The aim of this paper is to explore some of the possibilities, advantages and difficulties of corpus-based analyses of semantic and pragmatic aspects of language in one particular field, namely the linguistic expression of emotion concepts. For this purpose, a methodological procedure is proposed and an exemplary analysis of the emotion concept “fear” in English is performed. The procedure combines Kövecses' lexical approach and Stefanowitsch's metaphorical pattern analysis with additional concepts from corpus linguistics such as semantic preference and (...) semantic prosody. The results of the study show that such a corpus-based analysis of emotion words offers several advantages. Firstly, by exploring the surroundings of the search word in a vast amount of text, we are not only able to find evidence of conceptual metaphor and metonymy that structure the emotion concept and of related emotion concepts, but also we can enrich the description of the emotion concept with information from a series of dimensions and add a pragmatic viewpoint by revealing an explicit or implicit evaluation of the emotion. The second advantage offered by a corpus-based approach lies in the possibility of quantifying results, i.e., comparing the frequency, productivity and creative use of individual metaphors and metonymies, which is especially interesting in view of contrastive studies. (shrink)

Dans cet article, nous présentons et discutons de notre méthodologie pour la constitution d’un « petit corpus » comparatif de narration orale en occitan. Il s’agit d’un « petit corpus » nouveau et unique, dans une langue minorisée, ce qui soulève un certain nombre de défis particuliers : la complexité des rapports entre l’écrit et l’oral dans la pratique du conte d’une part, et d’autre part, de nombreuses difficultés méthodologiques (variations diatopique, diachronique et sociolinguistique ; absence de données (...) numérisées ; outils de traitement automatique des langues en cours de développement). Cet article propose non seulement une méthodologie pour la constitution d’un corpus permettant d’explorer divers degrés d’oralité, mais contribue aussi plus globalement au débat sur la problématique des « petits corpus » pour les langues minorisées. (shrink)

Depuis plusieurs décennies, la numérisation des textes anciens et les progrès du TAL pour les traiter et les interroger ont largement modifié nos habitudes de travail. Il est désormais possible d’obtenir des données quantitatives massives qui affinent notre perception des phénomènes linguistiques et stylistiques dans des corpus écrits dans des états de langue anciens. Les corpus numériques créés depuis maintenant près d’un quart de siècle permettent d’envisager plus facilement la dynamique du...

Until recently, experimental philosophy has been associated with the questionnaire-based study of intuitions; however, experimental philosophers now adapt a wide range of empirical methods for new philosophical purposes. New methods include paradigms for behavioural experiments from across the social sciences as well as computational methods from the digital humanities that can process large bodies of text and evidence. This book offers an accessible overview of these exciting innovations. The volume brings together established and emerging research leaders from several areas of (...) experimental philosophy to explore how new empirical methods can contribute to philosophical debates. Each chapter presents one or several methods new to experimental philosophy, demonstrating their application in a key area of philosophy and discussing their strengths and limitations. Methods covered include eye tracking, virtual reality technology, neuroimaging, statistical learning, and experimental economics as well as corpus linguistics, visualisation techniques and data and text mining. The volume explores their use in moral philosophy and moral psychology, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and the history of ideas. Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy is essential reading for undergraduates, graduate students and researchers working in experimental philosophy. (shrink)

The “received wisdom” in contemporary analytic philosophy is that intuition talk is a fairly recent phenomenon, dating back to the 1960s. In this paper, we set out to test two interpretations of this “received wisdom.” The first is that intuition talk is just talk, without any methodological significance. The second is that intuition talk is methodologically significant; it shows that analytic philosophers appeal to intuition. We present empirical and contextual evidence, systematically mined from the JSTOR corpus and HathiTrust’s Digital (...) Library, which provide some empirical support for the second rather than the first hypothesis. Our data also suggest that appealing to intuition is a much older philosophical methodology than the “received wisdom” alleges. We then discuss the implications of our findings for the contemporary debate over philosophical methodology. (shrink)

In this paper we shall give an extended overview of the diffferent methodological options and approaches at the disposal of future editors of scientifijically sound, scholarly editions of our Fight Book sources. These options will be evaluated with respect to applicability of the material envisaged, work load, comparative and editorial obstacles, etc. The inevitably preliminary conclusions will then be tested by applying them to one extremely important exemplum for the whole corpus: the text tradition concerning the Zedel, the verses (...) ascribed to the auctoritas of Master Johannes Liechtenauer, the Urtext of the German martial arts heritage. The paper should therefore be seen as a tool for future editors, rather than as a preliminary study for an edition in its own right, although the present author will not deny the existence of plans in that direction. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to outline a methodological framework for brand equity planning with structuralist rhetorical semiotics. By drawing on the connectionistconceptual model of the brand generative trajectory of signification it will be displayed in a stepwise fashion how a set of nuclear semes and classemes or anintended semic structure that underlies manifest discursive structures may be projected by its internal stakeholders with view to attaining differential brand associations. The suggested methodological framework focuses on the strength and uniqueness (...) of brand associations as integral aspects of a brand’s equity structure and comprises a set of calculi that aim at addressing from a brand textuality point of view how associations may be systematically linked to their key sources with an emphasis on the ad filmic text. The propounded methodology is exemplified by recourse to a corpus of ad filmic texts from the major brand players in the UK cereals market. The argumentative thrust is intent on demonstrating that structuralist rhetorical semiotics is not only useful for analysing/interpreting brand texts, but, moreover, for constructing and for managing them over time. This demonstration is deployed by adopting a synchronic/diachronic and intra--filmic/inter--filmic approach to the formation of brand associations that make up a projected brand equity structure, in the context of embedded product category dynamics. (shrink)

