Corpus Linguistic Techniques Research Articles

Do top-down and bottom-up agents agree on internationalisation? A mixed methods study of Spanish universities

This paper explores the implementation of internationalisation in the Spanish university system and its effects from a mixed methods approach, combining quantitative corpus linguistics techniques and qualitative interview protocols. Results from the quantitative and qualitative analysis showed that Spanish universities’ written policies align with the national framework and rely on a complementary use of ‘abroad’ and ‘at home’ strategies for research and education mostly through mobility, collaboration, and English-medium instruction. A positive representation of internationalisation is also identified, with both top-down and bottom-up actors stressing its benefits for society and individuals. Yet, some critical voices pointed at mismatches between institutional views and stakeholders’ experiences, questioning the sufficient allocation of resources and lack of recognition and incentives. The paper argues that effective comprehensive internationalisation should include written internationalisation plans, communication strategies, and a clearly defined internationalisation model adapted to the universities’ particularities.

Profiling of (Ir)reversible Binomials in Translated Texts

A binomial, or binomial pair, is a pair of words conventionally linked by a lexical link such as a conjunction or a preposition, for example, “day and night”, “life and death”, “dos and don’ts”, etc. Binomials are very common in all languages. Binomials can be reversible or irreversible; i.e. they share/do not share the same word order in the Source Language or Target Language. Binomials play a very important role in learners’ or speakers’ competence; the more binomials you are familiar with the more competent one would be. In this paper, we will examine binomials in the Arabic language; we will use corpus-based approaches to explore how binomials are reversible in Arabic and English. In an attempt to find a practical-digital way for language learners and translators to rely on when they come across conjoined words, mainly binomials, different approaches to binomial extraction have been explored. Corpus linguistic techniques and Mutual Information1 statistics are used to test the relations between the different parts of binomials; the most frequent binomials and conjoined phrases are analyzed in an Arabic text coupled with their translations into English. By calculating the significant binomials, mutual information helps us to identify what to examine in the concordance lines. Based on the analysis of the concordances of the data, some rules have been proposed, something which would enable language learners and translators to make generalizations and reach firmer conclusions regarding the order of parts within binomials and whether they are reversible or irreversible when translated from one language into another.

Construction of group norms in a radical acceptanceonline forum for heavy alcohol users: A corpus-based discourse analysis.

Alcohol use is a major source of morbidity and mortality globally. Numerous adverse health outcomes have been linked to alcohol use, including liver disease, road injuries, violence, cancer, cardiovascular disease, suicide, domestic violence and family breakdown. Alcohol use is responsible for approximately three million deaths per year across the globe. Different paradigms have been employed in the treatment of alcohol use disorder, including abstinence-based and harm-reduction models. Radical acceptance, which has been successfully applied elsewhere in mental health treatment, has not gained purchase in the treatment of addictions. We used a set of corpus linguistics techniques to analyze a dataset of approximately 10,000 posts in an online forum for self-identified severe alcoholics. The forum we studied explicitly claims a radical acceptance approach to alcohol use disorder. The forum is "for people who accept their lifestyle choice and don't want to be interrupted . . ." We combined quantitative methods (keyword and collocation analysis) and qualitative methods (concordancing) to conduct a discourse analysis of the linguistic and rhetorical practices employed in the forum. We found that although the forum purports to embrace acceptance and eschew change, in fact, the discursive practices in the forum reveal a highly ambivalent relation with both acceptance and change. We found that acceptance and change are in dialectical tension that mirrors the structure agency dialectic described in critical realism. We suggest there may be merit in considering employing a radical acceptance paradigm in addictions treatment.

The Co-construction of News Values on News Magazine Covers: A Corpus-assisted Multimodal Discourse Analysis (CAMDA)

ABSTRACT Extant research from various perspectives has provided valuable insights into what news values are more frequently foregrounded across news types, topics, and outlets; and how they are constructed through verbal and visual resources. However, no research so far has examined how specific news values may be frequently co-constructed to package an individual news story and make it more appealing to potential readers. This research adopts the discursive news values analysis (DNVA) approach to examine the co-construction of news values in the multimodal discourse of TIME magazine covers (n = 300). To identify such co-construction, this study adopts cluster analysis, which has yet been deployed to study news values. The use of cluster analysis has identified six different combinations of news values repeatedly been observed together in clusters of covers. These combinations may represent what the magazine perceives as most attractive to the target audience. This study has also revealed intersemiotic relations in news values construction. While some news values are often reinforced across the verbal (i.e., cover line) and visual (i.e., cover image) semiotic modes, others rely more on the verbal mode. This study crosses disciplinary boundaries by bringing corpus linguistics techniques into journalism studies to understand a previously under-explored news genre.

