Applied Corpus Linguistics最新文献

This study presents a corpus-assisted ecolinguistic analysis of the evolving discursive representations of tree/s and forest/s in US American discourse from 1820 to 2019 in the approximately 475-million word Corpus of Historical American English (Davies, 2010). To explore these entities and their depictions in prevailing discourse, this study performs a diachronic collocation analysis of adjectives occurring with the terms across the span of the corpus. The analysis identified the 100 most frequent adjective collocates appearing with the singular and plural forms of tree/s and forest/s and calculated Kendall's tau correlation coefficient scores using decade-by-decade per million use rates in order to empirically assess the strength of trends in language use. The findings indicate a divergence in broadly positive and negative representations over the time span as adjectives construing poor health and lack of vitality are rising while adjectives conveying positive attributes of size, beauty, and wellbeing are declining. In addition, adjectives reflecting experiential engagement with tree/s and forest/s have progressively been replaced by a discourse of scientific identification and governmental dominion.

This corpus-based study examined the vocabulary in a 2.7-million-token corpus composed of digital science resources for middle school (6–8 grade) students in the United States. The findings of this study show that to reach the suggested 95%–98% lexical coverage thresholds of the Digital Science Corpus (DSC) that are conventionally deemed to facilitate minimal and optimal reading comprehension (Laufer, 2020), middle school (MS) students grade 6–8 must recognize the first 6,000 and 14,000 most frequent word families in the BNC/COCA (Nation, 2012), respectively, plus proper nouns and marginal words. The results of the lexical analysis across the three sub-corpora in the DSC suggest that the Life Science sub-corpora has a considerably larger vocabulary load than the Physical Science and Earth and Space Science sub-corpora. Additionally, while 98.60% of the most frequent 1,000 BNC/COCA word families occurred at least six times in the DSC, the 2,000–7,000 BNC/COCA word families provided significantly fewer opportunities for repeated occurrence. Since more than half of the words in the 5,000–7,000 BNC/COCA bands occurred five times or less in the overall corpus, most words across these bands do not have high enough frequency in the digital science resources to allow MS students to learn them incidentally from reading the texts found in digital science resources. Several pedagogically relevant suggestions for middle school science teachers are discussed.

One of Randi Reppen's major contributions has been her pioneering corpus research into school children's writing. In this paper, I will discuss how such research can contribute to both theory and educational practice. I will then look at two sets of unresolved methodological issues in this area: the issue of defining appropriate linguistic and textual categories, and the issue of drawing valid developmental inferences.

The issue of categories arises because corpus analysis depends on abstracting away from specific instances of language use in specific texts to make claims about the use of linguistic categories (e.g., noun phrases, low-frequency vocabulary) in textual categories (e.g., stories, science reports). Such abstraction enables researchers to draw out patterns of language variation that are difficult to spot by other means. But it also raises the problem of how to define categories that are reliably operationalizable, that capture consistent developmental patterns, and that are theoretically and educationally informative.

The issue of drawing valid inferences stems from the fact that corpus data record the products of complex, contextually contingent writing processes, involving the interaction of many variables. Capturing the combined outcomes of these complex processes promotes ecological validity. However, it also creates challenges for researchers who want to draw conclusions about specific aspects of the writing process, such as writers’ knowledge of vocabulary or grammar, or their emerging awareness of audience.

This paper will discuss these issues in detail, illustrating their impact and suggesting ways forward for educationally informative corpus research.

This methodology-focused paper reports how I compiled and analysed a 12-million-word corpus of threaded online discussions by employing Corpus Workbench tool (CWB, Evert & Hardie, 2011) and combining corpus analysis with micro-analysis drawing on the principles of digital Conversation Analysis. The tool not only affords an efficient retrieval and analysis of a large dataset, but also, more importantly, facilitates exploration of a corpus of online discussions based on different variables (e.g., topics of discussions, role of internet users, types of postings) and units of analysis (e.g., subforums, threads, postings). Examples are presented to illustrate how I used this tool to investigate various aspects of online discussions, and extract threads surrounding a particular topic or language practices for micro-analysis. I propose internet users’ interactions in online discussions can be further explored in the field of corpus linguistics by using this tool and a synergy of corpus linguistics and an interactional approach.

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.

The effective implementation of health policies addressing opioid addiction may be jeopardized by the complex and sometimes mismatched beliefs and discourses held by policymakers, agency administrators, case managers, and ultimately target populations. Policies must be “aligned” socially across service levels, but misalignment by well-meaning stakeholders becomes a potential hindrance to implementation at different administrative levels. This observation motivates the study to ask, what do health policies and agents actually say? Data for this study come from policy documents (n = 100; words = 571,481) and ethnographic interviews (n = 29; words = 171,492) collected from rural, older adult health service offices. Results and analysis focus on comparing linguistic features, keywords and collocations, between policy texts and agents’ talk. Findings show a complex, socially mediated relationship between priorities and stances in official documents and the enacting agents, especially regarding the causes and effects of the opioid epidemic.