Notre proposition engage à (re)problématiser l’intérêt de la linguistique de et sur corpus quant à ses applications professionnelles. Ancrée en pragmatique, elle retrace le mode de recueil et d’exploitation de données dans le cadre applicatif du corpus DECLICS2016, ce, pour servir les questions de métier en médecine. Nous testons l’efficience de la linguistique, comme discipline de SHS contributive éclairant l’activité professionnelle, en produisant des scénarios pédagogiques à partir d’extraits de discours. On s’attache à réfléchir sur la « reconstruction (...) de la relation médecin patient », à partir d’un matériau de paroles authentiques. En premier lieu, l’accent est porté sur la constitution même du corpus DECLICS2016. En second lieu, c’est l’application en santé qui est interrogée via nos résultats. Ceux–ci dégagent, à partir d’entretiens de confrontation croisée entre médecins mis face aux paroles authentiques et données d’études linguistiques de patients, qu’il est délicat, pour ces médecins, de profiter de nos catégories pragmatiques prédéterminées : rapports de place, intercompréhension et stratégie discursive du médecin. (shrink)

In this essay I will argue for an interpretation of the remarks of Physics 1.1 that both resolves some of the confusion surrounding the precise nature of methodology described there and shows how those remarks at 184a15-25 serve as important programmatic remarks besides, as they help in the structuring of books 1 and 2 of the Physics. I will argue that “what is clearer and more knowable to us” is what Aristotle goes on to describe in 1.2—namely, that nature (...) exists and that natural things change—his basic starting-point for natural science. This, I shall hope to show, is the kind of “immediate” sense datum which Aristotle thinks must be further analyzed in terms of principles and then causes over the course of Physics books 1 and 2 to lead to knowledge about the natural world.[1] Such an analysis arrives at, as I shall show, a definition of nature not initially available from the starting-point just mentioned, and which is clearer by nature.[2] It is not my aim here to resolve longstanding debates surrounding Aristotle’s original intent in the ordering and composition of the first two books of the Physics, nor how the Physics is meant to fit into the Aristotelian corpus taken as a coherent whole, but rather to show that the first two books of the Physics, as they stand, fit with the picture of methodology for natural science presented to us in 1.1. [1] An interesting consequence of this, and one which I shall not pursue in this paper at any length, is that the progression from what is clearer to us and what is clearer by nature is by necessity a form of revision: i.e., the Physics should not be seen as a work validating the “starting-point” of 1.2 contra the monists, but a work which gradually builds to the language of matter and form as what is clearer by nature. [2] Viz., what we find at the beginning of 2.1: “this suggests that nature is a sort of source and cause of change and remaining unchanged in that to which it belongs primarily of itself, that is, not by virtue of concurrence”. (shrink)

A consumer health information system must be able to comprehend both expert and non-expert medical vocabulary and to map between the two. We describe an ongoing project to create a new lexical database called Medical WordNet (MWN), consisting of medically relevant terms used by and intelligible to non-expert subjects and supplemented by a corpus of natural-language sentences that is designed to provide medically validated contexts for MWN terms. The corpus derives primarily from online health information sources targeted to (...) consumers, and involves two sub-corpora, called Medical FactNet (MFN) and Medical BeliefNet (MBN), respectively. The former consists of statements accredited as true on the basis of a rigorous process of validation, the latter of statements which non-experts believe to be true. We summarize the MWN / MFN / MBN project, and describe some of its applications. (shrink)

This contribution presents the fundamentals of an amazement laboratory as a methodological means of transforming an object of disappointment into an object of desire for the researcher. First, the authors report on a Spinozist reading of their affects caused by their confrontation with a foreign material to the field of psychology, a docu-soap opera about school dropout entitled « Les persévérants » (Ferron & Baer, 2014). They consider astonishment as an affect to renew the interest of the researcher for his (...) research subject. Then they examine its conditions of emergence. Finally, the conditions for setting up an amazement laboratory are illustrated by examples drawn from the literature and the authors practices. (shrink)

Cet article propose un tour d’horizon de différents types de biais que l’on peut rencontrer dans les études basées sur l’annotation de corpus vidéo de langue des signes. En tâchant de situer objectivement les choix effectués et les biais potentiels à chaque étape, nous décrivons les méthodologies que nous avons mises en place dans trois études, portant respectivement sur la synchronisation des composantes corporelles, le mouvement des sourcils et les clignements des yeux, puis la coarticulation.

