Corpus Linguistics Research Articles

Reform of Business English Teaching in Colleges and Universities under the Background of Education Informatization

Abstract This paper builds a business English intelligent teaching network platform through cloud computing, virtual reality, corpus and automatic scoring system, and other information technologies. Educational information technology helps construct a linguistic corpus by utilizing vocabulary lookup and MI values to create a one-stop solution for multi-level language analysis and application. The essay scoring project in the Business English Smart Teaching Network Platform utilizes the bag-of-words vector model to extract the features of each word, text, and topic to complete automatic essay scoring. After analysis, it can be seen that the business skills and interests of the experimental group have significantly improved after the teaching of the Business English Wisdom Teaching Network Platform. After the corpus-scaffolded writing teaching training, the mean values of students’ vocabulary richness ranged from 3.869 to 4.108, and sentence variety ranged from 3.961 to 4.135. Automatic scoring of compositions resulted in a significant improvement in the writing quality of students (P=0.000). The smart teaching network platform mentioned in this paper can be utilized to improve business English teaching in the context of informationization.

TOXICITY AGAINST BRAZILIAN WOMEN DEPUTIES ON TWITTER: A CATEGORIZATION OF DISCURSIVE VIOLENCE

This paper discussed categories of violent discourses and toxicity against Brazilian women deputies on Twitter through a mixed-methods (corpus linguistics approach/discursive analysis) on a dataset of 1400 tweets. Results suggest that toxic discourse in this case is largely based on violence connected to women's behavior and abilities in the political realm, rather than ideology or propositions. Ideological affiliation, while may influence the amount of toxicity created, doesn’t influence the types of toxic discourses.

Afghan Women’s Representation in News Discourse during the First 365 Days of Taliban Governance A Corpus-Based Analysis

The study attempts to investigate the 365 days of Afghan women in the post-Taliban regime in Afghanistan in news discourse. The study particularly aims to analyze the lexical collocation of the keywords related to Afghan women in the news discourse. The study is qualitative as it analyses the data qualitatively. Corpus Linguistics has been used as a methodology in this study. Fifty online news articles have been selected from Pakistani newspaper The News International, and a corpus has been developed with the name Afghan Women News Corpus. The data have been analysed using LancsBox v.5.x (Brezina et al., 2020). The study draws on Baker’s (2004) Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis framework. The corpus was uploaded to LancsBox and a list of collocations of the keyword Afghan Women was generated. Both the left and right collocates of the keywords were analyzed in detail and were used for thematic development and coding. The findings of this analysis revealed the basic patterns the data used to deal with the topic of Afghan women in particular and their social setup in general. It is found that in the majority of cases, the news discourse negatively represents the Taliban regime, occasionally shows it neutrally, and rarely shows it positively. The research concludes with a discussion of the main findings by highlighting the discourse surrounding community representation before and after the war.

대학생 글쓰기 자료에 기반한 사용역 연구

Based on college students’ writing data, this study investigated various uses via basic quantitative analysis, measurement of colloquialism, and comparative analysis of usage. In Chapter 3, the length of sentences by registers was measured. As a result, self-introduction and photo image writing had the shortest sentences, while proposal writing had the longest. Lexical diversity analysis revealed that travel writing had the lowest lexical diversity, and photographic image writing had the highest. Lastly, the vocabulary density was highest in proposal writing and the lowest in self-introduction, and all six registers showed values lower than the average vocabulary density of previously measured Korean written texts. A comparison of colloquial features measures in six registers and a usage analysis of specific vocabulary were performed in Chapter 4. First, we examined the distribution of 16 particles identified as highly colloquial vocabulary in existing research. Next, we compared and organized the usage of the dependent noun “geo” and the common noun “ttae” with high colloquiality scores by region of use. Influenced by, the incorrect use of the frequently used common noun “bubun” was also examined through usage analysis. We presente d a variety of quantitative measurement methods used in corpus linguistics, which is expected to be of considerable help in college writing research, where corpus linguistics research is relatively less advanced. In addition, sub-corpus were created and compared by register, and the writing data produced by individual students can also be quantitatively analyzed using the same method. In other words, through this comparative work, a student’s writing ability can be qualitatively measured and presented. In addition, supplementing and organizing the usage analysis performed in this study into a collection of usages will make it possible to use it as specific sentence usages in the development of writing textbooks or writing education at colleges in the future.

