Corpus Of Letters Research Articles

Applying and developing semantic web technologies for exploiting a corpus in history of science: The case study of the Henri Poincaré correspondence

The Henri Poincaré correspondence is a corpus of letters sent and received by this mathematician. The edition of this correspondence is a long-term project begun during the 1990s. Since 1999, a website is devoted to publish online this correspondence with digitized letters. In 2017, it has been decided to reforge this website using Omeka S. This content management system offers useful services but some user needs have led to the development of an RDFS infrastructure associated to it. Approximate and explained searches are managed thanks to SPARQL query transformations. A prototype for efficient RDF annotation of this corpus (and similar corpora) has been designed and implemented. This article deals with these three research issues and how they are addressed.

An Analysis of Lexical Chunks in Online Business Letters (OBL) and Business Letter Corpus (BLC): A Corpus-Based Study

This research investigated into the lexical density and frequencies of five types of lexical chunks located in 300 online business letters. Top 10 websites on business correspondence had been identified in terms of traffic visitors and bounce rate under one million web rankings worldwide. Criterion Sampling method was identified prior to extracting the sample letters from the websites. The data was then run with Antconc Concordance Program (ACP) for lexical density and frequency analysis. Top 15 lexical chunks in online business letters (OBL) were compared against those top 15 in Business Letter Corpus (BLC). Findings revealed that there was a total of 39 916-word tokens and 939 counts of lexical chunks found in this corpus. It was found that more lexical words do not imply more lexical chunks used in based on types of business letters. All 5 types of lexical chunks were identified and ranked in descending order; Sentence Builders (SB) as the most frequent type, followed by Collocations (COL), Deictic locutions (DLs), Polywords (POLs) and Institutionalized Expressions (IUs) as the least frequent type of lexical chunk. Sub-divisional analysis indicated that Grammatical Collocations (GCs) were more common than Lexical Collocations (LCs). Majority of lexical chunks were formed more at sentence level than phrasal level. Comparative analysis between top 15 lexical chunks in OBL and BLC discovered that most top lexical chunks in online business letters are representative of those corporate business letters in BLC. Pedagogical implications in terms of the reliability of online business letters for academic reference and future research considerations are also addressed.

Positionierungen in argumentativen Gesprächen und Briefen der Schule

Abstract The current research in the field of argumentation in school contexts predominantly focuses on the development of oral and written argumentation skills and interventions to improve students’ argumentative skills, while comparative studies of argumentative practices in different modes, particularly the linguistic features of oral versus written argumentative practices, are still rare. To close this gap, our study investigates argumentative oral and written practices of students in secondary school to answer the question whether the mode has an influence on the use of specific procedures and linguistic features. We examined how students express their stance on a controversial issue linguistically (Positionierung) by analyzing a small corpus of argumentative discussions and letters by 12th grade students. The results of the study show that while students use similar procedures and linguistic features in both modes, they are more varied and multifaceted in discussions, i. e. oral communication, than in letters, i. e. written communication.

The Grimm Brothers: A stylometric network analysis

Abstract Stylometric methods can be used to reveal similarities between texts and, combined with network analysis, to depict the stylistic relations between those texts. The research conducted here focuses on a corpus of letters written by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Using stylometric analysis, we model the writing styles of the brothers depending on the addressees and chronology. The brothers have individual styles: Wilhelm has a more friendly and personal tone independent on addresses, while Jacob has a more impersonal style, unless he was writing to Wilhelm. Their styles merge at the interactions of their career or personal development.

Sincerity in Lithuanian epistolarity: Between truth and emotion

AbstractThis paper investigates the lexical representation of sincerity in Lithuanian epistolarity throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on data from the corpus of Lithuanian letters and employing the techniques of corpus, statistical and philological analysis, this paper explores the use, frequency and context of occurrence of the four sets of lexical stems: atvir- (‘open’, ‘frank’), nuošird- (‘sincere’, ‘honest’), šird- (‘heart’), and tikr- (‘authentic’, ‘genuine’, ‘real’). As each of these lexical stems foreground different semantic shades of sincerity, they are treated in this paper as lexical variables that inscribe different degrees of an author’s sincere attitude (stance) toward the addressee and the writing act itself. The findings suggest that in Lithuanian epistolarity the use of sincerity lexemes is constrained by the grammatical shape of the lexeme and genre-related factors, namely, formulaic vs. non-formulaic context. Frequent lexical inscription of sincerity lexemes in the speech acts of thanking, wishing and greeting suggests that sincerity (as a stance) is conventionally linked to these specific social acts. When these social acts are evoked in epistolary practice, they thus evoke a particular (sincere) stance meaning.