Fake News Spreaders Detection: Sometimes Attention Is Not All You Need

Guided by a corpus linguistics approach, in this article we present a comparative evaluation of State-of-the-Art (SotA) models, with a special focus on Transformers, to address the task of Fake News Spreaders (i.e., users that share Fake News) detection. First, we explore the reference multilingual dataset for the considered task, exploiting corpus linguistics techniques, such as chi-square test, keywords and Word Sketch. Second, we perform experiments on several models for Natural Language Processing. Third, we perform a comparative evaluation using the most recent Transformer-based models (RoBERTa, DistilBERT, BERT, XLNet, ELECTRA, Longformer) and other deep and non-deep SotA models (CNN, MultiCNN, Bayes, SVM). The CNN tested outperforms all the models tested and, to the best of our knowledge, any existing approach on the same dataset. Fourth, to better understand this result, we conduct a post-hoc analysis as an attempt to investigate the behaviour of the presented best performing black-box model. This study highlights the importance of choosing a suitable classifier given the specific task. To make an educated decision, we propose the use of corpus linguistics techniques. Our results suggest that large pre-trained deep models like Transformers are not necessarily the first choice when addressing a text classification task as the one presented in this article. All the code developed to run our tests is publicly available on GitHub.

In the Name of Freedom

The ubiquitous image of the sprawling 19th century Southern plantation has meant that much of the research on US slave names has focused on regions below the mid-Atlantic (Desrochers 2002). The resulting lack of attention that has been given to other times and spaces has necessarily limited our collective understanding of slave naming patterns. The purpose of the current investigation is to help address this geo-temporal oversight. With that goal in mind, the present empirical study explores the naming patterns of fugitive slaves as advertised in newspapers published in New York and New Jersey between 1730 and 1790. Using the techniques of corpus linguistics, this investigation analyzed 147 runaway slave advertisements featuring 150 slave names. These onomastic exemplars comprised four name-types: first names, surnames, nicknames, and aliases. Onomastic patterns were identified using descriptive statistics as well chi-squared and Fisher’s exact tests. Special attention was paid to exploring the relationship between the runaways’ names and their reported age, gender, and racial classification. After a brief introduction to slavery in the New England colonies, this study presents the empirical results and compares them with previous findings on US slave names. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limitations and argues for more corpus-based research into slave names.

Donkey discourse: Corpus linguistics and charity communications for improved animal welfare

A corpus linguistic approach has been applied to examine the representation of donkeys in public discourses for an international equid welfare charity (The Donkey Sanctuary) with a view to improving the British public's understanding of the roles of donkeys, in Britain and worldwide. By increasing understanding of public perceptions, this study aims to support improvements in donkey welfare through targeted education. The study explored patterning in public discourses about donkeys (online and print news and social media) using corpus linguistic (CL) techniques and tools, supplemented with methods from discourse analysis. The findings highlight key representations of donkeys in public and media discourses that are not present in informed discourses about the animals. In this paper, we examine the results of the corpus study from the perspective of one current aim from The Donkey Sanctuary's public engagement strategy: to promote understanding of donkeys as sentient beings with the capacity to experience a wide range of emotional responses to events or situations. We found that donkey experience is more subtly represented in the discourses than other aspects of donkey lives, such as actions and behaviours, which have more obvious, overt representations. The results demonstrate the value of applying the CL framework for researchers and practitioners involved in textual analysis for charity communications and public awareness campaigns. We discuss the implications that our findings have for donkey welfare—and animal welfare more generally—as well as what such a methodology could offer other organisations providing public education and/or relying on philanthropic support from the public.

