Corpus Study Research Articles

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis for the Malay Language: New Corpus using CNN-based Framework

Sentiment analysis in the Malay language has traditionally focused on text-based data. Malay is the native language of Malaysia and other surrounding countries. While text-based sentiment analysis has shown good performance, it often lacks accuracy due to the absence of the speaker's affective state and intentions, which can lead to misinterpretations. Multimodal sentiment analysis addresses these shortcomings and has demonstrated improved performance in various prediction tasks. Unfortunately, there has been little research in this area for the Malay language, due to a lack of corpus and baseline studies. This paper introduces a new Malay Multimodal Sentiment Corpus, ‘MyMSC’, with annotations at both the multimodal and unimodal text levels. It contains 1208 segments covering political and social topics. The corpus development processes are described in detail, along with the necessary guidelines and considerations. This paper proposes a CNN-based framework with a late fusion method as the baseline model. Experiments with the proposed model demonstrate that the multimodal approach (F1 score = 0.77) outperforms the unimodal approach (F1 score = 0.68), validating the contribution of multimodality to classification performance. The differences between the two types of annotations and their impact are further elaborated. The full corpus is available at https://github.com/serenaroseaini/MyMSC .

Word order change in German infinitival complementation

Abstract The present article discusses whether processing factors might play a role in the reduction of word order variability in German infinitival complements of control verbs, connecting evidence from a diachronic corpus study to processing considerations and psycholinguistic findings. We show that intraposition, a linearization pattern that has been claimed to be costly in comprehension due to both center-embedding and temporary ambiguity, became less frequent in language use over time. Findings from language production experiments show that present-day German speakers avoid producing intraposition patterns even following repeated exposure to this pattern. Taken together, our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that processing factors can influence the distribution of word order variants. Looking at the diachronic dimension, however, reveals that the effect of processing factors can be modulated by sociolinguistic factors and the impact of language modality.

Gradually increasing context-sensitivity shapes the development of children's verb marking: A corpus study.

There is substantial evidence that children's apparent omission of grammatical morphemes in utterances such as "She play tennis" and "Mummy eating" is in fact errors of commission in which contextually licensed unmarked forms encountered in the input are reproduced in a context-blind fashion. So how do children stop making such errors? In this study, we test the assumption that children's ability to recover from error is related to their developing sensitivity to longer-range dependencies. We use a pre-registered corpus analysis to explore the predictive value of different cues with regards to children's verb-marking errors and observe a developmental pattern consistent with this account. We look at context-independent cues (the identity of the specific verb being used) and at the relative value of context-dependent cues (the identity of the specific subject+verb sequence being used). We find that the only consistent effect across a group of 2- to 3-year-olds and a group of 3- to 4-year-olds is the relative frequency of unmarked forms of specific subject+verb sequences being used. The relative frequency of unmarked forms of the verb alone is predictive only in the younger age group. This is consistent with an account in which children recover from making errors by becoming progressively more sensitive to context, at first the immediately preceding lexical contexts (e.g., the subject that precedes the verb) and eventually more distant grammatical markers (e.g., the fronted auxiliary that precedes the subject in questions). RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We provide a corpus analysis investigating input effects on young children's verb-marking errors (e.g., Mummy go) across development (between 2 and 4 years of age). We find evidence that these apparent errors of omission are in fact input-driven errors of commission that persist into the third year of life. We compare the relative effect on error rates of context-independent (e.g., verb) and context-dependent (e.g., subject+verb sequence) cues across developmental time. Our findings support the proposal that children recover from making verb-marking errors by becoming progressively more sensitive to preceding context.

The Variations in the Use of Sentence Connectors in Timed and Untimed Student Writing: A Comparative Corpus Study of British Students

This study investigates the use of sentence connectors in British students' timed and untimed writings, utilizing data from the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB). By comparing the frequency and patterns of 54 selected connectors between these two writing conditions, the research reveals that students tend to overuse certain basic connectors like and and or, particularly in timed examinations. The analysis also highlights the impact of time pressure on linguistic choices, showing a preference for simpler connectors in timed settings. The findings contribute to understanding native English speakers' connector usage and suggest implications for academic writing and teaching strategies.