This paper examines the “methodology,” or philosophy of social science, developed by Felix Kaufmann in the second quarter of the 20th century, with the aim of determining its influence on the early work of the sociologist Harold Garfinkel. Kaufmann’s two methodology books are discussed, one written before, the other after, his migration from Austria to the United States. It is argued that Garfinkel took over Kaufmann’s conception of scientific practice: as a set of procedural rules or methods that (...) determine whether or not new propositions will be accepted into the corpus of scientific knowledge, and whether previously accepted propositions should be retained or abandoned. However, Garfinkel deployed this methodology not so much as a model for sociological inquiry, but rather for the processes by which the lifeworld is constituted—an area of investigation that is epistemologically prior to the focus of most social science, and one which had been opened up in the writings of Edmund Husserl and (especially) Alfred Schutz. It is suggested that Kaufmann’s “methodology” was an important complement to the work of these other two philosophers in their influence on Garfinkel. (shrink)

Research on the construction of traditional information science methodology taxonomy is mostly conducted manually. From the limited corpus, researchers have attempted to summarize some of the research methodology entities into several abstract levels (generally three levels); however, they have been unable to provide a more granular hierarchy. Moreover, updating the methodology taxonomy is traditionally a slow process. In this study, we collected full-text academic papers related to information science. First, we constructed a basic methodology taxonomy (...) with three levels by manual annotation. Then, the word vectors of the research methodology entities were trained using the full-text data. Accordingly, the research methodology entities were clustered and the basic methodology taxonomy was expanded using the clustering results to obtain a methodology taxonomy with more levels. This study provides new concepts for constructing a methodology taxonomy of information science. The proposed methodology taxonomy is semi-automated; it is more detailed than conventional schemes and the speed of taxonomy renewal has been enhanced. (shrink)

In this chapter we use methods of corpus linguistics to investigate the ways in which mathematicians describe their work as explanatory in their research papers. We analyse use of the words explain/explanation (and various related words and expressions) in a large corpus of texts containing research papers in mathematics and in physical sciences, comparing this with their use in corpora of general, day-to-day English. We find that although mathematicians do use this family of words, such use is considerably (...) less prevalent in mathematics papers than in physics papers or in general English. Furthermore, we find that the proportion with which mathematicians use expressions related to ‘explaining why’ and ‘explaining how’ is significantly different to the equivalent proportion in physics and in general English. We discuss possible accounts for these differences. (shrink)

We investigate claims about the frequency of "know" made by philosophers. Our investigation has several overlapping aims. First, we aim to show what is required to confirm or disconfirm philosophers’ claims about the comparative frequency of different uses of philosophically interesting expressions. Second, we aim to show how using linguistic corpora as tools for investigating meaning is a productive methodology, in the sense that it yields discoveries about the use of language that philosophers would have overlooked if they remained (...) in their "armchairs of an afternoon", to use J.L. Austin’s phrase. Third, we discuss facts about the meaning of "know" that so far have been ignored in philosophy, with the aim of reorienting discussions of the relevance of ordinary language for philosophical theorizing. (shrink)

In this study, the preface and introduction of Ibn Juzay’s book at-Tasheel li ‘ulȗmi’t-tanzeel, have been examined in terms of his approach to style and methodology problems in commentary.Ibn Juzay, whose first works included useful topics and ashes; wrote two loyalties, a lexicon, later in which the meanings of the words frequently mentioned in the Qur'an were compiled; thus, he gave information about his style and methodology; In introduction of his book, he explained the underlying reasons to write (...) his book at-Tasheel. That his intention to do so, first of all is to reveal the importance of style and methodology in commentary and then to guide the reader on how to be read this concise work. In this context, he suggested some of the works of the classical commentary corpus, sometimes by giving a name, but in a more uncharacterized and criticism of how to overcome these suggestions about the problematic, so that he wanted to give a healthy perspective for those interested in academic commentary and plain readers. The importance of the article is also due here. In the article, a descriptive language is used in a style that is turned from the scientific personality to the conclusions of commentary; then a general evaluation has been made with an analysis-critic-axis approach. As a result, it has been determined that some commentators, especially the general principles regulating the science of commentary relations with other sciences, have some style and procedural errors. (shrink)

ABSTRACT At the core of Kant’s theoretical philosophy lies the deduction of the categories: his effort to secure the distinctiveness of sensibility and understanding and to provide a necessary relation between the domains of these faculties. The argument for this claim is presented in two different versions - i.e., the A and B editions of the Critique of pure reason - and is one of the most puzzling in Kant’s corpus. The common view in the literature that considers the (...) importance of the A-deduction and tries to present its structure is that it must be understood in the light of the B-deduction argument. I aim at contesting this view and offering an internal reconstruction of the A-deduction argument which reveals its unique methodology. The thesis advanced is that the A-deduction follows an analytical methodology and that this methodology does not allow the accomplishment of the task of the deduction stated in Kant’s effort. At first, Kant’s retrospect of the A-deduction is taken into account. After that, a consideration of the part of the argument described as ‘subjective deduction’ is carried out. (shrink)