Cooperation and demotion: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis of Aboriginal people(s) in Australian print news

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activists and researchers agree that print media discourses surrounding First Nations people(s) in Australia remain negative and stereotypical. However, how these discourses are constructed in language – and therefore linguistic practices which should be avoided – has so far received minimal attention. Analysing a purpose-built corpus of Australian newspaper articles, this study uses the corpus linguistic technique of collocation analysis to identify relevant discourses and examines the linguistic construction of one discourse that had not yet been identified: cooperation. It finds that although notions of cooperation are ostensibly positive (and therefore contrast with discourses identified in previous research), this is often undermined by syntagmatic processes which demote agential Aboriginal participants to prepositional phrases. Prepositions are often neglected in corpus linguistics and in critical discourse analysis, making this an important finding.

Corpus-informed instruction of the pragmatic marker I mean

ABSTRACT Pragmatic markers perform important communicative functions, but they can be difficult to learn in a second language because of their multifunctionality and lack of salience during communicative events. This study has two goals: (1) to describe the communicative functions of the pragmatic marker I mean in academic discourse; and (2) to provide instructional activities for teaching the multiple functions of the pragmatic marker I mean. Bottom-up corpus-linguistics techniques were used to discover frequent functions of I mean in a corpus of interactive classroom discourse. The results revealed three main communicative functions: (1) argumentation management, (2) communication management, and (3) interaction management (cf. Fant. 2016. Pragmatic markers in high-level second language use. In Advanced Proficiency and Exceptional Ability in Second Languages, ed. K. Hyltenstam, 15–42. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton). The results also revealed a range of subfunctions, including self-correction, elaboration, rapport building, and pause filling while holding the floor. These findings provided an empirical basis for the creation of pedagogical materials. We present instructional tasks that draw on awareness-raising and explicit-inductive teaching techniques to support L2 learners in gaining a richer understanding of the multifunctionality of I mean, as well as the importance of context in interpreting and creating meaning.

The impact of the SDGs on non-financial corporate communications: an analysis of CaixaBank reports (2013-2019).

Academic interest in corporate discourse has been increasing in recent years. This paper examines how the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have influenced the structure of the discourse employed in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, taking as a specific case the non-financial reports produced by CaixaBank. We employed a hybrid analytical method, using some techniques from corpus linguistics and framing analysis. In the non-financial reports from 2013 to 2017, a clear master frame was found, involving a negative evaluation of the influence of the economic crisis. In contrast, discourse concerning the SDGs forms the backbone of the 2018 and 2019 reports. Fromthe point of view of linguistic/discursive methodology, this study shows how the use of corpus linguistic techniques in combination with framing analysis can facilitate an examination of the changes in corporate discourse on sustainability, providing an effective method of studying non-financial reports.

The lexico-phraseological profile of professional film reviews published by the British media: A corpus-linguistic study

Using corpus linguistic techniques, this exploratory study is intended to provide a descriptive in-sight into frequent lexical bundles, keywords and key terms as well as selected lexical markers of style used in a corpus of professional film reviews. The research material includes 210 domain-specific texts from the years 2020-2021, extracted from the websites of six British newspapers, magazines and institutions offering guides for moviegoers. The results show that the analyzed reviews make frequent use of general cinematic terms and more specific lexis denoting the different types and (sub)genres of cinematic productions repre-sented by the reviewed films. Other salient lexical features include a high concentration of referential but low concentration of stance bundles, though attitudinal items, particularly evaluation adjectives, signifi-cantly enrich the lexical inventory of the reviews. The presented data may have important pedagogic appli-cations in the area of teaching authentic English to future film reviewers and film journalists.

Collocations and aviation terms

Collocations have a great potencial to the understanding of meanings, senses and concepts of words or terms they compound. In this article, we studied the collocations of the terms “segurança” in Portuguese, and “safety” and “security” in English, in aviation language. Our aims were to search for a better understanding of the studied conceptual units, and to offer a discussion about the role of collocations in Terminology. We built two comparable corpora, one with Portuguese texts from the Brazilian National Civil Aviation Agency and the Brazilian Air Force, and another one with English texts from the International Civil Aviation Organization. We focused on the main collocations of the three terms in Portuguese and in English. The theoretical frame we adopted was the Communicative Theory of Terminology (CABRÉ, 1999) and we used the techniques of Corpus Linguistics (TAGNIN, 2010, 2013; BERBER SARDINHA, 2000) to design our methodology, assisted by the software WordSmith Tools, version 6.0. (SCOTT, 2012). We found noun and adjective collocations. The study is addressed to professionals, teachers and tranlators who make use of aviation language. KEY-WORDS: Terms of Aviation; Terminology; Corpus Linguistics; Collocations.

