Electronic Corpora Research Articles

Epistemic modality markers in research articles: a cross‐linguistic and cross‐disciplinary study

Research on the use of hedging strategies in research articles has received increasing attention during the last few decades, but few have compared the use of hedges across languages and disciplines. This article explores the use of epistemic modality markers – an important and frequently used type of hedges – in research articles written in three different languages (English, French and Norwegian) and belonging to two different disciplines (linguistics and medicine). Gender differences are also examined. The material is compiled within the electronic corpus of the KIAP project (Cultural Identity in Academic Prose). Statistical analyses of the data (Kruskar‐Wallis and Mann‐Whitney tests) show that Norwegian‐ and English‐speaking researchers use significantly more of these hedges than their French‐speaking colleagues. Disciplinary affiliation and gender seem to have little influence on the proportion of epistemic modality markers in a text, but there are interesting differences between disciplines as regards the type of markers used. These findings may have implications for the teaching of academic writing as well as for cross‐cultural understanding between academics.

Der zeitgenössische tschechische private Briefverkehr in einem elektronischen Korpus

Towards the end of 2005, the School of Humanities and the School of Informatics of the Masaryk University in Bmo completed an electronic corpus assembling the texts of Czech private correspondence. In a limited extent, the assembled material was made accessible in the framework of the Czech National Corpus, under the filename Korpus soukrome koresponcence - dopisy. In full, the material has been presented in a set of two CDs and a printed publication Czech Language in the Contemporary Private Correspondence. Letters, e-mails, SMS authored by Z. Hiadka et al. In the mentioned set, the CDs present 2000 letters, 1000 e-mails and 2000 SMS (tagged, in a full text version and in photocopies), the publication shows the possibilities of the linguistic interpretation of the assembled texts. The present article shows the methods of creating a corpus of the correspondence texts. Specifically it targets the issues of tagging the language of the private correspondence from the viewpoint of sociology, dialectology and morphology.

Corpus-based linguistic investigation for the South African Bantu languages: a Northern Sotho case study

The advent of electronic corpora has revolutionized linguistic investigation internationally and is starting to make inroads into the study of the South African Bantu languages. In this article, it is argued that the move from traditional language studies to corpus-based investigation would be a natural one for South African Bantuists, since it proffers a familiar methodology in a new guise. To illustrate the value and potential of corpus-based investigation, a case study was done on Northern Sotho adjectives, highlighting certain semantic aspects which have hitherto not been noted by grammarians, and illustrating the historical relationship between adjectives and enumeratives.

Vocabulary profiling with electronic corpora: A case study in computer assisted needs analysis

Since the inception of computer assisted language learning (CALL), computers have been successfully used to provide leaning and assessment opportunities for groups or individual learners. This article describes a use of computer that is fundamentally different to most CALL approaches, and yet contributes to language learning. While presenting a case study conducted in higher education in the Gulf of Arabia, the paper builds a strong case for computer assisted vocabulary profiling as a means of objective needs analysis and language program evaluation. This approach is based on a lexical comparison of learner corpora with the corpora of teaching resources. The software used for this purpose is The Compleat Lexical Tutor.

Some properties of texts in terms of ‘information distribution’ across languages

On a global level, an attempt will be made to relate relatively macro-level intuitions about properties of texts to more micro-level notions and to empirically testable lexicogrammatical properties. The strategy will be to (a) partly reduce an intuitive notion of ‘information distribution’ in texts and sentences to more technical and better understood notions of ‘information structure’, ‘informational density’ and ‘grammatical metaphoricity’, and (b) operationalize these latter notions in such a way as to make them empirically testable on electronic corpora, using the ‘shallow’ concepts of ‘explicitness, density, and directness’ as properties of semantics-to-grammar mapping in sentences. It will furthermore be suggested that aspects of intuitive qualities of texts, such as ‘content orientation’ vs. ‘interactant orientation’ and others can be partly modelled in terms of (a) and (b). The argumentation in this paper thus proceeds from intuitive text-level notions to more technical and clause-based concepts, and from these concepts to operationalizations. It then moves ‘upwards’ again to text-level properties, exploring the relationships between the two levels. Finally, an outline is attempted of some implications for studies of language contact and language change.

Language change in adulthood

This article, based on the electronic Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC), argues that adults change their language, at least in quantitative terms. By studying the shift from -th to -s of the third person singular suffix in Early Modern English, the author shows that the relative frequencies of the two variants underwent changes within individual lifespans. The article also claims that the shift followed both the communal and generational patterns of change. Historical letters are shown to be excellent material for the study of language change from a longitudinal perspective, because many such letters have survived for long periods of time. On the whole, letters form good data for research in historical sociolinguistics, since the backgrounds of the people involved (both as writers and as recipients) can be traced and used for analysis.