One may have different objectives in interpreting texts. If a judge interprets a statute in order to obtain a satisfactory solution to a case, his aim may be called “applicative”. But if a historian of science wants to reconstruct the meaning of obscure passages of Ptolemy’s “Hypotheses planetarum”, his objectives are purely historical and theoretical.The paper argues that these different aims, applicative and historical ones, require different methodologies of interpretation, and imply different criteria of success. In particular, the “principle of (...) charity” according to which an interpretation is better to the extent that we agree more with what the text as interpreted says, is fitting for applicative interpretations, but not without further qualifications for historical ones.The paper argues further that we should apply the methodology of historical interpretation to the entire body of German texts now available, if we want to interpret Martin Heidegger’s philosophical oeuvre, assess its philosophical value, and investigate its links to Nazism. These were the aims of Herman Philipse’s book “Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being. A Critical Interpretation” . Criticisms of this book by Taylor Carman and others are often off target because they presuppose applicative interpretations that aim at making Heidegger say things the interpreter believes himself, instead of striving for historical adequacy, and that are based upon a small selection of translations instead of upon the entire corpus of extant German texts. (shrink)

Quantitative and qualitative research writing is thought to differ in a number of ways, which include the visibility given to the human agents involved, that is, writers and participants in the study. However, most studies have so far centred on writer visibility alone, which has been measured principally through personal pronoun use. This paper approaches the issue of writer and participant visibility in one area of research where both quantitative and qualitative methods are frequent, namely health sciences. A new (...) class='Hi'>methodology is applied, based on the presence of verbs that imply a human agent and thus potentially offer an opportunity for writer or participant visibility. Two corpora are built to represent quantitative and qualitative research writing in health sciences, and quantitative data are obtained. Exploration of the most frequent human-agent verbs, their active uses and their subjects shows that both quantitative and qualitative researchers in health science maintain low writer visibility, but that both writers and participants are more visible in the case of studies using qualitative methodology. These findings are discussed in the light of the bibliography, and pointers are provided for future research. The contribution of the present paper to corpus-assisted research on academic writing is highlighted. Finally, some applications for teaching scientific writing at graduate level are proposed. (shrink)

Corpus linguistics grew up in the domain of written (and literary) varieties, while its recent methodological revolution is due to the computer-assisted capacity of elaborating massive amounts of text data. On the other hand, the so-called ‘low-density varieties’, including spoken varieties as well as varieties spoken in minority communities, have been confined to a rather marginal role. Among others, this is due to the technical problems connected to the scarce degree of normalization in linguistic –including graphemic– terms, as well (...) as to the scarcity of language resources for automatic processing. In this paper, we will exploit the possibilities opened by corpus linguistics for acquiring and analyzing the textual patrimony of the Walser German communities of Piedmont and Aosta Valley. The varieties of Highest Alemannic spoken there, dramatically exposed to language decay, provide a limited but significant amount of data, which is accompanied by a substantial lexical documentation due to the active collaboration of the speakers’ communities in collecting and compiling local dictionaries. After briefly introducing our archive and discussing the peculiar solutions adopted for the construction of the platform, we will also present corpus-based morphological investigations regarding the representation of verbal prefixes, of the clitic group, as well as of the inflectional behaviour of verb classes. (shrink)

The most neglected sector of Kant's Critical Philosophy is his collec tion of remarks about biological phenomena in the second part of the Critique of Judgment, the Critique of Teleological Judgment. The reasons for this are numerous, but since in Kant, everything comes in threes, a three-fold collection will suffice. The Critique of Teleological Judgment itself is one reason. More than most of his writings, this segment of the Critical corpus suffers from what can most charitably be termed "mistakes (...) of exposition. " In this part of the third Critique, it is commonplace to find sub-arguments in Kant's general position somewhere other than their logical niche. The result is that the general theme behind his remarks about living phenomena is obscured. This difficulty has done much to discourage even the most enthusiastic of Kant admirers from investing their time on this work. Secondly, in this century, until very recently, there has been little interest in philosophical questions about biology. Twenty-one out of thirty-one sections of the Critique of Teleological Judgment (sections #61 and 63-83) deal either directly or indirectly with issues of interest in the philosophy of biology. Finally, the Critique of Teleological Judgment has been placed among the last on that list "of writings thought to formulate Kant's Critical system. This is not merely because of its temporal position. (shrink)

In the field of NLP, “noise” is a notion with many different meanings. This is also true in fields of linguistics in which the analysis of ecological data is central.In studies involving corpus linguistic methods, noise management is an essential process for data collection, data structuration and data analysis. Paradoxically, this step is almost never developed, or completely ignored.In this paper, we propose to focus on the management of noise during the various stages classically defined in the processing of (...) an oral corpus: data structuration (including transcription), data enrichment (including annotation) and data analysis.We show that noise management is a cross-cutting issue: it needs to be taken into account during the phases of structuration, data enrichment and analysis of linguistic corpora. More specifically, the creation of corpora of children’s productions leads us to manage a particular type of noise: the variation regarding the so-called “standard” forms. For noise management, we show that there is no ideal methodology: noise management is specific to each project. Moreover, decisions taken at one stage necessarily influence the others: a noise generated during data structuration may cause a silence during automatic processing; a noise “cleaned up” during the processing phase may generate a silence during analysis. (shrink)

