Word Sketch Research Articles

Corpus-based Conceptual Metaphor Recognition in Legal Discourse: A Case study of Cambridge Legal Corpus

Metaphor is a universal feature of legal language, which not only reflects the human cognitive structure in the legislation, but also shapes the application of law. This research aims to conduct an in-depth analysis of case decisions in English and Welsh judgements from 2010 onwards, in order to deepen the recognition and understanding of metaphors in legal discourse. To this end, the research adopts a corpus-based approach and carefully analyzes the contents of the Cambridge Legal Corpus through the Word Sketch to identify the most common conceptual metaphors in the three target domains of COURT, LAW and COMPANY. Data analysis shows that these metaphors not only have their own background and meaning, but also serve as a part of the conceptual group of law, demonstrating the systematization and relevance of metaphors in legal discourse.

CORRER UMA VISTA DE OLHOS, GLISSER UNE OEILLADE, TO SHOOT A LOOK: LEXICAL VARIATION IN THE SLOT OF SUPPORT VERB IN COMPLEX PREDICATES OF VISUAL PERCEPTION IN PORTUGUESE, FRENCH AND ENGLISH

In order to describe complex predicates of visual perception with a support verb, we focus, at the formal pole of the construction, on the lexical variation around the verbal slot, without losing sight of its combination with predicating nominal elements. We intend to analyze whether there are predicating nominal elements of visual perception more or less strongly linked to each verb in the construction. Therefore, we aim to verify possibilities for perspectivizing the visual perception event. To do so, we compared data from two varieties of Portuguese (from Brazil and from Portugal), in comparison to French and English. We adopted the theoretical approach of Construction Grammar (GOLDBERG, 1995; 2006), taking into account its articulation with Sociolinguistics, which results in a socio-constructionist bias (MACHADO VIEIRA; WIEDEMER, 2019). We collect construction incidents via the Sketch Engine platform and we use the Word Sketch tool to check collocations. After selecting only the data that interests us, we arrive at 967 occurrences for Portuguese and 750 occurrences for French and 769 occurrences for English. We analyzed the data using quantitative and qualitative methodology. Results (AUTHOR, YEAR) showed that, in the use of the construction in question, Portuguese and French are similar in the sense that they both present prototypical support verbs (dar/ ‘to give’ and jeter/ ‘to throw’) that reflect the focus of the action on something external. English, on the other hand, presents a strong tendency to use the prototypical support verb take in the construction in focus, so that movement or the action, even if figurative, is in the sense of the participant's field of reference. These results confirmed our hypotheses that the most frequent support verbs in the construction of complex predicates of visual perception in Portuguese, French and English would be, respectively, dar (‘to give’), jeter (‘to throw’) and take.

One Country, Two Perspectives: A Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis of Newspaper Coverage of the Greater Bay Area Scheme in Hong Kong and Mainland China

Despite extensive research on media framing of Hong Kong affairs, there remains a significant gap in the comparative analysis of media representations between Chinese and Hong Kong news discourses amid Hong Kong’s increasing integration with mainland China. This study employs a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis to examine the discursive construction around the Greater Bay Area (GBA) scheme in the news discourses of South China Morning Post (SCMP) and China Daily (CD). The key emotion semantic analysis reveals that the SCMP predominantly projects negative emotions related to worry, while CD foregrounds positive emotions such as bravery. A word sketch of Hong Kong suggests that SCMP prefersd dynamic verbs highlighting the potential effects of the scheme, whereas CD emphasizes the actions associated with administration and regulation. The study contributes to an understanding of media shaping public perception, with real-world policy implications for cross-border communication strategies.

(Slovenska) leksika med leksikonom in slovnico

The article deals with a field labelled in linguistics as a “grey area” between lexical or semantic and syntactic problem areas in language. Our conclusions are based on the recognition that it is impossible to separate lexical knowledge from grammatical knowledge, and that lexical units are, in this sense, equally loaded with the meaning and syntactic potential of language. Taking this as a point of departure, we propose procedures, by compiling Word Sketches for Slovene within the Word Sketch Engine, for the syntactic and semantic identification of multi-word lexical units within the boundaries of the relevant context.

