Quantitative Linguistic Analysis Research Articles

A Discourse Analysis Study of the Chairman of the CCP’s Cultural Thought from a Corpus Perspective

The paper employs corpus technology and discourse analysis techniques to do a quantitative linguistic analysis of the keywords, semantic domains, and high-frequency collocations in the discourse of the chairman of the CCP’s cultural thoughts. According to the research, the chairman of the CCP’s cultural thought discourse is primarily focused on the domains of “people”, “China”, “culture”, and “socialism”, which together represent four key semantic features. These include a positive and resolute attitude towards cultural construction, a focus on upholding socialist political principles and stance, fostering socialist cultural self-confidence, and emphasizing the people-centered core idea. This paper offers reliable data support and a fresh research viewpoint to enhance further the comprehensive understanding and depth of comprehension of the chairman of the CCP’s cultural thought.

A quantitative linguistic analysis of a cancer online health community with a smooth latent space model

A quantitative linguistic analysis of a cancer online health community with a smooth latent space model

Word Length in Political Public Speaking: Distribution and Time Evolution.

In this paper, word length in the texts of public speeches by USA and UK politicians is analyzed. More than 300 speeches delivered over the past two hundred years were studied. It is found that the lognormal distribution better describes the distribution of word length than do the Weibull and Poisson distributions, for example. It is shown that the length of words does not change significantly over time (the average value either does not change or slightly decreases, and the mode slightly increases). These results are fundamentally different from those obtained previously for sentence lengths and indicate that, in terms of quantitative linguistic analysis, the word length in politicians' speech has not evolved over the last 200 years and does not obey the principle of least effort proposed by G. Zipf.

COLLOQUIALISMS AS MANIPULATION TOOLS IN ENGLISH BUSINESS MEDIA DISCOURSE

This research undertakes an explorative study into the manipulative potential of colloquialisms within the discourse of English-language business media. The premise of the research is grounded in the increasing infiltration of informal language into formal business media, postulating that such usage can be attributed to the manipulative capacity of colloquialisms. The study aims to answer critical questions such as the role of manipulative rhetoric in business media discourse, how colloquialisms can act as potent tools for manipulation, and the specific functions of these colloquialisms in their manipulative capacity. A quantitative linguistic analysis was performed on a corpus of 100 tokens of colloquialisms, sourced from leading business publications. The results revealed four main functions of colloquialisms: creating vivid imagery (45%), eliciting emotional responses (25%), creating a sense of familiarity (20%), and building rapport (10%). The implications of this research are substantial, as it unravels the strategic use of language in media discourse, thereby contributing to a deeper understanding of linguistic manipulation. The findings also offer avenues for further research in the evolving field of media discourse manipulation, particularly in the context of business communication.

Individuals with developmental disabilities make their own stylistic contributions to text written with physical facilitation.

For individuals with developmental disabilities (DD) such as autism, Down syndrome, or cerebral palsy, learning to express with language is a two-fold challenge because atypical cognitive capacity is compounded by sensorimotor coordination deficits. One approach to assisting linguistic expression in these individuals is to physically support them, for example, by touching their torso or arm as they type. The neurophysiological mechanism of such motor assistance for linguistic expression is not known, but recently it has been proposed that light touch may reduce the cognitive load associated with the sensorimotor coordination of typing, thereby releasing shared cognitive resources to the task of generating content. Historically, there has been significant controversy over the extent to which the facilitator and not the user authors texts written with touch assistance. User groups and a few researchers have argued that the user can express their thoughts through such techniques, but the prevailing view among researchers is that these texts are entirely the by-products of the facilitators' ideomotor cueing of users' movements. If the user is not a source of the produced text, the only linguistic style detectable in the text should be the facilitator's. Here, we use quantitative linguistic analysis to investigate whether DD users typing text with touch assistance exhibit their own stylistic signatures alongside those of their facilitators. In Study 1, we investigate whether the stylometric fingerprints of a set of users are detectable when they are all assisted by the same facilitator. In Study 2, we examine whether the users' stylometric characteristics are retained even when they are assisted by multiple facilitators. Across both studies, the results show that the users' stylistic signature is detectable alongside that of facilitators. This suggests that the texts generated by DD users withphysical assistance should be viewed as coauthored rather than wholly authored by facilitators via ideomotor processes. The users' stylometric presence in these texts suggests that touch-assistance may serve as a developmental scaffold and should be re-appraised as a teaching aid even where unassisted linguistic expression is an unlikely end goal.