Situé dans une approche interactionniste du développement du langage, l’article propose une démarche méthodologique pour étudier l’étayage dans sa dynamique dialogique, pour laquelle le recours à un corpus s’avère indispensable. L’article comprend plusieurs parties : sont présentées d’une part les différentes facettes de l’étayage d’un point de vue théorique, d’autre part la construction d’un outil opérationnel sous la forme d’une grille d’analyse des conduites étayantes des adultes et des réactions des enfants. Enfin, quelques résultats issus d’une recherche sur les (...) interactions mère-enfant, à titre illustratif de la démarche, montrent la façon dont les activités effectuées par les participants façonnent leurs conduites. La discussion se focalise sur les apports d’une analyse de corpus (données de type naturel tout autant que contrôle de certains facteurs, comparaison de données qualitatives et quantitatives, etc.). (shrink)

Cette contribution présente des types de petits corpus très hétérogènes, qui ne sont toujours pas clairement définis : les petits corpus oraux bilingues et plurilingues. Elle envisage d’abord de donner un aperçu de petits corpus et discute l’insécurité terminologique du domaine des corpus bi- et plurilingues. Ensuite, les bases de données de petits corpus bilingues Talkbank, HZSK, Sketchengine et CLAPOTY sont brièvement décrites pour discuter les possibilités de visualisation ainsi que de mise en disposition des (...) données de corpus. Finalement, un exemple concret est présenté : le corpus FM, un petit corpus bilingue français-anglais d’une variété du français canadien, parlée au Manitoba. (shrink)

Dentro del grado en “Lingüística y lenguas aplicadas” de la Universidad de Cádiz, la formación en lingüística de corpus se enmarca en la materia “Industrias de la lengua”. La complejidad de esta reside en que, a pesar de contar con una asignatura propia, también se aborda en otras específicas. Es ahí donde estriba el interés de este estudio, con el que obtuvimos interesantes resultados, ya que observamos que la experimentación investigadora y la puesta en práctica de conocimientos adquiridos optimizaron (...) las notas finales y consiguieron una mayor implicación del alumno, además de enriquecer la labor investigadora del profesorado. (shrink)

The following method is popular in some areas of philosophy and linguistics when trying to describe the semantics of a given sentence Φ. Present ordinary speakers with scenarios that involve an utterance of Φ, ask them whether these utterances are felicitous or infelicitous and then construct a semantics that assigns the truth-value True to felicitous utterances of Φ and the truth-value False to infelicitous utterances of Φ. The author makes five observations about this intuition-based approach to semantics; their upshot is (...) that it should be revised in favour of a more nuanced method. The author suggests that this method should be based on corpus linguistics and makes some tentative remarks about what it might look like and which questions we need to address in order to develop it. (shrink)

Cet article fournit, dans sa première section, une analyse méthodologique de l’utilisation de corpora, au cours de laquelle je détaille, de manière argumentée ce qu’on peut en attendre et pour quels objectifs, précise ce qu’on ne peut pas en attendre et montre pourquoi. La première partie conclut sur l’inutilité des corpora d’occurrences en sémantique des langues, même s’ils sont indispensables dans d’autres disciplines (comme, par exemple, les études littéraires) ; j’insiste sur le caractère nuisible de leur utilisation en sémantique, sauf (...) dans un cas que je spécifie, utilisation qui réintroduit l’introspection sémantique en la maquillant derrière un appareil technique inspiré des statistiques. Dans la deuxième section, je montre qu’il existe un moyen de sortir du carcan pseudo-méthodologique que la mode présentant les corpora comme unique accès à l’observation empirique tente d’imposer ; ce moyen, qui part de l’idée d’enrichir les corpora par des indications sur l’interprétabilité des échantillons, comporte deux aspects principaux : (i) réhabiliter l’expérimentation empirique et (ii) rechercher des hypothèses théoriques permettant d’engendrer des hypothèses descriptives à tester au moyen des expériences empiriques. On y insiste sur le fait que, conformément à ce que requiert une démarche scientifique rigoureuse, les tests empiriques ne peuvent pas vérifier une hypothèse, mais seulement la réfuter : c’est l’échec de la réfutation qui constitue un indice de validité (provisoire) de l’hypothèse. La troisième section présente, en détail et avec des illustrations, deux tests empiriques permettant des expérimentations destinées à tester les descriptions sémantiques que l’on peut être amené à proposer. On y insiste sur le fait que les corpora nécessaires à ces expérimentations peuvent être petits, mais nécessitent une interaction minimale entre l’observateur et les destinataires des échantillons : ils sont enrichis par une indication non verbale, fournie par les destinataires des échantillons, à propos de l’éventuelle difficulté qu’ils ont eues à les interpréter. Les tests sémantiques utilisant des unités de langue déjà décrites, le chapitre conclut sur l’avantage d’une incrémentation de la descriptibilité des unités de langue s’appuyant sur la récursivité des moyens de tester les descriptions : toute description non réfutée par les tests existants permet de construire de nouveaux tests. (shrink)