Korean vowel harmony has weak phonotactic support and has limited productivity

Abstract Chong (2017) claims that a derived environment process is productive to the extent that it is supported by phonotactics. The present study tests this claim by comparing variable patterns observed in Korean vowel harmony of suffix alternation with vowel co-occurrence restrictions in the lexicon. A corpus study replicated findings of previous studies that the harmony in suffix alternation is losing productivity, conditioned by the quality of the stem vowel, the number of intervening consonants between the vowels and the stem class. Phonotactic generalisations in vowel sequences matched such tendencies in the alternation in that harmony was feeble in phonotactics and that some of the factors that modulate the harmony in alternation were found to affect the harmony in phonotactics as well. The findings generally support Chong’s claim that lack of phonotactic support for an alternation makes it harder to learn.

The status of verbal theme vowels in contemporary linguistic theorizing: some recent developments. An introduction.

Contemporary theoretical approaches to morphology have devoted considerable attention to verbal theme vowels, i.e., the issue of whether they can be shown to possess identifiable syntactic or semantic properties. The position that theme vowels are items without syntactic or semantic import has profound theoretical consequences, entailing the existence of an autonomous component of Grammar dedicated to Morphology (Aronoff 1994, Anderson 1992, Embick and Halle 2003). Approaches that dispense with a separate morphological module must assume that theme vowels do, in fact, have discernible semantic contributions (Jabłońska 2004, 2007). In this paper, we review the arguments from both sides in order to set the stage for and critically examine a series of new contributions published in this Special Collection. On balance, evidence of a link between theme vowels and particular meaning components (either aspect or argument structure) can be observed, though only in the form of (often very strong) tendencies, which figure most prominently in ‘minimal pairs’ of verbs differing only in their theme vowel. We highlight this observation and the methodological approaches that were employed to extract it (quantitative corpus or experimental studies) as the main contribution of this Special Collection and discuss the theoretical significance of this finding. Our position is that it cannot be taken as a falsification of the view that theme vowels are ‘pure morphology’, to the extent that it would require proof of a perfect correlation between theme vowels and a particular semantic property. At the same time, following Marantz (1997) we consider the possibility that categorial rules are not necessarily to be expected in structures involving only a root and a little v, highlighting an innovative approach in terms of markedness hierarchies where aspect/argument structure is only one factor determining theme vowel selection (Milosavljević and Arsenijević 2022) as a possible way of deriving non-categorial rules observed in other papers from a mix of morphosyntactic and phonological factors.

Verb influence on French wh-placement: a parallel corpus study

Abstract Our study investigates the effect of French verb lemmata on the preverbal (QV) or postverbal (VQ) positioning of interrogative forms equivalent to English ‘what’ (que, quoi, and related forms) within a French–Spanish parallel corpus of subtitles. We highlight and illustrate the corpus’s utility for studying less frequent verbs in combination with specific wh-forms. Our findings suggest that less frequent French verbs exhibit weaker associations with QV compared to their more frequent counterparts. A post-hoc study using Spanish translations reveals that French verbs correlated with QV often denote observable actions involving directly accessible Q-referents. We hypothesise that queries concerning ‘situationally accessible’ referents are predominantly utilised for non-standard, evaluative, or challenging questions, which are typically QV in French.

Clausal Postpositioning in German Regional Language

This article presents the results of a corpus study of clausal postpositioning, that is, the occurrence of a sentential constituent in the postfield of the matrix clause to which it is syntactically linked, in German regional language. Analysis of 11,027 clauses from 60 spoken regiolect and dialect texts reveals that clausal postpositionings occur most frequently as non-relative finite clauses, followed by relative clauses, and lastly, infinitival constructions. Notably, while non-relative finite clauses comprise a smaller proportion of postpositionings in regiolect compared to dialect, relative clauses and infinitival constructions show the opposite trend. Adjunct clauses occur most frequently, followed by complement clauses, in both regiolect and dialect. Furthermore, in both varieties, postpositioning is more prevalent in verb-first and verb-second clauses than in verb-final clauses. This finding is attributed to restrictions on syntactic subordination. Finally, non-relative finite clause and relative clause types that may be embedded in both the postfield and inner field are center-embedded at mean relative frequencies of 13.42% and 28.17%, respectively. These findings shed light on contradictory claims in the literature regarding the possibility and frequency of clausal embedding in the inner field.

