Applied Corpus Linguistics最新文献

In both Australia and the UK, the number of adults living with obesity has been increasing over the last 30 years (AIHW, 2023; Baker, 2023). Although policy has emphasised ‘community-based interventions’ in Australia (AIHW, 2017) and ‘system-wide approaches’ in the UK (Ulijaszek and McLennan, 2016) for overcoming the challenges of obesity, previous research has shown that media representations have been dominated by representations promoting individual responsibility (e.g., Kim & Willis, 2007). In this paper, we report our observations of representations documented in corpora of media coverage from Australia and the UK between 2008-2017. The corpora amount to 16.4 million tokens and 36 million tokens, respectively. We identify key semantic domains for each year of the corpora and discuss both consistent and shifting themes in the data. Our findings show that the Australian coverage provides a more sustained focus on responses to obesity at the societal level, referring to practices in the food industry and differences between communities that can lead to health disparities. By comparison, while there is an increase in the amount of coverage in the UK press referring to obesity, the content became more narrowly focussed on food consumption and weight loss over the study period. The findings demonstrate how media coverage contributes to public understanding of how to respond to the challenges of obesity.

Previous research has yielded a substantial body of empirical evidence regarding the use of metaphors in various types of discourse. However, limited research exists on the relationship between metaphor and more segmented economic industries, such as the luxury hospitality sector. The attention of this article is directed towards inspecting how metaphorical expressions are deployed by luxury hotels to construct their luxury identity and attract potential guests.

A corpus of 62 lxury hotel websites from Singapore and Hong Kong is used as the contextual background for the investigation of metaphor usage in this study. Using MIPVU (Metaphor Identification Procedure VU University Amsterdam), a total of 6990 metaphorical keywords, including a diverse range of 28 source domains were observed. Among others, the five most productive source domains in the corpus are living organism, physical object, space, artifact, and motion. A mixed-methods approach that combines both quantitative data analytics and qualitative discourse analysis reveals and interprets significant associations between source domains, hotel facilities, and regions, suggesting that the choice of metaphorical expressions is not arbitrary but is influenced by specific factors related to the hotel's offerings and cultures. This study emphasises that the analysis of lexical-conceptual patterns in promotional texts can generate deeper insights into positioning strategies.

This study evaluates the extent to which information can be obtained from early Large Language Models (LLMs) for corpus linguistic research. Various tasks were conducted using ChatGPT 3.5, such as generating word frequency lists, collocations, words that fit certain grammatical patterns, and identifying genres. The generations were then compared with the search results from a large-scale general corpus (COCA). While favorable results were not achieved in identifying the genres of words or paragraphs, there was notable congruence in the frequency lists (75.0 %), collocations (42.8 %), and grammatical patterns (53.0 %) for the top 20 items. Even when the generated items did not perfectly match those from COCA, it was evident that high-frequency items were produced. Although LLMs may not be sufficient for rigorous academic research, the results are adequate for discerning overall trends or assisting learners. In addition, the results of this study show that the ability to search at the phrase level is an advantage of using LLMs for corpus research.

Many have claimed that pronominal adverbs, such as hereby, thereafter, and wherein, are a frequent, distinctive, and problematic in their use in legal language (Tiersma, 1999; Mellinkoff, 2004). The purpose of this study is to examine those claims empirically. In the present study, the prevalence of PAs in legal registers is compared to more general registers of contemporary American English to determine the extent to which these words are distinctly legal. The study will also explore why different types of PAs may be (in)frequent in specific legal registers to better understand their use. The frequency of PAs was extracted from corpora that are designed to represent six registers of English (3 legal; 4 non-legal). Rates of occurrence of PAs per text were then compared across registers using Kruskal-Wallis tests with Dunn post-hoc test with an eta² effect size. Subsequently, a functional analysis describing the uses of PAs was also conducted. The results indicate that PAs are highly restricted to legal registers because of functions that they serve. The types of functions that PAs perform within a text are discussed. A closer examination of the PAs considered both individually as well as grouped by locative adverb (i.e., here-, there-, and where-) indicates that some PAs are also more distinctive to certain legal registers for different reasons. This study opens the discussion as to the utility and necessity of PAs in legal language and provides suggestions for legal writers on how to use or remove PAs without inhibiting clarity or effectiveness.

As a crucial register of modernity, the laws of war provide a discursive environment for the production and/or maintenance of key categories associated with organized violence. The register hosts the concepts which are used to refer to mass organized violence (war, armed conflict), and has both constructed and/or amplified categories of person that have been developed to legitimate war and give coherence to the international laws of war (e.g., prisoners of war, civilians). With the key texts of the international laws of war including such well-known instances as the 1949 Geneva Conventions now available in a searchable corpus format via the Sydney Corpus Lab, this paper explores the usage and meaning of war in this register where, in principle, the word war is a central part of a body of law which purports to put limits on organized violence. The method is essentially corpus driven: it takes the usages of this lexical item in this register and explores its frequency, its typical local lexical environments, and its collocates. The analysis shows that while the concept of war is essential to the laws of war, it remains ill-defined, indeed virtually undefined, at the same time that its collocational habits affirm its naturalness and legitimacy. As has been found elsewhere, in the laws of war, war and violence are treated as distinct phenomena, operating in distinct lexical environments. The paper is a contribution from corpus linguistics to the work of understanding the ideological effects of this highly significant legal register.

