-created layers to implement all-embracing and grounded manual annotation of any type of text corpora. To examine the effective conveyance of meaning in public discourse, this research primarily centers on linguistic and auditory modes, specifically analyzing the speeches of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and their corresponding transcripts. It is worth noting that while this study does not currently encompass visual, gestural, and spatial modes, they hold the potential for inclusion in future investigations of motivational speeches, which could potentially augment the research outcomes. In conclusion, the investigation of these data has revealed that Volodymyr Zelenskyy tends to utilise a vast range of conceptual metaphors, specifically structural, ontological, and building. With this in mind, ontological metaphors are the most frequent since they depict the “physical experience” of the speaker. Finally, by applying Conceptual Blending, we can examine how the President makes reference to Russia by overlapping the mental space of COUNTRY with the mental space of TERRORISM, and AGGRESSION. Additionally, in the case of Ukraine, he merges the mental space of COUNTRY with the mental space of FREEDOM, and LIFE.

Tempo-spatial construction in human-law-society triangle from the perspective of cognitive semiotics

Time and space, habitually seen as the human psychological background, are increasingly being studied as the cognitive foreground for the development and evolution of matters. Via applying the corpus-based method based on the self-complied corpora of the US, the UK, the EU and Chinese data protection laws, this study examines the basic logic framework of time and space, including human psychological representation, semiotic essence, and function, seeking to present a holistic landscape of tempo-spatial construction in humanity, law and society from the perspective of cognitive semiotics. It finds that the human psychological representations in the tempo-spatial construction process contain cyclical time, linear time, place space and field space; the tempo-spatial essence is to express semiotic meanings through social dialogue and power negotiation among legal subjects in social contexts; and the tempo-spatial functions are manifested in mapping cognitive thinking mode of humanity and constructing law and society. It can be argued that legal discourse is the result of the tempo-spatial dialogue between legal subjects that depends on the interaction between society and its members and the overall evolution of its meaning interpretation; the tempo-spatial construction in human-law-society triangle is thus a typical intersemiotic operation. This study demonstrates the utility of sign of time and sign of space as a cognitive perspective in discourse construction and maps the strong interdependence between humanity, law and society.

Foreign Language Teaching and Learning Behaviour with a Big Data Corpus

Abstract This paper firstly constructs a foreign language subject system according to the foreign language teaching objectives and students’ learning situation in colleges and universities, puts forward a policy of informatization of foreign language teaching, and summarizes the ways in which college students’ foreign language learning behavior in the era of big data. Secondly, on the basis of corpus technology, the word vectorization representation of foreign language utterances is carried out, followed by similarity calculation of the word vectorization representation, judging the type of foreign language learning according to the results of foreign language semantic similarity calculation, and calculating the maximum weight path of the word vector sequence by using dynamic planning algorithm. Then, according to the demand analysis of the foreign language teaching corpus, the foreign language teaching corpus is constructed, and the application analysis of the corpus of foreign language teaching is carried out. The results indicate that the students in both classes have a similar understanding of the meaning and lexical properties of vocabulary. However, there is a certain gap in the collocation and utilization of vocabulary, and the corpus-based vocabulary teaching method is more conducive to students’ mastery of the target vocabulary than the traditional vocabulary teaching method, and the level of vocabulary learning is comparatively higher and more effective. The quality of foreign language teaching in colleges and universities can be improved by reference to this study.

Stem overgeneralizations in the acquisition of Croatian verbal morphology: Evidence from parental questionnaires

Studies on verbal overgeneralization often focus on languages with low morphological complexity. The Croatian conjugational system exhibits varying degrees of complexity, and this complexity is not primarily based on the number of inflectional morphemes, but on an elaborate system of stem changes. During early language development, children face the difficult task of acquiring this system, using overgeneralized forms to overcome its complexity. To date, studies have used a corpus-based method to retrieve overgeneralizations in child language, which has had limited success in capturing this phenomenon. The aim of this study was to investigate the production of overgeneralized verb forms in Croatian monolingual children aged 2;6 to 5;11 using a questionnaire in which parents report overgeneralizations used by their children. We tested the relationship between the production of overgeneralized forms and features of the input language (token frequency and class size). We hypothesized that the rate of overgeneralizations will depend on input language features, i.e. a higher rate of overgeneralizations for infrequent verbs and for verbs with smaller class size. The items selected for the questionnaire are the verbs with stem change used by parents in the longitudinal Croatian corpus of child language. Parents report overgeneralized forms in all verb classes, and verb frequency and class size negatively correlate with the proportion of overgeneralizations. Our results show that children gradually abstract morphological systems in a way that is highly sensitive to the properties of the input.