Este artigo, fruto duma primeira fase de investigações sobre a expurgação dos livros impressos iniciadas em 2011, adopta um ponto de vista e uma terminologia diferentes dos tradicionais. Instaurando decididamente uma distinção entre macro e microcensura, pretende estabelecer os fundamentos da análise dos fenómenos microcensórios, isto é, as modificações efectuadas nos livros em conformidade com as directivas oficiais fixadas pelo Santo Ofício. Este padrão metodológico, baseado na análise de dois corpus – de um lado os índices de livros proibidos (...) e expurgados impressos nos séculos XVI e XVII, e do outro os livros alvo de censura –, visa organizar um estudo sistemático dos fenómenos de expurgação, geralmente menos explorados do que os da proibição pura e simples dos livros. Dois fundos de livros antigos de Coimbra (Biblioteca Geral e da Faculdade de Medicina) foram examinados, limitando-se a análise a obras de médicos portugueses. (shrink)

This article presents a seven-step corpus-based approach to discourse analysis that starts with a detailed analysis of each individual text in a corpus that can then be generalized across all texts of a corpus, providing a description of typical patterns of discourse organization that hold for the entire corpus. This approach is applied specifically to a methodology that is used to analyze texts in terms of the functional/communicative structures that typically make up texts in a (...) genre: move analysis. The resulting corpus-based approach for conducting a move analysis significantly enhances the value of this often used methodology, while at the same time providing badly needed guidelines for a methodology that lacks them. A corpus of ‘birthmother letters’ is used to illustrate the approach. (shrink)

Dissertation is the most important research genre for graduate students as they step into the academic community. The abstract found at the beginning of the dissertation is an essential part of the dissertation, serving to “sell” the study and impress the readers. Learning to compose a well-organized abstract to promote one's research is therefore an important skill for novice writers when they step into the academic community in their discipline. By comparing 112 dissertation abstracts in material science by Chinese and (...) American doctoral students, this study attempts to analyze not only the rhetorical moves of dissertation abstracts but also the lexical-grammatical features of stance in different abstract moves. The findings show that most of the abstracts include five moves, namely, Situating the research, Presenting the research, Describing the methodology, Summarizing the findings, and Discussing the research. However, fewer abstracts by Chinese students include all five moves. In addition, the choices of stance expressions by the two groups vary across the five abstract moves for different communication purposes. The results of this study have pedagogical implications for facilitating the development of academic writing skills for L2 writers. (shrink)

A tight connection between competence and performance is a central tenet of the usage-based model. Methodologically, however, corpus frequency is a poor predictor of acceptability – a phenomenon known as the “frequency/acceptability mismatch”. This article argues that the mismatch arises from a “methodological mismatch”, when simple frequency measures are mapped onto complex grammatical units. To illustrate, we discuss the results of acceptability judgments of go/come-v. The construction is subject to a formal constraint (Go see the doctor! vs. *He goes (...) sees the doctor), which results from its mandative semantics (directives, commissives). While a formal model makes no prediction with regard to gradient acceptability of bare (“grammatical”) go/come-v, the usage-based view assumes that acceptability is a function of compatibility with an abstract schema. The experimental ratings are compared with a number of corpus-derived measures: while acceptability is largely independent of (raw) frequency, it is not independent of frequency-related usage distribution. The results add to recent suggestions that the frequency/acceptability mismatch is substantially reduced if the syntactic complexity of a unit is appropriately captured in usage data. (shrink)

Elicitation materials like language portraits are useful to investigate people’s perceptions about the languages that they know. This study uses portraits to analyse the underlying conceptualisations people exhibit when reflecting on their language repertoires. Conceptualisations as manifestations of cultural cognition are the purview of cognitive sociolinguistics. The present study advances portrait methodology as it analyses data from structured language portraits of 105 South African youth as a linguistic corpus from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. The approach enables the (...) uncovering of (a) prominent underlying conceptualisations of African language(s) and the body, and (b) the differences and similarities of these conceptualisations vis-à-vis previous cognitive (socio)linguistic studies of embodied language experiences. In our analysis, African home languages emerged both as ‘languages of the heart’ linked to cultural identity and as ‘languages of the head’ linked to cognitive strength and control. Moreover, the notion of ‘degrees of proficiency’ or ‘magnitude’ of language knowledge emerged more prominently than in previous studies of embodied language experience. (shrink)