디지털 인문학으로 분석한 문화재 안내판의 분포와 어휘

The Cultural Heritage Interpretation Boards are public facilities erected on site to explain the designation, historical background, and preservation value of the cultural heritages. The Cultural Heritage Administration has been revising the inscriptions for the improvement project since 2019. With the previous literature largely grounded upon linguistics, this article analyzes the distribution and vocabulary of the Boards reinstalled from 2019 to May 2023. To do so, I employ the methodology of GIS and corpus linguistics in the name of digital humanities. The first half of the analysis performs inductive analyses examining a total of 2,705 Boards revised. Gyeongju-si houses the greatest number of them, while Paldal-gu in Suwon-si has the highest density. The top-frequency words — involving designation, periodization, and appearance — vary across the four regions and affirm the corpora’s uniqueness as Boards. In the second half devoted to deductive analyses, I visualize the locations where specific terms are mentioned. The search words are found in unexpected places unless irrelative usages are filtered out. Although this paper examined only the latest revisions due to the limited accessibility to the previous information, I hope to identify the complete patterns of the Boards in follow-up projects by incorporating the pre-revision data.

Corpus Linguistics Strategies for Identifying Accepted Theories in Early Modern England

The paper investigates the applicability of corpus linguistics to the construction of a database of intellectual history. Working with the Royal Society Corpus (RSC), it presents a series of corpus queries that can aid with computationally identifying potential instances of communal theory acceptance in England during the period of 1665-1800. These queries allowed to identify a set of noun-adjective pairs potentially synonymous with “accepted theory” and retrieve around 1,400 excerpts potentially indicative of instances of communal theory acceptance. The paper also discusses some strategies for identifying the epistemic agent, as well as the RSC’s place within the broader historical context. Finally, I argue that, in addition to exploring corpus linguistics strategies, methodologies for interpreting computationally retrieved data should also be developed.

언어적 의사소통의 유형과 성패

This article starts from the types of language communication and combines research methods from multimodal corpus linguistics and related theories from counseling psychology to introduce several types of communication that occur in daily life and explain the process by which discourse leads to success and failure. It was an observational analysis. Eight types of language data were collected, including face-to-face voice communication between family members, untact text communication, text communication between Korean and Chinese friends, and untact voice communication for solving problems in daily life. The communication language is mostly Korean, but sometimes Chinese. Linguistic materials were analyzed from the perspectives of the purpose of communication, communication space, relationships between participants, type of communication medium, and double messages.

An Analysis of Errors in Resumes and Job Application Letters: The Study of Malaysian Undergraduate Students

Writing a resume and cover letter is essential, especially for fresh graduates, as these documents are crucial for pursuing their desired careers after completing their studies. The unemployment rate in Malaysia, coupled with the economic downturn brought about by COVID-19, is set to increase competition between new graduates and more experienced job seekers. The formatting of these documents, which must be correctly formatted and without errors, is critical because employers usually review resumes and cover letters as an initial screening for candidates. In developing the checklist for the corpus analysis for this research, the researchers adopted the Error Analysis (EA) framework by Corder (1973). The present study addresses this issue by examining the errors in resumes and cover letters produced by Malaysian undergraduates. The research employed the corpus linguistics approach by gathering 60 resumes and 60 job application letters to identify errors using the Error Analysis (EA) framework. The findings showed that students' common errors were misselection, addition, omission, blends and misordering. The most prominent error found in the data was misselection. In the context of intense job competition among recent graduates in Malaysia, this study emphasises the significance of impeccably crafted resumes and cover letters. It offers valuable insights into making job applications more effective and practical. The findings of this research have the potential to serve as a valuable guide for undergraduate students, which will allow them to develop compelling and relevant content for job applications.