Speech acts as intercultural danger zones: A cross-cultural comparison of the speech act of apologising in Irish and Chilean soap operas

Intercultural communication presents many challenges and one of them refers to the need to create awareness about the importance of understanding speech acts cross-culturally. Speech acts are what the writer or speaker is doing in uttering a particular form of words, and their focus is on meaning (speaker's intention). The recognition of the meaning of a particular speech act in a given cultural setting is at the heart of successful intercultural communication. Speech acts are considered universal, nevertheless research shows that they can manifest differently across languages and cultures. This cross-cultural difference in language use is indicative of broader socio-cultural differences that underline language in use internationally and certainly it is at this level that much inter-cultural misunderstanding has its origin. This paper focuses on the speech act of apologising, and it draws on two linguistic datasets or corpora for its analysis: one comprising two hours from an Irish soap opera Fair City and the other comprising two hours of comparable data from Amores de Mercado, a Chilean soap opera. These data are transcribed to form an electronic corpus for qualitative and quantitative analysis. Extracts of data containing the speech act of apologising in both sets of data are compared and the socio-pragmatic implications for meaning and intercultural communication are discussed.

Recognizing article errors in the writing of Japanese learners of English

In this paper, the authors propose a method to recognize article errors often seen in English text written by Japanese learners of English. In this method, article errors are recognized based on the statistic extracted from an electronic corpus such as English-language newspapers. The authors' method is different from earlier methods in that there is no need to create a dictionary or rules for article error recognition. The results of experiments confirm that the performance of the authors' method is equivalent or superior to earlier methods (F − measure = 0.76). In addition, the authors' method is shown to be superior to earlier methods insofar as (1) the effort to create a dictionary or rules is not needed; (2) there are no limits on the input text; and (3) the ratio of Recall to Precision can be adjusted. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 36(7): 54–63, 2005; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.20153

Freqüência e uso de estrangeirismos ingleses no português brasileiro: Um estudo baseado em corpus

Neste trabalho, apresentamos uma investigação baseada em corpora acerca da extensão do uso de estrangeirismos de origem inglesa no português do Brasil. Para tanto, utilizamos o corpus Banco de Português, do projeto DIRECT (LAEL, PUCSP), com mais de 230 milhões de palavras, de fontes orais e escritas, e o British National Corpus, com cerca de 100 milhões de palavras, também provenientes da escrita e fala. A investigação motiva-se (1) pela necessidade do envolvimento dos lingüistas e lingüistas aplicados em debates acerca de políticas públicas, (2) por ser esse um tema caro ao prof. John Robert Schmitz, e (3) pela escassez de trabalhos sobre estrangeirismos que utilizem corpora eletrônicos. Os resultados indicam que (1) há muitos anglicismos em vigor no português brasileiro, (2) a freqüência deles é baixa e (3) eles parecem adquirir sentidos e usos diferentes da língua de origem.

Cluster Analysis of the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English: A Comparison of Methods

This article examines the feasibility of an empirical approach to sociolinguistic analysis of the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English using exploratory multivariate methods. It addresses a known problem with one class of such methods, hierarchical cluster analysis?that different clustering algorithms can yield different analyses of the same data set, and that there is no obvious way of selecting the best one. The proposed solution is to analyze the data using hierarchical methods in conjunction with one or more fundamentally different types of clustering method, and then to select the analysis on which the hierarchical and the other method(s) agree most closely. A dimensionality reduction method, the self-organizing map (SOM), is used to exemplify this approach. The result is a close though not perfect match between the SOM and complete-link hierarchical analyses, but there is an important reservation?the SOM results vary with changes in user-defined training parameters, and are consequently also open to the criticism of inconsistency. The SOM cannot therefore be an objective arbiter for hierarchical clustering, but the analysis on which they agree gives a better basis for understanding the structure of the data than either method can provide on its own.

An 'important contribution' or 'tiresome reading'? A study of evaluation in peer reviews of journal article submissions

While the process of peer reviewing journal articles submitted for publication has been extensively investigated, particularly in the biomedical field, the language of peer reviews is relatively unexplored. This paper studies evaluation in an electronic corpus of 228 reviews submitted to the journal English for Specific Purposes (ESP). The research focuses on the things (or entities) evaluated and the adjectives associated with these. Entities and adjectives are categorised and quantified in order to ascertain what things are valued by reviewers and the qualities by which they are judged. The findings suggest that reviewers take on multiple roles, at the same time discouraging the publication of work that fails to meet the required standards and offering encouragement to authors and guiding them towards publication. These findings have implications for authors submitting research papers, those who support authors in this process, and journal editors.

Korpora als Korrektiv für einsprachige Wörterbücher

Electronic corpora are well-established as a basic resource for dictionary updates. Due to the absence of balanced corpora, updates of German dictionaries depend up to now on opportunistic corpora. This work addresses the question to what extent the newly created balanced DWDS-corpus as well as the very large DWDS-Erganzungskorpus with a size of 1 billion running words change the picture. We provide evidence for the fact that corpus extraction results vary with the difference in quality and quantity of corpora, and we give several examples for the impact that these corpora potentially have on dictionary updates.

Crime Films and Lexical Change: Can an Analysis of an Electronic Corpus of Fifteen Crime Films Help Students Understand Semantic Mutations1?