Expressing friendship in letters: Conventionality and sincerity in the multilingual correspondence of nineteenth-century Catholic churchmen

AbstractThe relationship between the polite and conventional nature of friendly language and the sincerity of the writer’s feelings is a central topic in linguistic and historical research on friendship in epistolary communication. This relationship can be understood in the context of the emotional values and conventionalised emotional practices that characterise the writer’s emotional community.The language of friendship has a significant role in the history of letter writing in religious communities. However, epistolary and emotional practices among religious groups in the modern era remain a rather unexplored filed of research. In this regard, the nineteenth century is of particular interest, as it saw the consolidation of sincerity as a central notion in European standards of letter writing.Bringing together historical pragmatics and the history of emotions, this paper describes the forms and functions of sincerity in the negotiation of friendships between nineteenth-century Catholic churchmen. The article analyses a corpus of letters in Italian and Spanish from the multilingual correspondence of European Benedictine missionaries in Australia between the 1850s and the 1890s. The results of the analysis show that sincerity and emotional self-disclosure, while dependent on the pragmatic conventions of letter writing, belonged to cross-linguistic cultural scripts typical of religious communities.

Plato's Persona: Marsilio Ficino, Renaissance Humanism, and Platonic Traditions by Denis J.-J. Robichaud

Reviewed by: Plato's Persona: Marsilio Ficino, Renaissance Humanism, and Platonic Traditions by Denis J.-J. Robichaud Sergius Kodera Denis J.-J. Robichaud. Plato's Persona: Marsilio Ficino, Renaissance Humanism, and Platonic Traditions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 344. Cloth, $79.95. Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) was not only the first translator and commentator of Plato's and Plotinus's Opera omnia (as well as of numerous other works of the Neoplatonic tradition of late Antiquity). He also developed a fascinating and highly complex synthesis of Platonism, Christian doctrine, Renaissance magic, and medicine. Well beyond the sixteenth century, [End Page 611] Ficino's texts were very influential. Over the past four decades, authors like Michael Allen, Brian Copenhaver, James Hankins, and Valery Rees (to name just a few of the most high-profile scholars from the Anglo-American world) have substantially increased our awareness of Ficino's intricate and substantial contributions to the Platonic tradition and Renaissance culture in general. With an enviable erudition and a superb command of printed and manuscript sources, as well as of the rhetorical tradition, Robichaud's book has enriched this already impressive tradition of Ficino scholarship. A mere glance into the index locorum of the book reveals the scope of Robichaud's research. Plato's Persona is an important and timely contribution to our understanding of Ficino's work; the book has enormous potential to engender new scholarship on Renaissance Platonism and its cultural environment in general. It is a must-read for any specialist in the field, because its author substantially enhances our sensitivity to Ficino's approach to Platonism in some crucial, but hitherto rather neglected, aspects: Ficino's sense of different literary registers, his word play, and his awareness of the ludic and the histrionic aspects of Plato's dialogues. Through a series of close readings that cut through an enormous amount of Ficino's texts, Robichaud shows how Ficino, by putting on different literary masks, imitates Plato and forged a humanistic rhetorical persona for himself with the intent to become "Plato's Latin spokesman in the Renaissance" (16). The first chapter is on the semantic field of the Greek word prosopon (which means both "mask" and "face") and argues that Ficino's large corpus of letters—veritable "epistolary games" with "dialogic traits»expose "an interior prediscursive self that participates in a divine principle of unification; on the reverse side, however, the very same letters also present Ficino's discursive exterior public persona with the mask of the Platonic philosopher" (67). Ficino thus aims at "the fabrication and presentation of vivid personae (prosopopoeia and enargeia)" (17). The second chapter provides a new perspective on Ficino's well-known understanding of Plato's dialogues as a coherent body of work. Robichaud explains that Iamblichus's De secta Pythagorica was a formative text for Ficino because it allowed him to categorize Plato's dialogues into texts "refuting sophists, exhorting youth and teaching adults»a threefold division that, according to Robichaud, is associated by Ficino to the Neoplatonic metaphysical order of "conversion procession and remaining" (103, 110). The following three chapters are dedicated to Ficino's "prosopopoetic" readings of passages in the Platonic corpus where Socrates, the Pythagoreans, and Plato speak "in particular voices" (19). Ficino believed that Plato wrote under the guise of three primary personae: his own, Socrates, and Pythagoras. "The dialogue's interlocutors are in other words mouths through which Plato can transcribe and communicate voices of philosophical traditions in order to record them in writing" (19). This is, by the way, a set of ideas that was already discussed long ago in Martha Nussbaum's 1986 book The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Her important contribution is curiously absent from the book under review. Robichaud arrives at his nuanced exposition of Ficino's complex relationship to Augustine and hence the Christian tradition through a series of intricate close readings, which produce a series of very interesting results. First, even though Ficino was a Christian, he advocated a hitherto unprecedented pagan virtue-ethics, with the goal of a deification that does not come about by the mediation of Christ (129, 171). Another and...