Exploring the Grammatical Complexity of International Teaching Assistants: A Comparative Corpus Study

AbstractThe purpose of this study is to analyze the grammatical complexity features of international teaching assistants' (ITAs) mock‐teaching presentations and to compare the distributions of these features to those found in the Oral English Proficiency Test (a local ITA assessment), university classroom teaching, conversation, and academic writing. The data consisted of 186 prospective ITAs' mock‐teaching presentations collected from two ITA training courses at a large U.S. university: one higher‐level course and one lower‐level course. All presentations were transcribed, proofread, and built into a corpus consisting of 247,043 words. Based on the previous corpus studies, a total of 22 grammatical complexity features were selected for the analysis. Overall, the discourse of ITA mock‐teaching involved a substantial number of both the grammatical complexity features commonly found in spoken conversation (e.g., finite adverbial clauses and modals) and those commonly used in academic writing (e.g., noun premodifiers and prepositional phrases). The frequency distributions of the features differed in complex ways between ITA mock‐teaching and the other registers, as well as between the higher‐level and lower‐level ITAs. Pedagogical implications for ITA training and assessment, and future research directions are discussed at the end.

China’s digital and green (twin) transition: insights from national and regional innovation policies

ABSTRACT This paper examines the role of policy in China’s digital and green (twin) transition, building on a qualitative study of a large corpus of policy documents in green and digital domains. We analyse the multi-level governance of these transitions for three regional case studies: Shanghai, Wuhan and Hangzhou. We find that regions both adopt and adjust green and digital aims and means differently from national policy. A twin transition is not comprehensively addressed at the national level, but is partially implemented in the three regions. Based on our findings, we develop a regional typology sketching top-down policy implementation strategies.

Charting the Universe of Metal Music Lyrics and Analyzing Their Relation to Perceived Audio Hardness

We analyze the relationship between the musical and the lyrical content of metal music by combining automated audio feature extraction and quantitative text analysis on a corpus of 124,288 song lyrics from this genre. Based on this text corpus, a topic model is first constructed using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). For a subsample of 503 songs, scores for predicting perceived musical hardness (heaviness) are extracted using an audio feature model and corroborated via listening tests. By combining both audio feature and text analysis, we (1) offer a comprehensive overview of the lyrical topics present within the metal genre and (2) are able to establish whether levels of hardness are associated with the occurrence of particularly harsh (and other) textual topics. Twenty typical topics are identified and projected into a topic space using multidimensional scaling (MDS). Positive correlations are found between musical hardness and textual topics dealing with “brutal death,” “dystopia,” “archaisms and occultism,” “religion and satanism,” “battle,” and “(psychological) madness,” while there is a negative association with topics like “personal life” and “love and romance.” Further, we show different prevalences of the identified topics within different metal subgenres. In summary, this article presents the first comprehensive computational corpus study of musical and lyrical content in metal music.

Demonstratives in heritage Greek, Russian, and Turkish in Germany and the United States

Aims and Objectives: This study investigates the use of definite noun phrases involving demonstratives in adolescent and adult monolingually raised and heritage speakers of Greek, Russian, and Turkish with the following research questions: (1) Do heritage speakers of Greek, Russian, and Turkish align with monolingually raised speakers regarding the production of demonstratives? and (2) Do mode and register affect the use of demonstratives? Methodology: We conducted a corpus study on production data of heritage speakers of Greek, Russian, and Turkish residing in the United States and Germany and the respective monolingually raised speakers in Greece, Russia, and Turkey. The majority languages of the heritage speakers were German or English, respectively. Data were elicited in two distinct registers (formal vs informal) and in two distinct modes (spoken vs written). Participants were asked to narrate what happened in a short video showing a fictional minor car accident. Analysis: Oral and written narrations were annotated and analyzed using generalized linear mixed-effects regression modeling on the use of demonstratives by heritage and monolingually raised speakers accounting for individual variation, country of elicitation, mode, and register. Findings: The results show that heritage and monolingually raised speakers of Greek, Russian, and Turkish converge in their use of demonstratives. Also, mode and/or register significantly affect the production of definite noun phrases with demonstratives across all speaker groups. Originality: This is the first cross-linguistically comparable large-scale corpus study with ecologically valid production data of definite noun phrases with demonstratives in bilinguals. Significance: The study contributes to understanding the use of demonstratives in heritage and monolingual Greek, Russian, and Turkish. It provides insights into the use of demonstratives in languages with different determiner systems and the impact of mode and/or register, which seems to be pronounced roughly similarly across these languages.