Lexical change proves one of the most puzzling aspects of the evolution of English for non native speakers. While some mechanisms which explain shifts in the semantic programs of known lexical items are well documented others like a puritan background have been rarely discussed. In this paper, we will suggest that Noir films provide evidence of the lexical creativity caused by this puritan strain and may explain why so many English words have to be translated by French words they are not associated with in most dictionaries. We suggest that a better understanding of the forces at work in language evolution will not only help students of English as a second language but may provide some insight into more theoretical approaches.

The Zulu locative prefix ku- revisited: a corpus-based approach

This article re-examines the distribution of the class 17 locative prefix ku- and its variants kwi- and ko- in the locativisation of nouns in Zulu. To this end an electronic corpus of 5 million running Zulu words—the University of Pretoria Zulu Corpus (PZC)—is queried. We indicate how PZC can be used to highlight previously under-emphasised and overlooked aspects of a seemingly well-documented language feature such as the class 17 locative prefix ku-. Analysing the output proffered by PZC—an organic corpus that has been organised chronologically, and that consists of a number of sub-corpora stratified according to genre—enables us to reach conclusions regarding not only the frequencies with which the variants ku-, kwi- and ko- of the class 17 locative prefix are used, but also regarding the possible changes in use that these prefixes have undergone with time. We also show how these prefixes relate to each other in the different sub-corpora.

Fairly pretty or pretty fair? On the development and grammaticalization of English downtoners

The paper discusses the adverbialization of two roughly synonymous present-day English intensifiers, pretty and fairly. Based on electronic corpora, a quantitative analysis of their long-term history is provided using the framework of adverb functions proposed by Quirk et al. [Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., Svartvik, J., 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Longman, London]. The results indicate that, despite some of their shared meanings, the two items underwent non-identical processes of adverbialization. These findings are set against a wider framework of grammaticalization. The question is asked whether adverb formation is regular enough to constitute an inflectional process in Modern English. The productivity of - ly suffixation is discussed as the chief argument for adverbialization being inflectional rather than derivational. The conclusion is reached, however, that too many exceptions can be found to lend credence to this generalization.

English for the Computer: The SUSANNE Corpus and Analytic Scheme

Computer processing of natural language is a burgeoning field, but until now there has been no agreement on a standardized classification of the diverse structural elements that occur in real-life language material. This book attempts to define a Linnaean taxonomy for the English language: an annotation scheme, the SUSANNE scheme, which yields a labelled constituency structure for any string of English, comprehensively identifying all of its surface and logical structural properties. The structure is specified with sufficient rigour that analysts working independently must produce identical annotations for a given example. The scheme is based on large sample of real-life use of British and American written and spoken English. The book also describes the SUSANNE electronic corpus of English which is annotated in accordance with the scheme. It is freely available as a research resource to anyone working at a computer conected to Internet, and since 1992 has come into widespread use in academic and commerical research environments on four continents.

The significance of computational morphological for Zulu lexicography

With regard to the significance of computational morphological analysis for Zulu, and more specifically for Zulu lexicography, the aims of this article are the following: Firstly, we discuss computational morphological analysis as an enabling technology in the field of natural language processing (NLP) with specific reference to lexicography. Secondly, we explain how a computational morphological analyser for Zulu is built by using the Xerox finite-state tools. Thirdly, we demonstrate the application of such an analyser by means of examples from Zulu. Finally, we argue that in Zulu lexicography, a computational morphological analyser is an indispensable tool for facilitating some of the basic outputs of electronic corpora.

Some remarks on the application of a lexicon-grammar

Summary The French lexicon-grammar today is the most complete, in particular for the description of verbs. As we have undertaken to convert all these tables into computable data in order to apply them to electronic corpora, we have encountered many problems due to their size. In this paper, we describe some of these problems and present some ideas for solving them.

Metaphorical radiodiagnostic terms

The purpose of this article is to identify and classify metaphorical sign terms in the field of abdominal radiodiagnostic imaging. A 1,000,000 word electronic corpus of English and Spanish medical texts was used to compile an extensive list of metaphorical designations for signs detected on radiological images. These terms were classified thematically and structurally and analyzed from the terminological perspective of logical motivation. The fundamental premise behind this research is the belief that a better knowledge of this type of terminology (both English and Spanish) can lead to a better understanding of the specialist’s perception of the prototypical image conjured by the metaphor.

Structured text corpora in the study of language variation and change

From the perspective of a compiler of electronic corpora, one of the major challenges in the attempt to improve their quality is the need to carefully reconsider how language-external variables used to structure them could be defined and conceptualized more precisely to justify references to them as factors conditioning language variation and change. How these variables relate to one another should also be specified. In examining criteria for assessing representativeness of corpora, the concept of range is discussed to stress the evident differences between texts categorized as representatives of a specific genre. Good practices of philological computing are highlighted by illustrating what kind of information can be lost if scholarly rigour is not applied in the process of editing and/or digitizing texts.