‘Adieu, Vaarwel, groet mijne zo Waarde Ouders’

Abstract ‘Adieu, Vaarwel, groet mijne zo Waarde Ouders’: The usage of French loan suffixes and loan words in a nineteenth-century family correspondenceThe French cultural hegemony in Europe over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries affected Dutch society. During the French period (1795-1813), the French influence on Dutch politics was significant as well. As a result, the Dutch language ‘frenchified’: many loan words and loan suffixes were borrowed from French. A corpus analysis of the family letters of the Bijleveld family from Leiden (1813-1814) reveals the extensive impact of French language contact. Especially in the letters of son Theodoor, who was sent to France in 1813 to serve for Napoleon’s Garde d’honneur (‘guard of honor’), the amount of loan suffixes is considerable. This result outnumbers the outcomes of the study by Rutten, Vosters and Van der Wal (2015) and shows that the language use of elite citizens was significantly influenced by French. A comparison between loan suffixes and loan words in the letter corpus reveals an even more compelling result: the relative frequency of loan words in the corpus is twice as high as the relative frequency of loan suffixes.

The Pastoral Epistles: Common Themes, Individual Compositions? An Introduction to the Quest for the Origin(s) of the Letters to Timothy and Titus

ABSTRACT In New Testament scholarship, the pseudonymity of the so-called Pastoral Epistles (1–2 Timothy and Titus) continues to be a majority position, partially because many scholars assume that they were originally designed as a tripartite letter corpus. Over the past decades, however, a growing group of scholars has started to challenge this corpus theory by pointing out the individual qualities of the letters to Timothy and Titus and their mutual differences. These research findings have brought a number of scholars to believe that the letters were composed by more than one author. When the arguments for plural authorship are compared to the traditional arguments for common authorship, it seems the pseudonymity of the Pastoral Epistles is by no means a foregone conclusion. Accordingly, the quest for the origin(s) of the letters to Timothy and Titus must be continued.

Neo-Assyrian Statues of Gods and Kings in Context

Abstract Neo-Assyrian letters are a broad and interesting corpus of data to investigate how ancient Assyrians dealt with the manufacture of statues, the shaping of royal and divine effigies, and the final arrangement of sculptures. This paper aims to analyse the ritual and practical aspects of the making of images in the Neo-Assyrian period with reference to this corpus of letters, which reveals how Assyrian kings, officials and sculptors worked together for this purpose. It explores the role of the personnel involved, the process of the creation, and the final display of statues. Based on the interplay of texts and archaeological data, the study reveals the intense activity of making statues of gods and kings in Assyria, with the administration supervising both projects for new statues and the maintenance of already existing ones.

Basilius von Cäsarea (329?–378?) in der Polyphonie der Kirchenväter

Abstract The article offers a brief presentation of Basil of Caesarea (329-378) in the context of a polyphony of the church fathers. Basil, one of the most influential figures in the entire history of the Eastern Church, held close contacts with many other major theologians and bishops of his time. His large corpus of extant letters gives a strong sense of his participation in a polyphonic interaction between diverse Christian voices. Yet he is also elusive and often difficult to integrate into conventional categories of patristic history. This can be explained by his pragmatic approach to theology which uniquely combines deep intellectual sophistication with a level-headed awareness of the practical needs of the Church in his own time.

Феномен церковного течения в корпусе писем свт. Василия Великого

Феномен церковного течения в корпусе писем свт. Василия Великого

СПЕЦИФИКА ТИПОВ МОДАЛЬНОСТЕЙ В ЖАНРЕ «ДЕЛОВОЕ ПИСЬМО» В КРОСС-КУЛЬТУРНОМ АСПЕКТЕ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ АНГЛОЯЗЫЧНОЙ ДЕЛОВОЙ КОММУНИКАЦИИ)

Relevance of the work is conditioned by interest in the problems of business communication genres functioning in the English language. On the basis of the material of the representative specialized corpus of business letters collected from both public and private companies of the United Arab Emirates, the author aims to describe the language specificity of the data samples of written business communication and to reveal statistically significant differences in the use of modal verbs between authentic texts and the studied corpus. In the article, differences in the frequency of using modal verbs are analysed, and the dominant types of modality are identified.