Gender and Genre in Translation: The Linguistic Construction of Femininity in the American and French Editions of Early 1920s VOGUE

This paper aims to bridge the gap between gender, genre and translation studies by taking an interdisciplinary approach across these research areas and employing some of the tools of corpus linguistics to provide a contrastive analysis of the linguistic construction of femininity in the American and French editions of early-1920s Vogue. In particular, it takes as a sample twenty-four Vogue issues published in 1921 and focuses on its extensive fashion features, originally written in English and then translated or adapted so as to appear in the French edition. A contrastive analysis of two parallel corpora (one consisting of the fashion articles published in 1921 Vogue US and another comprising their translations/adaptations for Vogue France) as regards frequency, collocational patterning and co-textual environment of lexical items pertaining to the domains of fashion and femininity reveals both similarities and differences in the linguistic representation of gender identity across two different cultures, alongside the adoption of particular translation strategies.

Get back! Methods for Exploring Discourses of Nostalgia and Nostalgic Discourses Using Corpora

Nostalgia for something lost (factual or imagined) has shaped nations and continues to shape national self-image and pol-icies. The rhetorical appeal to nostalgia has been blamed for a range of phenomena, from populism to reactionary politics at large, and yet research in psychology has suggested that nostalgising has a beneficial cognitive function. The dis-sonance between the negative reputation of nostalgia and the science of how it works for us, as a positive and useful emotion, is related to the fact that nostalgia is not a given content, but a situated cultural practice. I here use corpus linguistics methods to pursue the mismatch between the “discourse of nostalgia” and “nostalgic discourses” and to move from expressions that denote nostalgia, to expressions that signal it. This paper reports on the methodological ex-plorations analysing large newspaper corpora and working on the overlaps between the collocational profile of nostalgiaand the markers of nostalgic discourse. The aim is to exploit corpus studies’ ability to systematically analyze patterns as a gateway to access nostalgic narratives. Nostalgia is, in fact, intrinsically discursive: it is a story of transformation, and it is the story of felt absences in the present compared to an ‘elsewhen’. Understanding the narratives of nostalgia and identifying a typology of nostalgic discursive triggers may of-fer insights into how this pervasive, powerful and often prof-itable emotion gains purchase in public discourse.

Recommendations for the meanings of words by Estonian language planning – justified and necessary, or not?

On the example of Estonian language planning, this research paper explores whether it is justified and necessary to give recommendations for the meanings of words. The focus is on the general language. Technical language is out of the scope of this research. First, a brief overview of the history of Estonian language planning and the development of Standard Estonian, as well as the current situation is provided. Then the paper focuses on recent research on the meanings of words in Estonian. The purpose was to revise the recommendations for the meanings of words by Estonian language planning. The research is based on the common approaches in Estonian linguistics today – the usage-based linguistics and corpus linguistics. The paper argues that recommendations by language planning for the meanings of words are not justified nor necessary in the general language, even if some explanations on the choice of words are relevant (e.g., for offensive words).

Las formas modales 'must' y 'should' en el discurso académico inglés de los posgraduados españoles

This paper presents a corpus linguistic study investigating the use and functions of the modal verbs, must and should, in academic discourse. The study analyses a corpus of doctoral dissertations within two distinct fields of knowledge, written in English and submitted to Spanish universities between 2011 and 2021. By employing corpus linguistics, we could interrogate this compilation to obtain concordances that could be analysed from a horizontal perspective, ensuring that each sample was appraised appropriately within its context of occurrence. The frequency and distribution of these modals in various contexts were examined. The findings revealed that must and should are utilised with differing frequencies and in diverse ways, depending on the academic discipline and the rhetorical purpose of the discourse. The paper contends that the use of modality, particularly deontic modality, is a vital aspect of academic writing, as it signals the writer's stance and the level of necessity, recommendation or obligation in their argumentation.