Neg-raising in Russian Sing Language

The article is devoted to the primary search for neg-raising in Russian Sign Language. Neg-raising is a phenomenon of syntactic or pragma-semantic nature that occurs when a matrix verb takes over the negation from a dependent clause, while semantically negation pertains to a dependent verb. Neg-raising has been thoroughly studied in sound languages, but sign languages were not previously included in a typological review: there are only four studies that consider the neg-raising phenomenon. A corpus analysis revealed the neg-raising verbs of the propositional attitude want, love, need. During the experiment, consisting of two diagnostic tests and a questionnaire, the results of the corpus study were confirmed, and think was also identified as a verb that can take over the negation from a dependent clause.

Building ESP Corpus-driven Specialized Words in Vocational Education in Saudi Arabia

Both corpus revolution and advances in computer-based technologies have a remarkable impact on teaching and learning English as well as corpus studies. Nevertheless, Jablonkai (2020) observed that professional or occupational programs are less studied or researched compared to academic focus courses. Therefore, this paper is based on a replication study of Coxhead and Demecheleer (2018, cited in Jablonkai and Csomay, 2023) to develop ESP corpus-driven specialized words in vocational education. This process is tackled in three main phases: collection, computerization, and annotation of data. Data collection will be in mixed method from written and spoken ESP corpuses before using qualitative and quantitative analysis to measure frequency, key words and concordance comparing with other ESP corpora. The computerization phase will be based on lexical frame analysis (LFA) framework to convert a text to corpus, and this is quite labor-intensive part of creating the corpus. Finally, the annotation phase includes further lexical information covering semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic details. The first phase, data collection and analysis, will be reflected in Coxhead and Demecheleer's (2018) and the remaining two phases, annotating and computerizing data, will be elaborated through using LFA with two similar Business English corpora, PROLEX and PROCOMPARE, cited in Vincent (2009). The findings and conclusion of using three corpora could be effective in conducting this study as a preparation for creating a comprehensive technical corpus covering specialized words for all oil industry majors in my context. Further research could be conducted in the service of replication studies and expanding areas of ESP and vocabulary research using corpora.

Seni Helah dan Perbahasan Belanjawan 2024: Analisis Pragmatik

The integrity of the administration of any governmentlargely depends on relevant and clear financial policies, for instance, Short-Term Plans or Annual Budgets. Periodically, the Annual Budget, the most important component of Parliamentary discourse, will be tabled for discussion, either to gain support or face criticism in both Houses of Representatives. Certainly, discussions and debates require politicians to master the art of rhetoric, analysis, and inference to navigate the dynamics of political legitimacy. For this purpose, the important document known as the Hansard serves as a substantial source, recording the strategies and art of Evasive Language in challenging-defending policies, addressing-mitigating issues, and strengthening-undermining the image that determines the integrity of the legitimacy of both the Governmentand and Opposition. However, previous corpus studies by Hansard on the topic of Evasive Response have focused only on the structural forms of debate. Therefore, employing three Pragmatic models, namely Harris’s Framework of Respons (1991), Thomas’s Notion of Implicator (1995), and Claymen’s Dimension of Resistance (2012), this qualitative study aims to analyse more complex, intense, and natural debate sessions, specifically the policy debate on the 2024 Budget. The findings reveal that all three types of Responses have some distinctive features, and their selection correlates with the scale of their impact on the image of the Government-Opposition. In addition, adhering to the Gricean Maxims (1975), the configuration of Evasive Language behavior is more easily defined and justified. Lastly, the discourse background at the policy level is more heterogeneous, thereby enriching the performative nature of Evasive Language.

„Et fehlt dä Ruhrpott, verstehste!“. Dialekt als Stance-Ressource in der digitalen Interaktion

Abstract This article sheds light on the functionality of dialect performance in digital writing on Instagram. Within an interactional-sociolinguistic framework, two Instagram posts (by aroundtheword; responsible: ZDF) which deal with the German-speaking dialect area including follow-up communication (1,068 comments) are analysed. The main research questions guiding this article are (1) for what specific purpose dialect is used in the analysed Instagram comments and (2) which functional patterns of dialect use can be identified in this form of digital interaction. The corpus study presented follows a mixed methods approach and thus integrates descriptive quantitative and qualitative analyses. In theoretical and methodological terms, the study is based on widely accepted models of stance research (Du Bois 2007) as well as media and internet linguistic concepts (Beißwenger 2020). From this theoretical perspective, Instagram communication is investigated as a (typical) format of a digital and interaction-orientated stance practice. The present study provides insights into the stance potential of dialect performance: it not only serves as a marker of authenticity and a resource for identity construction (referring to regionality) but is also an essential means of community building (as part of alignment) and epistemic-evidential positioning.