Despite the importance and the ubiquity of medical patient information in many healthcare systems in the world, existing approaches to its production do not seem to result in an effective product as readability measures continually judge most materials too difficult for patients to comprehend. Radiography is one medical setting where understanding patient information materials is particularly important in view of the rising numbers of examinations being performed and the potential risks involved from radiation, though studies consistently show that patients lack basic knowledge regarding the common radiographic exams. The gap in the literature and the concerns relating to patient understanding of radiation risk means there is a pressing need to investigate the linguistic characteristics and the language demands of radiography patient information, though to date very few studies have been carried out of the register and none that use a lexical bundles analysis. This study describes an analysis of 4-word lexical bundles in a corpus of 221 patient information leaflets for radiography which revealed a predominance of bundles more common to dense informational text and classroom instruction than the conversational, everyday language that healthcare writers are encouraged to use. A high frequency of passive structures - usually considered too complex for patients to process and flagged up by readability measures – was also found. An investigation of the discourse functions of the bundles reveals that the underlying purpose of radiography patient information is to instruct, suggesting that a conflict may exist between this and the concepts of patient-centred healthcare.

Measuring lists of lexis across corpora is a well-established method in corpus linguistics. This article takes a novel approach and measures the frequency of occurrence of the Academic Formulas List (AFL; Simpson-Vlach and Ellis, 2010) across academic lectures (OYCLC) and an academic-adjacent corpus of TED talks (TTC). Frequency of occurrence is measured at three levels: overall inter- and intra-corpus variation; the composition of representation, to see which formulas are represented; and an investigation of the behaviour of formulas within texts. The corpora were found to be significantly different from each other in terms of overall representation with a medium effect size. The greatest difference concerned referential expressions and the smallest difference concerned stance expressions. In terms of intra-corpus variation the AFL was found to occur less often in the humanities and most often in the natural sciences for both corpora. The composition of coverage revealed Zipfian distributions for the AFL, with both corpora presenting a similar set of high frequency formulas within each group category. A combined ratio and minimum frequency measure identified salient formulas to each corpus. Concerning formula behaviour, differences were found between the corpora concerning the use of the same formulas. Pedagogic and methodological implications are discussed in the conclusion.

An increasing number of Australian organisations and charities are making use of social media platforms to raise public awareness, gather funds, organise events, and educate and support individuals with invisible chronic conditions (ICCs). During the COVID-19 crisis, the social disconnectedness already experienced by individuals with ICCs led to a rapid rise in their use of social media, mainly for emotional purposes. Although more and more systemic functional linguistic studies of electronically mediated discourse are being carried out, few of them have focused on dialogical interaction and power relationships between organisations engaging with social media, and their followers. The article examines several types of discourse on two public Facebook pages advocating for endometriosis awareness. It adopts a discourse-analytical approach to show how the discursive construct of toxic positivity is enmeshed in power and ideology. Two corpora of posts and comments were extracted from the Endometriosis Australia and MyEndometroisisTeam Facebook pages and analysed combining Systemic Functional Linguistics, Pragma-dialectics, and critical theory. The study revealed that both dominant and other interlocutors on the social media platform often engage in discursive moves inspired by neoliberal ‘positive thinking’ ideology, resulting in a less inclusive SNS platform, which may be redressed by an increased use of affirmative discourse.

Grant proposals seeking research funding represent a high-stakes written academic register for professional scholars. Unfortunately, limited research has been undertaken to inform the productive knowledge required to write quality grant proposals. The little research that exists centers on the broader rhetorical features of the proposals while ignoring their component linguistic features. Among these linguistic features are lexical frames, or discontinuous word sequences (e.g. the * of the). Lexical frames are phraseological building blocks required for constructing the broader rhetorical features of grant proposals. For this reason, investigating lexical frame use in grant proposals is helpful for further informing productive knowledge related to writing quality grant proposals.

The purpose of this study is to profile lexical frame use in National Science Foundation grant proposal abstracts, which serve as public-facing documents used to justify continued dispersal of federal research funds in the Untied States. This is done by following a frame-first approach to comprehensively analyze frequently occurring four-word lexical frames in a corpus of NSF grant proposal abstracts. Results indicate a few general characteristics connected to lexical frame use in NSF abstracts. First, many of the frames exhibit fixed variability in addition to being either unpredictable or highly unpredictable. Furthermore, there are relatively few function word frames (e.g. the * of this) when compared to content word based frames (e.g. goal * this project) and verb based frames (e.g. the * will be). Finally, the majority of frames are functionally referential while there are very few discourse organizing frames. These characteristics are attributable to the short length of the abstracts as well as the fact that the abstracts exhibit a relatively small set of rhetorical moves.