Haunted Across the Political Spectrum: The Specter of Communism in Two Midcentury American Organizations

Organizations operating in midcentury America experienced a period of relative economic prosperity and global power. While political tensions existed between the United States and the Soviet Union since the culmination of the World War II, when the Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear test in 1949 and then successfully launched Sputnik 1 in 1957, these political tensions became more pressing concerns to American organizations. In fact, the perceived existential threat posed by communism became an observable rhetorical justification for organization and action within the United States. Through the use of corpus linguistics techniques, a comparative analysis was conducted on the foundational documents of the rightwing, John Birch Society and the leftwing, Students for a Democratic Society. Relative word frequencies, collocations, concordancing and statistical analyses were conducted around the use and context of the keyword communism. The results suggest that while these radical and reactionary groups perceived a common threat, multifinality exists in terms of organizational response. This insight is useful to those engaged in strategy development and rhetoric for political and business organizations.

Using promotional discourse analysis and project-based learning to develop Master’s students’ business writing skills

Foreword Caroline Rossi, universite Grenoble Alpes While corpora have been used extensively in translator training for a few decades (Beeby et al. 2009; Zanettin et al. 2013), applications to the English for specific purposes (ESP) classroom have remained relatively scarce. However, a recent meta-analysis into “the effectiveness of using the tools and techniques of corpus linguistics for L2 learning or use” (Boulton & Cobb 2017) has reported effective use of corpora with learners of a foreign...

Narrative evaluation in patient feedback

AbstractThis study examines how patients use narratives to evaluate their experiences of healthcare services online. The analysis draws on corpus linguistic techniques, specifically annotation, applyingLabov and Waletzky’s (1967)framework to a sample of online comments about the NHS in England. Narratives are pervasive in this context, being present more than absent in the patients’ comments, but are particularly prominent in comments which evaluate care negatively. Evaluations can be accomplished through all the structural elements of the narrative, including in combination with one another. However, the presence and ordering of these elements does not seem to be influenced by the type of evaluation given (i.e. positive, negative or more neutral). As mediated social practice, the narratives are shaped by the technological affordances and social dynamics of this context, for instance in the placement of particular structural elements and the design of narratives for particular “imagined” audiences.

What Russian University Stands for: Analyzing Socially Embedded Vision and Values

SummaryThe present investigation is a response to the discourse analytical methodology expanded by corpus linguistic techniques. Within a discursive approach the university’s identity is seen as existing in and being constructed through discourse. The research interest is in how ideology and the obligation models set by the state construct the university’s self-image and university-based research as its core mission. The study is generally consistent with current trends in social constructivism where identity is considered as the process of identity construction rather than a rigid category. It is presumed that key factors are developed within a definite socio-cultural practice, which then shape the concept of collective identity. Detecting and analyzing such factors on the basis of Russian realities and modern Russian university is becoming a new research objective. The focus of the given article is on how certain values can be foregrounded in texts representing university strategies to the public. The research employs corpus linguistic methods in discourse analysis. The organization of the paper is as follows. First, it outlines the socio-political context in which the transformation of academic values and organizational principles of Russian national universities are embedded. Second, it discusses corpus findings obtained from an original research corpus which includes mission statements posted on the websites of Russian national research and federal universities. Conclusions concerning the university mission statements reflect ongoing transformations of the universities’ role in the society. The rhetoric of the statements is declarative and foregrounding new values. The linguistic data analysis shows their socially constructive nature as they build a framework for currently relevant uniformed ideas and concepts.