Examining a Hypothesis about the Past‐Oriented Aorist Infinitive in Post‐Classical Greek

AbstractI examine a hypothesis concerning the decline of the past‐oriented aorist infinitive in Greek in a corpus of private letters dating to between the third century BC and the sixth century AD. According to the hypothesis examined, the decline of the past‐oriented aorist infinitive was related to the aspectual value of the aorist infinitive in Greek and to the spread of the perfect in the cross‐linguistic sense of the word (Haspelmath 1992). In addition to supporting the hypothesis examined, the corpus also sheds new light on the syntax of infinitive clauses in the period investigated. It is observed that, when found in the corpus, past‐oriented aorist infinitives tend to be used in specific, predictable contexts that support their past‐orientedness, and they have a parallel in the use of the aorist injunctive in Vedic Sanskrit. This phenomenon is consistent with the hypothesis examined in that it assumes that the aorist infinitive encoded the perfective aspect rather than tense.

Documenting Feature Pools in Language Expansion Situations: Sibilants in Early Colonial Latin American Spanish

AbstractThis paper proposes a reconstruction of the demographic and linguistic composition of the Spanish settling contingent in the American colonies as one of several key factors determining the evolution of Spanish in the early colonial period (sixteenth century). It focuses on the evidence for contact among several sibilant systems, including seseo, i.e. the reduction of four medieval sibilants to /s/. In the standard narrative of the history of Latin American Spanish, this reduction is seen as the consequence of the demographic primacy of seseo in the early metropolitan colonial mix and the inherent phonological simplicity of the merger (Catalán 1958; Granda 1994; Parodi 1995; Hidalgo 2016). This study calls for a reassessment of several of these previous assumptions. The bulk of the data in this study come from a corpus of private letters by early colonial settlers from Spain, analysed quantitatively and contextualized on the basis of additional demographic and linguistic evidence. The sociolinguistic reconstruction that emerges from this data contradicts the canonical presentation of the internal and external ecology of early colonial Latin American Spanish, and calls for the incorporation of a variety of cognitive and sociodemographic triggers beyond the action of the metropolitan input.

Цифровые потери в коммуникации при переходе от «общения» к «передаче информации»

The article focuses on the issues of communication in the digital age. Digitalisation, which means converting information into digital form and simultaneously introducing modern technologies in all social areas, is contrasted with computerization — the process of forming the ultimate conditions to meet users’ information needs by means of appropriate technologies. The difference between the two is that in the first case the system can make choices for an individual, while in the second it merely assists you by simplifying the process of mastering and using cultural and language codes. One of the consequences of digitalisation, in the author’s opinion, is a change in the very concept of communication: it is no longer defined as “interpersonal communication”, but rather as “an exchange of information”, according to dictionaries of linguistic terms. The author argues that instrumentality prevailing over communicativeness is the root of many issues, i.e. the merging of written and oral forms of language, the use of contracted and curtailed speech similar to texting, losing the plot while listening, broken links between the form and content of a language sign, the emergence of “sticker-words” indicating objects, actions, and emotions, choosing words with a smaller set of semes in their meaning, replacing words and punctuation with pictorial representations (emoticons and emoji), etc. As illustrations, the author uses samples of texts and dialogues obtained by means of applying the participant observation method, as well as texts from a corpus of business letters. Having analysed the material, the author concludes that the modern human brain works similarly to T9, selecting from the entire repertoire of linguistic means the most frequent ones which are included in the surface layer of the active lexicon, grammatical competence and pragmaticon of the speaker and meet the dominant, “popular” standard of speech.

Missing ‘Particles’ in Disputed Pauline Letters? A Question of Method

New Testament scholars continue to debate the number of missing ‘particles’ in disputed Pauline letters in order to advocate or challenge their pseudonymity. Surprisingly, however, participants in the debate do not usually define particles nor do they explain how they count missing types. Addressing these methodological issues, the present study suggests using the broader category of ‘indeclinables’ instead of particles, and to count missing types by either comparing the data for a particular letter (or group of letters) against another letter (or group of letters) or in light of the entire Pauline letter corpus. Since the overall result proves to be different for both approaches, it appears that the question regarding the number of missing indeclinables in (pseudo-)Pauline literature is essentially one of method.