Valeska Bopp-Filimonov and Martin Jung, eds. Kaleidoskop Rumänien. Einblicke in die aktuelle Vielfalt des interdisziplinären Faches Rumänistik

Valeska Bopp-Filimonov and Martin Jung, eds. <i>Kaleidoskop Rumänien. Einblicke in die aktuelle Vielfalt des interdisziplinären Faches Rumänistik</i>

Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Rhetorical Strategies of Persuasion: A Longitudinal Study of Transitivity and Ergativity in the Rhetoric of Saras’ Sustainability Reports

This study explores the correlation between Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as tools for analysing the evolution of rhetoric in the communicative strategies adopted in a company&amp;rsquo;s Reports on social and environmental responsibility. In more specific terms, Transitivity and Ergativity&amp;mdash;concepts from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) &amp;mdash;through the lenses of CDA, are employed as a theoretical means for the analysis of a longitudinal study in the communicative strategies employed by Saras SpA pre- and during the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. Saras is an Italian joint-stock company operating in oil refining and power generation. &#x0D; &#x0D; The qualitative and quantitative linguistic analysis carried out using Sketch Engine software, aims to identify and explain how rhetoric is built and presented through language use in Saras SpA Sustainability Reports. Specific focus is given to communication strategies towards local and global communities and stakeholders in the years immediately before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. The rationale behind the study lies in the fact that 2020 and 2021 have been among the most difficult years since the end of World War II. Lives were abruptly turned upside down by the pandemic, which had grave negative effects on people&amp;rsquo;s health and on the economy. The result has been a threefold crisis involving health, the economy and social tension, with the refining sector being one of the hardest hit, since the oil refining industry was one of the most affected industries due to the general reduction in mobility and oil consumption brought about by the virus-fighting measures.&#x0D; &#x0D; Emphasis is placed on the construction of rhetorical strategies pre- and during the pandemic crisis using the representational process of Transitivity and Ergativity, thus revealing the close relationship between the use language in terms of grammatical configuration encoded and semantic roles of syntactic transformation on the one hand, and rhetorical assumptions on the other. The results show that linguistic decisions regarding Transitivity and Ergativity choices play a crucial role in how effective writing achieves its rhetorical aims in terms of extending and maintaining dominant and implicit ideologies and underlying persuasive actions, and that some rhetorical motivation is perpetuated&amp;mdash;if not actually overtly or subtly strengthened&amp;mdash;in social-environmental Reports issued in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis.

Nikolai Cherginets’ prose: A quantitative stylistic analysis and the problem of authorship

Nikolai Cherginets, a Belarusian author of prose fiction, was recently honored as People’s Writer of Belarus (2022), thus becoming the first holder of this title whose books are written in Russian. The quantitative linguistic analysis reveals that Cherginets’ novels “Riskovannaya igra” (A risky game), “Russkaya krasavitsa” (A Russian beauty), “Poslednii geroi” (The last hero) significantly differ from his other oeuvres and from each other. Linguistic and narrative similarities, improbable to arise by chance, are found between these novels and the creative output of Andrei Voronin, a collective pen name. We argue that the three books, released under the name of Cherginets, were in fact authored chiefly by the creators of Andrei Voronin.

Language Use in Mother-Adolescent Dyadic Interaction: Preliminary Results.

This preliminary study applied a computer-assisted quantitative linguistic analysis to examine the effectiveness of language-based classification models to discriminate between mothers (n = 140) with and without history of treatment for depression (51% and 49%, respectively). Mothers were recorded during a problem-solving interaction with their adolescent child. Transcripts were manually annotated and analyzed using a dictionary-based, natural-language program approach (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count). To assess the importance of linguistic features to correctly classify history of depression, we used Support Vector Machines (SVM) with interpretable features. Using linguistic features identified in the empirical literature, an initial SVM achieved nearly 63% accuracy. A second SVM using only the top 5 highest ranked SHAP features improved accuracy to 67.15%. The findings extend the existing literature base on understanding language behavior of depressed mood states, with a focus on the linguistic style of mothers with and without a history of treatment for depression and its potential impact on child development and trans-generational transmission of depression.

Anti-pluralist arguments in the Tea Party online discourse: A mixed method analysis of populist rhetoric

Populism can be treated as an ideological attribute of political parties, but in this study, it is operationalized as a feature of argumentation that allows populists to claim to be the only ones to represent the interests of the nation. Such anti-pluralist arguments could be observed during US midterm elections in 2018 in online discourses of the right-wing political movement Tea Party. This article reports on a mixed-method study of the Tea Party’s official website obtained through scraping the All News feed. The quantitative linguistic analysis of keywords, concordances and couplings in the newsfeed sample is complemented with a qualitative rhetorical analysis of some topoi and argumentative fallacies. The analyses reveal such strategies as: (1) homogenizing the representation of true patriots, (2) polarizing between “good us” and “evil them,” (3) discrediting opponents through analogies, “worst” examples and ad hominem attacks (4) conspiracy theorizing, and (5) mobilizing modes of pathos and ethos in relation to mediatized and historicized cultural imaginaries. The study showcases the advantages of a mixed-method approach to the so-called populist rhetoric.