L’omission de clitiques sujets préverbaux en frioulan : méthodologie et analyse à base de contraintesEn frioulan, les clitiques sujets en position préverbale sont omis en général quand le verbe est précédé de la particule négative, d’un clitique objet ou d’un pronom réfléchi. Toutefois, les conditions précises de cette omission n’ont pas été analysées jusqu’à présent de manière approfondie. Dans cet article, je propose une analyse dans le cadre de la théorie de l’optimalité fondée sur des données empiriques. L’analyse est basée (...) sur des jugements de grammaticalité de 52 locuteurs représentant les trois principales variétés frioulanes. Les données sont aussi comparées à celles d’un autre corpus, une bible frioulane. L’article conclut que l’omission des clitiques sujets est déterminée par la phonologie et par une stratégie visant à éviter les syncrétismes. (shrink)

Psychologists have used experimental methods to study language for more than a century. However, only with the recent availability of large-scale linguistic databases has a more complete picture begun to emerge of how language is actually used, and what information is available as input to language acquisition. Analyses of such “big data” have resulted in reappraisals of key assumptions about the nature of language. As an example, we focus on corpus-based research that has shed new light on the arbitrariness (...) of the sign: the longstanding assumption that the relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning is arbitrary. The results reveal a systematic relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning, which is stronger for early acquired words. Moreover, the analyses further uncover a systematic relationship between words and their lexical categories—nouns and verbs sound differently from each other—affecting how we learn new words and use them in sentences. Together, these results point to a division of labor between arbitrariness and systematicity in sound-meaning mappings. We conclude by arguing in favor of including “big data” analyses into the language scientist's methodological toolbox. (shrink)

The present study is a corpus-assisted analysis of discourses on the Catalan movement of independence in the Catalan and Spanish press. A referendum for Catalan independence was held on 1 October 2017 but was not approved by the central Spanish government and was declared illegal. Spanish and Catalan newspapers differed considerably in their treatment and representation of the conflict, which also drew the attention of the international press to Catalonia. My analysis interconnects theoretical perspectives from linguistic critical discourse studies, (...) cognitive linguistics, and media studies. The methodology is based on the analysis of two comparable corpora of journalistic texts. My aim is to identify and compare different features of the semantic prosody of words describing the event of geopolitical separation and the different narratives on this sociopolitical conflict that these prosodies contribute to producing. More specifically, I focus on a selection of keywords, like independence, secession, and sovereignty, that seem to be indicative of different discursive strategies consciously, and possibly unconsciously, chosen by a selection of national Catalan and Spanish newspapers. By carrying out a contrastive analysis of the two corpora, I am able to describe certain similarities, like the similar frequent use of the word independence, and differences, like the more frequent use of the word secession in the Spanish corpus, that indicate different framings of the same event and can be related to different ideological positionings against or in favor of Catalonia’s independence from Spain. (shrink)

Cet article présente et discute la méthodologie de construction d’un corpus plurilingue en diachronie longue (1681-1914). Puisqu’il n’existait pas de corpus alsacien significatif, un important travail de construction d’un corpus significatif a été mené afin de constituer un corpus documentant les contacts linguistiques dans les écrits des locuteurs-scripteurs alsaciens. Cette tâche a présenté un certain nombre de défis méthodologiques causés par le contact des langues, la variation sociolinguistique et diachronique, le manque de sources primaires et de (...) documents numérisés. Parmi ces défis entrent aussi en compte la complexité du contexte historico-politico-sociolinguistique et les rapports entre oralité et scripturalité. (shrink)

The present study investigates the collocation-induced semiosis of the linguistic sign AFRICA as being used in the academic section of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (known as COCA) (Davies, Mark. 2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): one billion words, 1990-present. Available online at https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/). Drawing on a hybrid theoretical framework, the study utilizes Charles Peirce’s (1931–58) semiotic model of the sign and Roman Jakobson’s theory of “markedness” (Jakobson, Roman. 1972. Verbal communication. Scientific American (Special (...) Issue, September 1). 73–80) as well as Stuart Hall’s treatment of “code” (Hall, Stuart. 1980. Encoding/decoding. In Stuart Hall, Doothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, & Paul Willis (eds.), Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972–79, 117–127. New York: Routledge) and John Swales’ notion of “discourse community” (Swales, John M. 1990. Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The study empirically tests the hypothesis that, in a given discourse domain, the relevant interpretant can decode a linguistic sign (representamen) in the co-text of its marked collocates in a way that is collocationally used via the two modes of iconic and indexical signification. The concordance-based analysis conducted in the present study offers two findings, theoretical and practical. First, the study proposes the theoretical concept of collocational semiosis as one way of methodologically integrating the study of collocation into a structural-linguistic analytic framework that richly intersects with the genre-based notion of “discourse community.” Second, in the academic discourse community of the COCA, to the expert interpretant, the representamen AFRICA has been decoded due to its marked collocates which have been technically used in two modes of signification, viz. iconic and indexical. (shrink)