From loss to repair. A study of body narratives in patient claims for medical injury.

In this article we examine the body's status in the complaints that patients filed with a compensation agency. Taking a corpus of letters, we analyse the way in which the patients mobilise their bodily experience from the angle of the damage for which they demand compensation. To this end, we articulate an approach in terms of the sociology of complaint with an approach rooted in the sociology of medicine, health and illness. To analyse the body narratives, we use the notion of loss. We highlight the manner in which patients approach their losses as 'losses in practice'. These losses are defined by the patients putting forward the concrete experience of a body harmed by the treatment received, and by their formulation of expectations in terms of compensation. We therefore identify four ways in which the reality of the damaged body is given a form in terms of expectations of repair: the 'body-producer', the 'body-ecological', the 'body-help' and the 'body-self-image'. Our analysis adds to studies on the status of the body in care and in complaint by showing: the specific influence of the enunciative situation, the plurality of patient evaluations and their temporal dynamic.

„annaðhvort með dönskum hala eða höfði, enn að öðru leiti íslenskt“: Um tengsl íslensku og dönsku á 19. öld og áhrif þeirra

Icelanders were the subjects of Danish kings for more than five centuries. This article focuses on Icelandic-Danish language contact towards the end of this period, i.e. in the 19th century when Icelandic is assumed to have been heavily influenced by Danish. This assumption is, however, based primarily on metalinguistic evidence and random examples rather than on empirical research. The purpose of the present article is to question this, seeking to evaluate the impact of Danish on Icelandic vo-cabulary based on investigations of 19th century texts. In the spirit of historical socio-linguistics, we examine a variety of published and unpublished texts, and refer both to the external sociohistorical situation and language use as it appears in our texts.In the 19th century, the Danish kingdom was losing territories and changing from a multiethnic and plurilingual empire, into a national state with Danish as the national language. Together with the prevailing 19th century ideology of nationalism in Europe, the changes within the state promoted ideas of national independence for Iceland, and the Icelandic language became a central symbol of nationhood. At the same time, direct contact between Icelandic and Danish, formerly quite limited and mostly confined to a small group of high officials, increased. Travels between the two countries became easier and more frequent, a growing number of Danes sett led in Iceland (and vice versa), and bilingualism became more common among the general Icelandic public. The political struggle for national independence, as well as the growing presence of Danish in Iceland, is reflected in the language discourse of the 19th century, where the impact of Danish was a constant concern. It was seen as a serious threat to Icelandic, most prominent in the speech in Reykjavik, the fastest growing urban centre. This article presents the results of two investigations of lexical borrowings, based on recently compiled corpora of 19th century Icelandic texts: a corpus of printed newspapers and periodicals, and a corpus of unpublished and handwritten private lett ers. The first study included words in both corpora, that contained one of four borrowed affixes, an-, be-, -heit and -era, which were commonly featured in contemporary (negative) comments on foreign influence. The results show that such words were, in fact, rare in the texts, and that their number, relative to the total number of running words, decreased in the course of the century, especially in the newspapers. The second investigation was directed at recent borrowings (including one-word code-switches) in a subcorpus of newspapers from the last quarter of the 19th century. The results show a very moderate number of tokens relative to the total number of running words in the texts as a whole (0.37%). We do, however, see a clear increase between 1875 and 1900, as well as a higher proportion of lexical borrowings in the Reykjavik newspapers than in those published elsewhere. Furthermore, the words in question were particularly prominent in advertisements compared to the rest of the text. The main conclusion of the article is that both the contact situation and the amount and character of the borrowed words found in the texts, place 19th century Icelandic on step 1 of Thomason and Kaufman’s borrowing scale, and that the over-all results show much less influence from Danish than contemporary metalinguistic comments indicated.

Crossing the line: Mamluk response to Qaramanid threat in the fifteenth century according to MS ar. 4440 (BnF, Paris)

AbstractThe present article investigates the complex dynamics of the relationship between the Mamluk sultans and Qaramanid rulers in the second half of the fifteenth century. Based on the revealing of an unpublished corpus of letters (MS ar. 4440, BnF, Paris), which preserved copies of the correspondence exchanged between sultan Īnāl and Ibrāhīm II after the Qaramanids' Rebellion in 860–862/1456–58 and their capture of the Mamluk fortresses in Tarsus and Gülek. After briefly sketching the history of their contact and alliances, I then concentrate on the Qaramanid Rebellion itself, presenting the new data provided by the corpus and analysing the stakes and extent of the Qaramanids' threat to Mamluk policy in the Anatolian context.