Corpus linguistics and television series: A personal reflection

Corpus linguistics and television series: A personal reflection

Personality adjectives in Serbian Tweets: An opening

There has been a great interest in investigating relations between personality and language use on the web or social media. Most of the recent studies are based on mining the users’ information available online and then using machine learning algorithms to predict their personality characteristics. On the other hand, a few studies have relied on the traditional lexical hypothesis when exploring personality under the assumption that personality-related attributes could be obtained from dictionaries. However, little is known about personality structure from Twitter - do data strictly reflect personality structure as represented by personality models, or as unique personality semantic patterns. The aim of the study was to assess and interpret the personality adjective-based structure contained in tweets. The data were collected from an open-access „Tweet-sr“ Serbian Twitter linguistic corpus (Ljubešić & Klubička, 2014). Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a topic modeling technique, was conducted to extract topics and cosine similarity was used as a measure to determine topic similarities, as well as topic-personality dimensions’s similarities. The results showed that the optimal solution comprised four non-overlapping topics reflecting specific semantic structures. Topics did not replicate trait constructs but were modestly related to them. The largest similarities were found with Extraversion and Agreeableness, pointing out the conceptual importance of these traits when describing interpersonal behavior. Also, no inter-topic differences in category distributions were found, with the evaluation terms being the second most frequent in three topics. Although tweets are short-form text messages, they have the potential to communicate socially relevant information through personality descriptors.

Phraseological variation, synonymy and parasynonymy in diachrony: a lexicographic and corpus linguistics study

Phraseological variation, synonymy and parasynonymy in diachrony: a lexicographic and corpus linguistics study

U.S. administration’s press communications on Tunisia after the July 25, 2021 ‘state of exception’: The shaping of urgency discourse

July 25, 2021 was an exceptional day in Tunisia, ushering in a new chapter in its contemporary political history and triggering a wave of global responses to the declared ‘state of exception’. This research examines the U.S. administration’s press communications on Tunisia following this event. Specifically, it explores (i) the dominant crisis frames permeating these communications and their underlying political agenda and (ii) the extent to which the discourse they imparted signals a change in U.S. foreign policy towards Tunisia in crisis situations. To meet these research objectives, a corpus-based investigation was undertaken using an integrative framework combining qualitative (frames) and quantitative (keyness and collocations) approaches. Results revealed changing discourses around the theme of crisis, moving from a sense of togetherness to urgency. This may echo the cautious attitude of the American government and its heightened concern about Kais Saied’s transitional measures. In broad terms, the exploration offered a glimpse of how the dynamics of global politics unfold discursively. Importantly, the Biden administration’s construction of Tunisia’s political-democratic crisis in terms of urgency can have real-life consequences for international perceptions of the country’s future. Theoretically, the study’s implications touch primarily upon Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS, henceforth), particularly the evolving corpus linguistics concepts of keyness and collocation networks.

Applied corpus linguistics and legal interpretation: A rapidly developing field of interdisciplinary scholarship

This article offers an overview of developments in a newly emerging interdisciplinary research field: legal corpus linguistics. The field brings together corpus research and legal theory by applying corpus-analytic techniques and linguistic concepts to facilitate the interpretation of legal texts. Despite the field's short history, it has already contributed important new insights into the meaning of statutory texts and parts of the U.S. Constitution, insights that may have significant practical implications for the American legal system. Our article provides an overview of relevant developments in legal corpus linguistics, from early success stories to recent and ongoing collaborative work between corpus linguists and legal scholars. It aims to highlight the benefits and illustrate the potential of this type of interdisciplinary work by summarizing three recent case studies, each of which deals with an important topic in American constitutional law. The case studies focus in turn on the following parts of the U.S. Constitution: (1) Article III and the meaning of “cases,” (2) the Appointments Provision in Article II, Section 2 and the meaning of “such inferior officers,” and (3) the Impeachment Provision in Article II, Section 4 and the meaning of “misdemeanors.” All three case studies use corpus analysis to explore phraseological patterns in large collections of Founding Era texts to provide insights into the meanings of the selected words and phrases in context during the time the Constitution was drafted and ratified. The article discusses the practical relevance of results from these case studies and potential implications of this and related work in legal corpus linguistics for contemporary and future litigation.