Analysis of recreational psychedelic substance use experiences classified by substance

Rationale and objectivesDifferences among psychedelic substances regarding their subjective experiences are clinically and scientifically interesting. Quantitative linguistic analysis is a powerful tool to examine such differences. This study compared five psychedelic substance report groups and a non-psychedelic report group on quantitative linguistic markers of psychological states and processes derived from recreational use-based online experience reports.MethodsUsing 2947 publicly available online reports, we compared Ayahuasca and N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT, analyzed together), ketamine, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), psilocybin (mushroom), and antidepressant drug use experiences. We examined word frequencies related to various psychological states and processes and semantic proximity to psychedelic and mystical experience scales.ResultsLinguistic markers of psychological function indicated distinct effect profiles. For example, MDMA experience reports featured an emotionally intensifying profile accompanied by many cognitive process words and dynamic-personal language. In contrast, Ayahuasca and DMT experience reports involved relatively little emotional language, few cognitive process words, increased analytical thinking-associated language, and the most semantic similarity with psychedelic and mystical experience descriptions. LSD, psilocybin mushroom, and ketamine reports showed only small differences on the emotion-, analytical thinking-, psychedelic, and mystical experience-related language outcomes. Antidepressant reports featured more negative emotional and cognitive process-related words, fewer positive emotional and analytical thinking-related words, and were generally not similar to mystical and psychedelic language.ConclusionThis article addresses an existing research gap regarding the comparison of different psychedelic drugs on linguistic profiles of psychological states, processes, and experiences. The large sample of experience reports involving multiple psychedelic drugs provides valuable information that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. The results could inform experimental research into psychedelic drug effects in healthy populations and clinical trials for psychedelic treatments of psychiatric problems.

National prisms of a global phenomenon: A comparative study of press coverage of climate change in the US, UK and China

This study compares press coverage of climate change in the US, the UK and China from a longitudinal perspective, through a combination of computer-assisted quantitative linguistic analysis and critical discourse analysis. Specifically, we examine the extent to which these three countries portray climate change similarly or differently, and further explore how moral reasoning – a growing area of research in climate change communication – may shape media portrayal of the issue across different cultures. There have been few scholarly inquiries examining how moral reasoning is deployed in media discourse around climate change. This study aims to address this gap with a comparative analysis of moral reasoning in news about climate change in leading national newspapers from three countries over a 6-year period. The findings suggest that while US and UK newspapers tended to frame climate change coverage as a domestic issue, Chinese media tended to frame it as a global issue that the world community needs to tackle. Moreover, US and UK newspapers often adopted the balanced reporting norm in communicating uncertainty and controversy, in contrast to the climate consensus that was firmly embedded in Chinese media discourse. Overall, the findings show mixed support for East and West differences in the moral rhetoric underpinning their climate change press coverage.

The verbal component of the modern time diplomatic wars (linguostatistical analysis)

A new interpretation of a “diplomatic war” is considered in the context of changed diplomatic communication – a complex organized system consisting of various components: diplomatic, political, economic, historical, legal, linguistic, and other. The article analyzes the examples of the verbal component of diplomatic communication on the basis of the communicative tactics in the process of information and diplomatic war, currently developing in international relations. The research material includes texts of speeches made by the Permanent Representative of Russia to the UN Security Council V.A. Nebenzya and the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine P. Klimkin (2014-2019) in a situation of diplomatic confrontation. The strategies of verbal confrontation, and the characteristics of emotivity and clichéd character of a diplomatic text are considered; the concept of implicitly evaluative diplomatic cliché is introduced. UN Security Council speeches are singled out into a separate subgenre of public speeches and verbal and structural characteristics of speeches obtained by quantitative computer tools are analyzed. Based on the results of quantitative linguistic analysis and the analysis of the extralinguistic situation, a linguopragmatic model of the speech situation of a diplomatic confrontation is suggested.