In this paper, we discuss a variety of misunderstandings that have arisen – and still linger – in the field of Law and Corpus Linguistics (LCL). Many have to do with the interdisciplinary nature of legal scholarship and practice on the one hand and corpus linguistics (CL) on the other. Our goals are to address these misunderstandings to explicate them, illuminate the assumptions that co-motivated them in the first place, and provide advice as to how to discuss, maybe refute, and avoid them moving forward, especially given the progress made to-date. In order to illustrate our discussion, we have separated the critiques into two major stages in the collaborative process – (i) a legal stage and (ii) a corpus linguistics stage. In stage (i), we address issues such as the desire to involve a corpus linguist, the question of whether the use of CL outsources a judicial task, and the role CL plays in legal theories of interpretation. In stage (ii), we discuss common critiques of CL applications to legal interpretation such as the claim that the method is inherently subjective, the potential arbitrariness of corpus compilation and selection, and the variable role that context plays in such applications. The final section provides our set of recommendations connecting the two stages to allow for the iterative fine-tuning process we think is required for successful collaboration in academic and applied legal settings; we conclude with our view on who should do corpus linguistics in legal contexts, hopefully facilitating further talk across the interdisciplinary aisle.

Writing proficiency is associated with linguistic complexity. We used measures of linguistic complexity to investigate the development of children's narrative writing using a large corpus of short stories (N>100,000) written by children aged 5–13 in the UK. Linguistic complexity was assessed using both lexical (N = 30) and syntactic (N = 14) measures. Most measures were associated with age, with writing by older children showing greater lexical density, sophistication, and diversity than writing by younger children. Older children also used longer sentences, and longer T-units and clauses, and the density of smaller syntactic units inside larger units was also higher. Principal Component Analysis identified a number of dimensions associated with complexity, with the first two dimensions capturing nearly 50 % of variance. Lexical diversity was mainly represented on the first dimension and syntactic complexity on the second. Across the age range, there was wider variation in syntactic complexity than in lexical diversity, suggesting that syntactic development is subject to more individual differences than the ability to use a diverse set of lexical items. Our findings quantify the nature and content of children's writing through mid-childhood, and we discuss the utility of analysing children's writing using a computational, data-driven approach.

Collocational competence is essential for all learners, particularly for multilingual learners. This corpus-driven study assembled a 474-collocation list from a digital science corpus compiled from several thousand middle school science resources. Using a corpus of more than 2.7 million tokens and more than 400 node words, the collocation list was extracted by combining two approaches: frequency-based and expert-judged. The Digital Science Collocations List (DSCL) provides middle school learners and teachers with an unprecedented resource covering Life Science, Physical Science, and Earth and Space Science. This list may be especially useful to multilingual learners as most of the collocations in this list are composed of patterns that they struggle with (e.g., adjective + noun and verb + noun).

This article offers an overview of developments in a newly emerging interdisciplinary research field: legal corpus linguistics. The field brings together corpus research and legal theory by applying corpus-analytic techniques and linguistic concepts to facilitate the interpretation of legal texts. Despite the field's short history, it has already contributed important new insights into the meaning of statutory texts and parts of the U.S. Constitution, insights that may have significant practical implications for the American legal system. Our article provides an overview of relevant developments in legal corpus linguistics, from early success stories to recent and ongoing collaborative work between corpus linguists and legal scholars. It aims to highlight the benefits and illustrate the potential of this type of interdisciplinary work by summarizing three recent case studies, each of which deals with an important topic in American constitutional law. The case studies focus in turn on the following parts of the U.S. Constitution: (1) Article III and the meaning of “cases,” (2) the Appointments Provision in Article II, Section 2 and the meaning of “such inferior officers,” and (3) the Impeachment Provision in Article II, Section 4 and the meaning of “misdemeanors.” All three case studies use corpus analysis to explore phraseological patterns in large collections of Founding Era texts to provide insights into the meanings of the selected words and phrases in context during the time the Constitution was drafted and ratified. The article discusses the practical relevance of results from these case studies and potential implications of this and related work in legal corpus linguistics for contemporary and future litigation.

When the meaning of an ambiguous word, phrase or grammatical structure in a statutory provision is disputed, courts are tasked with identifying the best meaning of the contested language. A common method of resolving linguistic ambiguities is to investigate the meaning of the contested word or structure in statutory provisions with similar subject matter. While the subject matter of a text has a demonstrated effect on language use, register variation research shows that the function of a text is also highly influential in predicting linguistic variation. Thus far, the function of a statutory provision (e.g., obligation to act, authorization to act) has not been considered in legal interpretative research. In the present study, I investigate the extent to which function influences the lexico-grammatical characteristics of statutory texts. 2,573 statutory provisions from the Arizona State Code are individually assigned to one of seven categories representing their function: Duties, Permissions, Impersonal Rules, Operational Definitions, Prohibitions, Procedural Guidelines, and Criminal Offenses. Key feature analysis is used to identify and describe patterns of lexico-grammatical variation between the seven functional types. Results reveal a great deal of lexico-grammatical variation associated with function in the register of statutory law. Furthermore, some functional types of statutory provisions are more linguistically distinct than others. These findings suggest that it may be beneficial to consider communicative function when investigating legal interpretative questions.