Women Marginalization as Victims of Sexual Harassment: Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis

This study aims to explain the subject-object position and readers’ position in reporting on women as victims of sexual harassment that were built by mass media Detik.com. The design of this study is descriptive-qualitative study. The data of this study are all e-news about sexual harassment cases which published by Detik.com starting 1st January to 31st December 2021. Data was collected by using corpus-based method and corpus tools (SketchEngine and AntConc) as research instrument. Data, then, was analyzed using the CACDA or the combination of corpus linguistic and critical discourse analysis. The results of this study are: (1) ‘the police’ were more dominantly positioned as subjects in the news report (4 datas), while the most dominant position of the object is occupied by the ‘the perpetrator of sexual harassment’ (4 datas). 3 datas, among all 5 datas, marginalized women as the victims of sexual harassment through the word construction, whereas the other 2 datas showed the author’s side with the victims. (2) on 1 data, the authors combined the mediation and cultural code processes, while on 4 other datas the authors used only the mediation process. Though most of the the readers’ comments were accusing and blaming the perpetrator, yet some of them still marginalized women. The novelty of this study is the implementing Sara Mill’s critical discourse analysis on CACDA method.

Idioms in General English Corpora: on Frequency, Register, and Cross-Variety Variation

Research into idioms and phraseology has become an established part of the corpus linguistic research agenda and has often revolved around either corpus-based or corpus-driven methodologies. At the same time, a relatively recent approach to socio-variational aspects of language in the form of Cognitive Sociolinguistics has contributed to establishing an ideal platform for the study of variation in the varieties of English. The present paper rests on these two research strands in a survey devoted to variation on the level of idioms in present-day English, namely those denoting competition. While idioms, first and foremost, are theoretically identified with the frameworks of Phraseology, Cognitive Linguistics, and Applied Linguistics, among others, this study will make use of a corpus-based method of idioms introduced by Moon and Gustawsson’s idioms frequency and significance threshold, paired with Moze and Mohamed’s sociolinguistic profiling of idioms. The Idioms will be examined in two national varieties of English, namely those spoken in Great Britain and the USA, which are represented in the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English, respectively. With the assumption that the concept of competition is variety-specific, the main questions to be answered during the analysis are: (1) To what extent can the frequency of use of idioms be regarded an element of variation? and (2) Are there any differences in the prominence of specific variables, such as frequency, register, gender, and age across the two varieties under study? The preliminary findings indicate a significant amount of similarity, but upon closer examination of the data, some important variations are emphasised. Thus, a discussion of the results provides a basis for an inter-variety comparison of the idioms denoting competition and, in so doing, adds to the universality / variation debate.

Review of Wu (2023): Media Representations of Macau’s Gaming Industry in Greater China: A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract Media Representations of Macau’s Gaming Industry in Greater China, written by Yuxi Wu, adopts a corpus-based critical discourse analysis method to compare newspaper media representations of Macau’s gaming industry in 2014 in Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, and Macau, the three regions of China with different historical backgrounds, economic conditions, political systems, and social norms. The topical preferences, attitudinal differences and ideological stances of English-language newspapers published in these three regions are revealed in this research.

Conserving Semantic Unit Information and Simplifying Syntactic Constituents to Improve Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition.

Implicit discourse relation recognition (IDRR) has long been considered a challenging problem in shallow discourse parsing. The absence of connectives makes such relations implicit and requires much more effort to understand the semantics of the text. Thus, it is important to preserve the semantic completeness before any attempt to predict the discourse relation. However, word level embedding, widely used in existing works, may lead to a loss of semantics by splitting some phrases that should be treated as complete semantic units. In this article, we proposed three methods to segment a sentence into complete semantic units: a corpus-based method to serve as the baseline, a constituent parsing tree-based method, and a dependency parsing tree-based method to provide a more flexible and automatic way to divide the sentence. The segmented sentence will then be embedded at the level of semantic units so the embeddings could be fed into the IDRR networks and play the same role as word embeddings. We implemented our methods into one of the recent IDRR models to compare the performance with the original version using word level embeddings. Results show that proper embedding level better conserves the semantic information in the sentence and helps to enhance the performance of IDRR models.

A Sea of-Noun vs. a Mountain of-Noun: A Quantitative Corpus-Based Study of Two Metaphorical Constructions

Applying the perspective of Construction Grammar and the corpus-based method known as Distinctive-Collexeme Analysis, this study seeks to identify nouns that indicate a strong preference either for the sea of-noun-construction or the mountain of-noun-construction. Based on the data extracted from the corpus, this study reveals that the constructions convey subtle nuances of meaning, reflect different degrees of metaphoricity, and have a strong tendency to occur with specific nouns.