Capturing Herder: a three-step approach to the identification of language ideologies using corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis

Recent lexical approaches to the identification of language ideologies focus on the application of quantitative corpus-linguistic techniques to large data sets as a way to minimise researcher inference and ensure more objective sampling methods, replicability of analytical procedures, and a higher degree of generalisability ( Fitzsimmons-Doolan, 2014 ; Subtirelu, 2015 ; Vessey, 2017 ; Wright and Brooks, 2019 ; and McEntee-Atalianis and Vessey, 2020 ). Based on two comprehensive, specialised research (11.6 million words) and comparator (22.4 million words) newspaper corpora, this study offers an examination of the effectiveness of the multivariate and univariate statistical techniques, and proposes a three-step approach whereby corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis are combined to identify ( 1) thematic and ( 2) ideological discourses (cf. ‘d’/’D’ discourses; Gee, 2010 ), and ( 3) language ideologies. In contrast to recent contributions, it is argued that item frequency is not necessarily a reliable or effective indicator of language ideologies but, rather, of language-related discourses which can be examined for implicit and explicit language-ideological content. A combination of multivariate and univariate statistical techniques, and the three-step approach are shown to be a highly effective methodological solution for synchronic and diachronic language ideology and discourse research based on topically/discursively heterogeneous corpora.

A methodological synergy of dramatistic discourse analysis and corpus linguistics: From the discourse of US Presidents to Trump's 2016 Orlando speech

The present study offers a novel methodology for corpus-based discourse analysis that combines Kenneth Burke's (1968, 1969) dramatistic method of text analysis and the corpus techniques of keyword extraction and concordance reading. Applying the methodology, a two-stage analysis of Donald Trump's 2016 Orlando speech has been conducted: First, at a micro level, identifying the keywords used by Trump in his speech as compared against the historical reference corpus of US Presidents through WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2012) as well as describing and interpreting Trump's keyword lexical structures in the pentadic ratios rhetorically motivated by the that select and deflect representations of the gay-nightclub-shooting event in the speech; second, at a macro level, substantiating the whole speech event of Orlando in terms of the different types of substance – geometric, familial, and directional – recognized in the keywords clustering and linking in the speech. The study has reached two findings. First, methodologically, synergizing Burke's dramatistic method of text analysis and corpus-linguistics techniques in a novel way that contributes to analysing the rhetorical language of political discourse, yielding a corpus-based dramatistic discourse analysis. Second, practically, analysing the pentadic ratios of the speech keywords and their substance types has revealed Trump's rhetoric of selecting and deflecting certain representations of the Orlando political event through a number of terministic screens and substantiations.

Philosophical Sediments

Ethics rest on philosophical groundings. This holds implications for international business as the philosophers selected as the basis of ethics are informed by culture. Business publications provide a source for exploring this phenomenon. Articles from the CNKI database were downloaded and analyzed in KNIME. An author-created ontology was used to identify business ethics articles. Corpus linguistic techniques established philosophical sediments. From a Marxian perspective, Marx and Mao Zedong figured prominently, where Plato and Aristotle were frequent non-Marxian philosophers. A Mann-Whitney U test showed the median frequency of Marxian philosophers is significantly greater than non-Marxists. Dyadic analysis revealed more frequent reference to socialism over capitalism. These results suggest the philosophical sediments of these articles rest primarily on Marxian philosophers and collectivist constructs. As nations increasingly use artificial intelligence, they will use different philosophical lenses engendering distinctive results culminating in dissimilar system-level outcomes.

Part Meat and Part Plant: Are Hybrid Meat Products Fad or Future?

There is a growing interest in flexitarian diets, which has resulted in the commercialisation of new hybrid meat products, containing both meat and plant-based ingredients. Consumer attitudes towards hybrid meat products have not been explored, and it is not clear which factors could affect the success of such products. This study is the first to overview of the UK hybrid meat product market and to explore consumer’s attitudes towards hybrid meat products in 201 online reviews, using tools and techniques of corpus linguistics (language analysis). In the positive reviews, consumers emphasised the taste dimension of the hybrid meat products, seeing them as healthier options with good texture and easy to prepare. The negative reviews related to the poor sensory quality and not to the concept of hybridity itself. Using a multidisciplinary approach, our findings revealed valuable insights into consumer attitudes and highlighted factors to consider to market new hybrid meat products effectively.