Integration and Autonomy in Japanese Converb Constructions: A Corpus Study

Researchers still have no common opinion on the integration and autonomy of parts of Japanese converb constructions. In this article, morphological and syntactic connectedness in the most common Japanese converb constructions is examined through tests whose results can be verified using corpus data. Results show that parts of all considered converb constructions demonstrate morphological independence (except for contracted colloquial forms). As for the syntax, converb constructions demonstrate both features of autonomy and unity, forming a sort of continuum, which makes it difficult to categorize them and to distinguish syntactic subtypes for each of the constructions. This reminds us that grammaticalization is a constantly ongoing process, and word classes not falling steadily into our classifications require flexible means of description.

Scoping review on primary school teachers’ beliefs on multilingualism in classroom teaching

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to provide an overview on the current state of research on primary school teachers’ beliefs concerning multilingualism; 1,785 articles were detected and 31 of these articles were included in the corpus. We employed a scoping review methodology to explore primary school teachers’ beliefs on multilingualism. Nearly half of the corpus studies were published in the last three years, and more than half of the included studies were carried out using qualitative research methods. The results show that the researchers did not meet on common ground regarding the concept of beliefs and handled the concept of beliefs on multilingualism diversely. The findings from the analyzed studies show that the teachers’ beliefs on multilingualism can be grouped in three different categories as rejecting, moderate, and supporting beliefs. The analysis results highlight the currently prominent role of research on teachers’ beliefs on multilingualism. Also, the high amount of qualitative research conducted on the topic suggests that continuing along the lines of qualitative approaches to encounter the challenge of social desirability in researching teacher beliefs can be beneficial. Based on the results of this review, the authors suggest a characterisation of the term ‘teacher beliefs’.

A Corpus Study of Acupuncture from the Perspective of Mass Media Based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English

Based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), this study examines acupuncture from the perspective of mass media. Acupuncture has been circulating throughout the Chinese Cultural Circle since the Qin and Han Dynasties, and has since spread directly or indirectly to the rest of the world. The United States boasts the world’s second-largest acupuncture market, with its laws, regulations, industry growth, research, and education all positively influencing the development of acupuncture in other nations. This study uses COCA to analyze the form and content of acupuncture’s dissemination in eight different types of media. The findings show that acupuncture appears in COCA a total of 1,788 times, with the highest frequency in magazines, followed by blogs, and the lowest frequency in fiction. These findings reveal the popularity of acupuncture in mass media in the United States and provide empirical data and insights for the future dissemination and development of acupuncture in the United States.

Muslims and social media: A scoping review

ABSTRACT As Muslim individuals, communities, and institutions have been transformed by the digital revolution, a literature has developed that seeks to contribute knowledge about these changes. Pioneering studies in this field suggest that this literature has a focus on digital documents. This scoping literature review aims to find out whether this focus is still valid. Therefore, we examine all studies on Muslims and social media that can be retrieved from the databases Scopus, Web of Science, Index Islamicus and Atla Religion Database between 2010 and 2022, using the following keywords: Facebook; Twitter (tweets); YouTube; Instagram; TikTok; Snapchat; and Telegram (n = 359). Our findings show that interest in studying Muslims on social media has grown significantly in recent decades and that most studies have focused on non-conflictual use of social media. Most of the studies are corpus studies, i.e. big data, data scraping, or descriptive analysis of websites, Twitter accounts, or Facebook pages (82 percent). Thus, this literature review shows that the study of Islam, Muslims, and Islamic online environments is flourishing in various fields of scholarship. However, the strong focus on descriptive documentary studies should be complemented by more studies that collect new empirical data through interviews, surveys, and mixed methods. It is only by engaging with the users of these services that we can answer when, what, and why individuals do or do not do something on social media.