#PuertoRicoSeLevanta: a Closer Look at the Language Used on the First-Year Anniversary of Hurricane Maria

In September of 2017, Puerto Rico was hit by Hurricane María. Reactions to the hurricane were widely discussed on the social media site Twitter. The principal aim of the study was to examine the psychological processes of tweets one-year after Hurricane Maria and compare patterns of psychological processes within tweets originating from Puerto Rico relative to tweets originating from the continental United States and other countries. Also, researchers aim to geo-map the origin of tweets, as well as psychological processes exhibit in tweets world-wide. Researchers collected tweets (N = 1191) using #María, #PRSeLevanta, and #PuertoRico between September 20, 2018 to September 25, 2018. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software application was used to conduct a quantitative linguistic analysis of the sample of tweets, which classified the language utilized in the tweets across affective, social, psychological, and cognitive dimensions. A one-way between-groups multivariate analysis of variance investigated whether the affective, social, psychological and cognitive dimensions of the language utilized in the tweet varied as a function of where the tweet originated. Tweets varied in psychosocial dimensions as a function of where they originated, such that tweets originating from Puerto Rico used more language classified as positive emotion, cognitive processes, and referencing money in comparison to tweets originating elsewhere. These findings demonstrate how the particular use of words after a traumatic event can provide rich information about psychological processes and health outcomes experienced by individuals in the aftermath of disaster.

Shouting at each other into the void: A linguistic network analysis of vaccine hesitance and support in online discourse regarding California law SB277.

In 2015, California passed Senate Bill 277 and became the third state in the United States to ban all nonmedical exemptions from school immunization requirements, effectively prohibiting religious and personal belief exemptions. This attracted grassroots opposition and considerable debate among vaccine hesitant factions online. This mixed-methods study used quantitative linguistic analysis, semantic network analysis, and content analysis techniques to examine 2424 online documents drawn from newspapers, blogs, health websites, government information pages, web forums, personal websites, Facebook groups, among others. The study examined which words and phrases were used most frequently by vaccine skeptics, vaccine defenders, and more neutral media accounts to illuminate how groups with different attitudes towards vaccination discuss and disseminate information about vaccines and vaccine policy online. We proposed an innovative methodology for examining online discourse surrounding vaccine hesitance, as well as for studying the online dissemination of misinformation about vaccines. Our findings highlighted discrepancies in the narratives between what vaccine supporters believe causes vaccine skepticism and the issues that vaccine skeptics actually discuss within their own digital spaces. For example, in these exchanges, the importance of parental rights overshadowed that of children's rights; supporters of vaccines brought up autism in more distinct documents than skeptics do; distrust of government regulators and researchers seemed to unite vaccine skeptics and defenders; and politicians, doctors, and even celebrities often served as proxies in heated exchanges about factual evidence, believability, and the importance of expertise in public discourse.

Writing impact case studies: a comparative study of high-scoring and low-scoring case studies from REF2014

This paper reports on two studies that used qualitative thematic and quantitative linguistic analysis, respectively, to assess the content and language of the largest ever sample of graded research impact case studies, from the UK Research Excellence Framework 2014 (REF). The paper provides the first empirical evidence across disciplinary main panels of statistically significant linguistic differences between high- versus low-scoring case studies, suggesting that implicit rules linked to written style may have contributed to scores alongside the published criteria on the significance, reach and attribution of impact. High-scoring case studies were more likely to provide specific and high-magnitude articulations of significance and reach than low-scoring cases. High-scoring case studies contained attributional phrases which were more likely to attribute research and/or pathways to impact, and they were written more coherently (containing more explicit causal connections between ideas and more logical connectives) than low-scoring cases. High-scoring case studies appear to have conformed to a distinctive new genre of writing, which was clear and direct, and often simplified in its representation of causality between research and impact, and less likely to contain expressions of uncertainty than typically associated with academic writing. High-scoring case studies in two Main Panels were significantly easier to read than low-scoring cases on the Flesch Reading Ease measure, although both high-scoring and low-scoring cases tended to be of “graduate” reading difficulty. The findings of our work enable impact case study authors to better understand the genre and make content and language choices that communicate their impact as effectively as possible. While directly relevant to the assessment of impact in the UK’s Research Excellence Framework, the work also provides insights of relevance to institutions internationally who are designing evaluation frameworks for research impact.

Deliberation and Valence as Dissociable Components of Counterarguing among Smokers: Evidence from Neuroimaging and Quantitative Linguistic Analysis

ABSTRACT Counterarguing is a key obstacle to successful persuasion. However, the difficulty of directly measuring counterarguing during message exposure limits knowledge of the underlying mechanisms. The current study combines neuroimaging and linguistic measures to unpack neurocognitive and psychological mechanisms associated with counterarguing among a sample of established smokers in response to anti-smoking messaging. We capture participants’ neural activity in brain regions associated with effortful deliberation and negative argumentation during message exposure, and link it with their subsequent language patterns to further understanding of counterarguing in the brain. Greater brain activity within key regions of interest associated with deliberation and negative argumentation is associated with greater cognitive depth and less positivity in the post-scan message descriptions, respectively, among those who have lower intention to change their smoking behavior. We connect these neural representations of counterarguing with psychological theories and discuss implications that may increase the impact of persuasive communications.