“The pingdemic has been a greater challenge than Covid itself”: semantic prosodies in UK newspaper articles during the pandemic

In July 2021, the UK recorded an increase in self-isolation notifications to the users of the NHS Covid-19 contact-tracing app. The term pingdemic was coined and used widely in the media to refer to this period of increased notifications. Whilst existing research on language evolution during Covid-19 focuses on the negative connotations of the term pandemic, little attention has been dedicated yet to the connotations of the term pingdemic. Thus, this study contributes a com- parison between the semantic prosody of pingdemic and its benchmark pandemic, through the corpus analysis of 628 UK printed newspaper articles, published during the peak in notifications to add to the increasing knowledge of how the pandemic evolved in the UK and how AI has had an impact on it. With the aid of the Sketch Engine, through the analysis of keywords, collocations and Word Sketch Difference visualisations, we found that pingdemic held a more negative semantic prosody than pandemic.

Sketch By Sajjad Hussain Sarmad

In Urdu, sketching begins with Farhat Ullah Baig's writing "Nazir Ahmed's story, some of my words are their oral". Al thought Muhammad Hussain Azad also tried to show him moving pictures by describing the style of his dress and dialogue in detail for different poets in his book "Aab e Hayat" but first these pictures are blurred and incomplete and all the attention of 2nd Muhammad Hussain Azad has been focused on the heels and clothing .The term Urdu literature is the Urdu translation of the sketch English word sketch "For the gender of literature, the word sketch pin portrait is used in English, it is called sketch in Urdu”, Sketch in Urdu is also called personality and metaphorical Sajjad Hussain Sarmad is the first sketcher of Camal Pur District Attock whose collection of sketches has been published as "Nishant e Sarmadi"

Competing Views of Word Meaning: Word Embeddings and Word Senses

Abstract At least since the invention of writing, people have been troubled by the problem of what a word means. Dictionaries have traditionally been written with numbered word senses, giving the impression that the different senses of a word are fixed abstract entities, which can be used to separate usages into neat piles according to their different meanings. Adam Kilgarriff’s daring 1997 article ‘I Don’t Believe in Word Senses’ challenged this traditional view of word meaning, presenting an account in which ‘the basic units are occurrences of the word in context’. Kilgarriff went on to develop the Sketch Engine, a statistical tool that enables lexicographers and NLP researchers, teachers, and students to explore the relationship between meanings and collocations (words and their contexts). In this review article, we compare the information provided by Kilgarriff’s Word Sketches with the recently developed Word Embedding techniques and with the results of Corpus Pattern Analysis.

Technology Integration and SkELL: A Novelty in English Foreign Language Teaching and Learning

The development of technology and its web-applicative tools in reference a variety of fields of contemporary interest, has flourished even the horizons of education. Due to the necessity of the rapid growth of Technology, its integration was considered as a solution to the covid-19 pandemic worldwide situation that caught humanity unskilled on such frequent and easy-to-follow use of ‘learning by doing’ when dealing with knowledge. On purpose, the present study introduces the implementation of SkELL (Sketch Engine for Language Learning) in English Foreign Language (EFL) learning and teaching as a rich source of free online linguistic data, provided the use of authentic texts (hereby to corpus data). All of these constituents autonomously yield both sides: learners and teachers to learner-learner interaction, learner-teacher interaction. Throughout the exploitation of its various web-applicative tools such as: Word Sketch, Thesaurus, Wordlist, Concordance, and Visualization among a range of others made possible and available EFL learning, and assisted teaching during the hard educational situation. It consequently may serve as a pre-requisite for language practitioners, curriculum designers to facilitate overall EFL teaching and learning process.

Causes of the male-female ratio of depression based on the psychosocial factors.

Recently, depression has been a great concern of researchers, and the research on the male-female ratio of depression mainly covers the fields of epidemiology and clinical studies. This study is made to explore the causes of the male-female ratio of depression from a humanistic perspective, namely, the psychosocial factors, thus providing some support and reference for further research on depression. Thereby, the authors select and analyze word lists closely collocated with "depression" according to word score and frequency through the word sketch in enTenTen20 by the corpus tool "Sketch Engine." Meanwhile, the above words are further explored for the causes of the male-female ratio in depression from the biological, psychological, and social aspects based on the Biopsychosocial Model as well as some existing relevant medical research findings. Consequently, women are found to be more likely to suffer from emotional problems and depression than men under the influence of biological basis, general psychological characteristics, and social environment interference.