A Computational Linguistic Approach to English Lexicography

Focusing on computational linguistic approaches to English linguistics, this research explores how computational methods can be applied to dissect, understand and utilise the English language. We first looked at text analysis and processing, delving into natural language processing techniques such as text categorisation, sentiment analysis and machine translation, and their application to social media and automated text processing. In the area of lexicography and semantics, we explored how techniques such as distributed word vectors, semantic role labelling and sentiment analysis can deepen our understanding of vocabulary and semantics. We highlight the importance of these techniques in natural language processing tasks such as sentiment analysis and information retrieval. In addition, we focus on cross-language comparative and multilingual research, emphasising how big data and cross-language comparative research can reveal similarities and differences between languages and their implications for global linguistics. Finally, we explore corpus linguistics and big data analytics, highlighting the richness of linguistic data and tools they provide for linguistic research. Overall, this study highlights the importance of computational linguistic approaches to English linguistics and how they have transformed the way linguistics is studied and language technology has evolved. Future research trends will continue to drive the further development of computational linguistics methods, leading to a closer integration of linguistics with big data analytics and computational methods, creating more opportunities for the future of the field of linguistics.

A Linguistically-Informed Assessment Model for Multidimensional Competence Building in Romanian School Writing

In education, student involvement in writing activities is crucial for enhancing their learning experience and developing multiple competences. The development of any national curriculum within Europe is based on the indispensable competences required for lifelong learning as outlined in the European Parliament’s Reference Framework. In response to the changing landscape of education, the Romanian national curriculum has undergone revisions that currently prioritise a competence-based approach to teaching writing. This approach aims to equip students with the necessary skills and knowledge to effectively communicate through writing, enabling them to express their ideas and thoughts clearly and concisely. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that there has been a lack of research conducted to assess the efficacy of the didactic resources and materials developed to facilitate these educational goals. This study uses corpus linguistics methodologies to examine the correlation between the content of textbooks used for writing tasks in primary education, secondary education, and high schools and the pedagogical skills they aim to develop. For this purpose, we have constructed a preliminary textbook corpus called ROTEX, which consists of online materials, specifically Romanian language and communication textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education. The corpus includes three datasets, one for each educational level (4th grade, 8th grade, and 12th grade). Our analysis uses writing tasks to identify linguistic and thematic complexity patterns. This approach allows us to determine the competences that are effectively enhanced at each educational level. Our conclusions are backed up by quantitative linguistic evidence, which provides valuable insights into the dominant competences fostered within the educational framework.

A Micro-Diachronic Corpus Investigation of Violence-Related Metaphors Used to Frame China during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract The article explores Sinophobic discourses during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing specifically on violence-related metaphors used to frame China in American and Australian newspapers from January to June 2020. Specifically, the analysis aims to investigate the extent to which violence-related metaphors were used to frame China in a micro-diachronic perspective and the functions they performed in the dataset. The investigation was conducted by combining corpus linguistics and discourse analysis approaches to analyse the semantic domain of violence. The results revealed that violence-related metaphors were extensively used to negatively frame China and its institutions in both corpora, although they were more frequent in the Australian corpus. From a micro-diachronic perspective, in the American corpus, violence-related metaphors were less recurrent and evenly distributed over time, whereas they peaked in May 2020 in the Australian corpus, a time that coincided with China’s imposition of substantial tariffs on Australian barley. This seemed to suggest that the use of such metaphors was highly influenced by socioeconomic factors rather than by the spread of COVID-19.