Преса України мовами національних меншин

Social and political processes taking place in the modern Ukrainian society are reflected, among other things, in the language of our mass media. The study of the language question is important not only due to the constant discourse regarding the status of the official language and the supposed number of official languages, but also as the subject matter of reflecting the national identity of the citizens of our state. As of 2001, the population of Ukraine was estimated at 48, 2 million people, being representatives of 107 nationalities. Support and preservation of ethnic and cultural as well as linguistic consciousness of ethnic groups is an important goal of every multiethnic and multilingual country. Ukraine signed the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages on May 2, 1996 (hereafter — the Charter), ratified it in 2003, though it came into effect only since 2006. The introduction of the above mentioned document into the national legislation testifies respect and willingness to protect regional languages or minority languages. The provisions of the Charter are applicable not to all the minority languages of the national minorities living on the territory of Ukraine, but only to the following ones: Belarusian, Bulgarian, Gagauz, Greek, Jewish, Crimean Tatar, Moldavian, German, Polish, Russian, Romanian, Slovak and Hungarian. According to quantitative linguistic analysis of printed periodical publications that are published in the languages of national minorities and come under protection, only the ethnic Poles (1,07 of publications per one ethnic group representative that considers the language of his/her nationality to be his/her mother tongue) and the Hungarians (5,94) may be regarded as well provided for; the Romanians (0,08) and the Russians (0,03) are partially provided. Keywords: periodicals, journalism, mass media, media space, propaganda, agitation, party press.

Development of the quantitative method for automated text content authorship attribution based on the statistical analysis of N-grams distribution

The peculiarities of the application of linguo-statistics technologies for the identification of the style of the author of text content of scientific and technical profile are considered. Quantitative linguistic analysis of a text uses the benefits of content monitoring based on the NLP methods to identify and analyze the set of stop words, keywords, set phrases and to study N-gram. The latter are used in the linguometry methods to determine in per cent if the given text belongs to a particular author. The quantitative method for automatic text content authorship attribution was developed based on statistical analysis of the 3-gram distribution. The approach to the implementation of identification of the author of the text in the Ukrainian language of the scientific and technical profile was proposed. Experimental results of the proposed method to determine the belonging of the analyzed text to a specific author in the presence of the reference text were obtained. Application of the linguo-statistical analysis of the 3-grams to a set of articles will make it possible to form a subset of publications that are similar in linguistic descriptions. Imposing additional conditions in the form of statistical and quantitative analyses (a set of keywords, set expressions, stylometric, linguometric analyses, etc.) on a subset will allow a significant reduction of this subset by specifying the list of the most likely author. For qualitative and effective content analysis when determining the degree of authorship of a particular author, we propose to analyze the reference text and the one under consideration at several stages: linguometric analysis of the coefficients of the diversity of the author's speech, stylometric analysis, analysis of set expressions, linguo-statistical analysis of 3-grams. For automated text processing, not only the frequency of occurrence of a certain category, but also its existence in the studied text in general are important. Quantitative computation makes it possible to draw objective conclusions about the orientation of materials by the number of using the units of analysis in the studied texts. Qualitative analysis does the same, but as a result of the study of whether (and in what context) there is a certain important original category in general

Productivity and Constraint on Multi-Verb Constructions in Old Japanese

Old Japanese is a dead language from the Asuka and Nara periods (7th - 8th century AD). Its writing system, case system and word order make it distinct from Modern Japanese in many respects. This study presents a quantitative linguistic analysis to the patterns of multiple verb combining in Old Japanese. To this end, two databases were built: multi-verb construction in the Early Nara Period written in variant Chinese (AD. 712) and purely classical Chinese (AD. 720), and multi-verb construction in the Late Nara Period written by man’yōgana (AD. 759).The findings reveal that, in the Nara period, the formation of multi-verb constructions is an issue of verb serialisingand is facilitated at a syntactic level. Grammaticalisation of unaccusative change-of-state verbs and motion verbs results in tighter integrity of multiple verbs, which, in turn, inspires the device of verb compounding.The entropy ofthe Vfinal unaccusative reveals that the formation via verb serialising is more productive than the formation via verb compounding.