Towards a Marine Accident Frame

This paper presents the results of a study that combines information extraction by means of word sketches with corpus-based analysis. In the analysis, terminological information was extracted from a corpus of investigation reports by retrieving the word sketches of the selected verbs. The aim of the study is to demonstrate how to identify predicate-argument structures in a specific domain corpus by adopting the principles of Frame-based Terminology (FBT). Thus, this research shows how FBT can be applied to different scenarios such as a marine accident event, which is the object of this study. The long-term goal is to build a marine accident frame by utilising the predicate-argument structures identified in this study. The predicate-argument structures and the evolving frames can be used to enhance the representation and understanding of marine accident events. Thus, the predicate-argument structures are presented for consultation to future end users of the results, namely the stakeholders in the field of maritime safety, including maritime English teachers, as well as LSP teachers and terminologists.

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.

Word sketches of descriptive modifiers in children's short stories for teacher training in teaching English as a foreign language

Stories have proved to be an important didactic resource in language teaching; therefore, teacher trainees are often encouraged to design story-based tasks. However, they may find difficulties in identifying the language typically found in children's stories. For this reason, the present paper aims at exploring a relevant feature of this genre, descriptive modifiers, in order to raise student teachers’ genre awareness and prompt them to use high-frequency words and phrases. In this corpus-based study, a number of key elements were first identified, then classified, and finally, their occurrences were analyzed to obtain patterns in their grammatical behavior and an inventory of their most common collocates. SketchEngine was used both to compile the corpus and to retrieve word sketches of each modifier. Gaining more insight into the language of stories can contribute to helping teacher trainees to perceive characteristic language in children-oriented text types and to develop their own storytelling abilities.

A Comparable Corpus-Based Study of Cross-Strait Varieties: The Case of 注意 Zhùyì and 專心 Zhuānxīn

Chinese Word Sketch (CWS) provides a tool to identify the semantic distinctions of the Chinese near synonyms in the natural language use situation. This study has the case of 注 意 Zhùyì and 專 心 Zhuānxīn, with Gigaword_CNA and Gigaword_XIN, two of the main sub-corpora in CWS, as the corpora for the research. Based on the comparison of senses and part of speech (POS) from Chinese Word Net and dictionaries, it is found that there are some disagreements of the POS between the ones prescribed by dictionary and in actual language use. What is more, some similarities and differences have been revealed based on the common and only patterns in the two sub-corpora. The study aims to reveal the variations of the two keywords in Taiwan Mandarin and Mainland Mandarin, which will contribute to the revision of the dictionary and facilitate a better understanding of cross-strait communication.

An Investigation of Corpus Contributions to Lexicographic Challenges over the Past Ten Years

This study explores the role of corpus linguistics in addressing lexicographic challenges over the past ten years. It examines 25 studies published from 2012 to 2021 that employed corpus solutions to solve lexicographic problems. Challenging tasks are either relevant to the macrostructure or the microstructure of dictionaries. In the past decade, lexicographers made extensive use of corpus tools to create dictionaries and improve existing ones. This effort included compiling general and specialized headword lists, identifying idiom variations, detecting collocational patterns, identifying and ordering words senses and differentiating polysemous words and near-synonyms. Frequency, keyword extraction, and word sketches are among the most effective aids for lexicographers. According to the investigated studies, almost all dictionaries may benefit from corpus tools at the macro and microstructure levels.

Hair Colour Stereotypes in Croatian Language Corpora

The paper shows how hair colour stereotypes are reflected in two Croatian language corpora: the Croatian Language Corpus hrWaC and the Croatian Language Repository. Both were searched with the Sketch Engine corpus tool, utilizing the word sketches function, which shows the information on the most common collocations in which a lemma occurs. Synonymous words denoting female and male persons with fair, brown, black, ginger, or red hair were explored. The following hypotheses were confirmed or partially confirmed: women are more often defined by hair colour than men; more synonyms denote a female person of a particular hair colour than a male person; some synonyms appear in contexts suggesting stereotypes more often than others; in the formation of words especially denoting female persons of particular hair colour, some word-formation models are used to form pejorative and depreciative words and (by onymisation) animal names; and the adjectives pravi (‘real’), jedan (‘one’), and običan (‘ordinary’) serve as focus markers and suggest expressions reflecting stereotypes. Based on the conducted collocation and word-formation analysis, it is concluded that the collocations and word-formation models associated with hair colour words suggest various extralinguistic data, including the social status of women.