Voice-based, spoken interaction with artificial agents has become a part of everyday life in many countries: artificial voices guide us through our bank’s customer service, Amazon’s Alexa tells us which groceries we need to buy, and we can discuss central motifs in Shakespeare’s work with ChatGPT. Language, which is largely still seen as a uniquely human capacity, is now increasingly produced—or so it appears—by non-human entities, contributing to their perception as being ‘human-like.’ The capacity for language is far from the (...) only prototypically human feature attributed to ‘speaking’ machines; their potential agency, consciousness, and even sentience have been widely discussed in the media. This paper argues that a linguistic analysis of agency (based on semantic roles) and animacy can provide meaningful insights into the sociocultural conceptualisations of artificial entities as humanlike actors. A corpus-based analysis investigates the varying attributions of agency to the voice user interfaces Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant in German media data. The analysis provides evidence for the important role that linguistic anthropomorphisation plays in the sociocultural attribution of agency and consciousness to artificial technological entities, and how particularly the practise of using personal names for these devices contributes to the attribution of humanlikeness: it will be highlighted how Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri are linguistically portrayed as sentient entities who listen, act, and have a mind of their own, whilst the lack of a personal name renders the Google Assistant much more recalcitrant to anthropomorphism. (shrink)

“The Aristotelian corpus and Christian Philosophy in Byzantium between the Ninth and Fifteenth Centuries: Readings and Traditions” is the topic of Section I of SIEPM Commission VIII: Byzantine Philosophy. Aristotle’s writings, which were assimilated variously, function as a meta-text of medieval intellectual culture. Between the nineth and fifteenth centuries Byzantine thinkers developed stable and functional strategies for integrating Aristotle’s philosophical methodology into different theological and philosophical contexts. The project will study the influence of Aristotle on Byzantine metaphysics, epistemology, (...) physics and ethics. We shall attempt to reconstruct the Aristotelian roots of key conceptual models in Byzantine philosophy that played a major role in theological discussion and exposition, such as the metaphysical status of hypostasis, the paradigm of essence-energy, the use of the categories for developing the concept of the image, the transformation of Aristotle’s concept of the soul in lig... (shrink)

Much recent work in Cognitive Linguistics and neighbouring disciplines has adopted a so-called usage-based perspective in which generalizations are based on the analysis of authentic usage data provided by computerized corpora. However, the analysis of such data does not always utilize methodological findings from other disciplines to avoid analytical pitfalls and, at the same time, generate robust results. A case in point is the strategy of using corpus frequencies. In this paper, we take up a recently much debated issue (...) from construction grammar concerning the association between verbs and argument-structure constructions, and investigate a construction, the English as-predicative, in order to test the predictive power of different kinds of frequency data against that of a recent, more refined corpus-based approach, the so-called collexeme analysis. To that end, the results of the application of these corpus-based approaches to an analysis of the as predicative are compared with the results of a sentence-completion experiment. Concerning the topic under consideration, collexeme analysis is not only shown to be superior on a variety of theoretical and methodological grounds, it also significantly outperforms frequency as a predictor of subjects’ production preferences. We conclude by pointing out some implications for usage-based approaches. (shrink)

The purposes of this study are twofold. First, it investigates how the digital media discursively react against the use of anabolic-androgenic steroids. Second, it examines how Thailand is portrayed as a venue for steroid holiday among recreational bodybuilders from the Western countries. Adhering to the principle of theoretical triangulation, the study employs two frameworks including Reisigl and Wodak’s discursive strategies and Van Dijk’s ideological structures. The methodology undertaken is a corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The corpus contains 100 articles (...) published on various websites between the period of 2014 and 2019 with the total number of 107,116 words. Main findings indicate that, regarding the first purpose, the media portray AAS as the ‘outgroup’ by employing various negative lexical items while attempting to dilute any claimed benefits. Concerning the second purpose, Thailand is represented as a venue in which AAS are easily available coupled with corrupt dealers and lax regulations. (shrink)

In this volume Canevaro studies the 'state' documents preserved in the public speeches of the Demosthenic corpus. Offering a comprehensive account of the documents in the corpora of the orators and in the manuscript tradition, Canevaro summarizes previous scholarship and delineates a new methodology for analyzing the documents.

Meaning in sensory language is often built through figurative mechanisms, such as synesthetic metaphors, where a sensorial domain is used to talk about perceptions from a different sense, as in sweet[taste] texture[touch]. The motivation of synesthetic transfers of meaning has been studied in general and literary language, resulting in attempts to reveal universal patterns regarding the directionality of meaning transfer and sensorial conceptual preference. However, those universals have not been proven in any sensory Language for Specific Purposes (LSP). We a (...) sensory LSP corpus of olive oil tasing notes in English to explore the nature of these metaphors, test existent models and explanatory accounts and identify tendencies present in synesthetic meaning transfers. The computer-assisted semi-automatic scalable methodology followed consists of the innovative quasi-simultaneous identification of semantic incongruences and the classification of synesthetic expressions in the discourse according to the source and target sensorial domains. Results show the inadequacy of existent models to explain synesthetic behavior in olive oil tasting language. The patterns found are discussed in the light of cognitive constraints and LSP genre analysis to conclude that a multi-causal approach is needed to explain the motivation of synesthetic transfers of meaning. (shrink)