Grammatical gender and stereotypical gender associations with inanimate nouns in the ‘Germanic sandwich’

This pilot study is a contribution to the theoretical debate on the impact language has on general cognition. More specifically, we applied a Word Sketch collocator (an innovative NLP tool operating on large-scale corpora) to collect human adjective collocations of masculine, feminine, and neuter inanimate nouns in German, Dutch, and English to see whether there is a correlation between the grammatical genders of inanimate nouns and the adjective collocations most frequently used to describe those nouns. Later, in a series of online questionnaires, we examined the impact of grammatical gender and stereotypical gender associations on the perception of inanimate nouns (e.g., street, lamp, bottle) by testing the gender associations of their human adjective collocations obtained from the Word Sketch collocator in German (a grammatical gender language), Dutch (a language with a combination of grammatical gender and natural gender), and English (a natural gender language). In German, the results show that grammatical gender alone is not a decisive factor in causing masculine or feminine gender associations of inanimate nouns. Rather, it is the combination of grammatical gender and stereotypical gender associations of nouns that plays a role. In English, nouns associated with neutral, masculine and even feminine gender had significantly more neutral adjectival associations. In Dutch, nouns with common and neuter gender resulted in a higher proportion of masculine adjectival associations because these nouns are mostly referred to with common and masculine pronouns. We observed a special role played by stereotypical feminine associations of nouns in German, Dutch, and English.

Word Sketch: An Entry Point To A Corpus For Extractionof Meaning

Word Sketch: An Entry Point To A Corpus For Extractionof Meaning

Query Expansion for Slovak to Bulgarian Language Machine Translation using Parallel Search

The paper presents results of the application of a statistical approach for Slovak to Bulgarian language machine translation. It uses Information Retrieval inspired search techniques and employs sever alalgorithmic steps of parallel statistical search with query expansion in Slovak-Bulgarian EUROPARL 7 Corpus using the Sketch Engine software and its scoring. The search includes the generation of concordances,collocations, word sketch differences, word sketches, and thesauri of the studied keyword (query) by using a statistical scoring, which is regarded as intermediate (inter-lingual) semantic standard presentation by means of which the studied keyword (from the source language) is mapped together with its possible translation equivalents (onto the target language. The results present the study of adjectival collocabillity in both Slovak and Bulgarian language from the corpus of political speech texts outlining the standard semantic relations based on the evaluation of statistical scoring. Finally, the advantages and shortcomings of the approach are discussed.

Study of The Meaning of Lelaki, Bujang and Bujangan Words in the Utilisation of Indonesian Corpus

This study aims to examine the meaning of the words man, single, and bachelors in the use of the Indonesian language corpus and how the semantic and pragmatic meanings of the use of the words male, single, and bachelor are seen from their collocation. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative. Data were collected using Leipzig corpora and word sketch engine of the linguistic corpus for Indonesian. The word male appeared 69,907 times, the word single appeared 1,473 times, and the word bachelor appeared 69,907 times. The researcher uses discourse analysis for the word male, which can be used according to the meaning of the word/semantics. In a colocation sense, it turns out that men have the equivalent of nine words, while bachelors have a colocation with ten words and bachelors have a colocation with thirteen words.

A restrição combinatória e a multidimensionalidade do núcleo eventivo em unidades fraseológicas especializadas

Este trabalho trata da Fraseologia Especializada relativa à Conservação e Restauração de Bens Culturais Móveis em papel. Seus objetivos foram: a identificação e extração de Unidades Fraseológicas Especializadas Eventivas (UFE eventivas), em língua portuguesa, e sua inserção na árvore de domínio da área da Conservação e Restauração. As UFE eventivas se constituem por um Núcleo Eventivo (NE) de natureza verbal e um Núcleo Terminológico (NT) de natureza nominal e indicam ações e processos especializados. As unidades analisadas foram extraídas do Corpus Papel (Termisul) utilizando a ferramenta Word Sketch do programa Sketch Engine. A partir da análise dos dados no corpus de estudo, apresentamos dois principais resultados: a observação do fenômeno da restrição combinatória que, nas UFE eventivas, parece incidir sobre o NE, e a observação do princípio da multidimensionalidade do NE.