Jonathan Culpeper, A. Hardie, J. Demmen, Jennifer Hughes, Matt Timperley
Abstract This article explores challenges in the corpus linguistic analysis of Shakespeare’s language, and Early Modern English more generally, with particular focus on elaborating possible solutions and the benefits they bring. An account of work that took place within the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language Project (2016–2019) is given, which discusses the development of the project’s data resources, specifically, the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus. Topics covered include the composition of the corpus and its subcomponents; the structure of the XML markup; the design of the extensive character metadata; and the word-level corpus annotation, including spelling regularisation, part-of-speech tagging, lemmatisation and semantic tagging. The challenges that arise from each of these undertakings are not exclusive to a corpus-based treatment of Shakespeare’s plays but it is in the context of Shakespeare’s language that they are so severe as to seem almost insurmountable. The solutions developed for the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus – often combining automated manipulation with manual interventions, and always principled – offer a way through.
{"title":"Supporting the corpus-based study of Shakespeare’s language: Enhancing a corpus of the First Folio","authors":"Jonathan Culpeper, A. Hardie, J. Demmen, Jennifer Hughes, Matt Timperley","doi":"10.2478/icame-2021-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/icame-2021-0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores challenges in the corpus linguistic analysis of Shakespeare’s language, and Early Modern English more generally, with particular focus on elaborating possible solutions and the benefits they bring. An account of work that took place within the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language Project (2016–2019) is given, which discusses the development of the project’s data resources, specifically, the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus. Topics covered include the composition of the corpus and its subcomponents; the structure of the XML markup; the design of the extensive character metadata; and the word-level corpus annotation, including spelling regularisation, part-of-speech tagging, lemmatisation and semantic tagging. The challenges that arise from each of these undertakings are not exclusive to a corpus-based treatment of Shakespeare’s plays but it is in the context of Shakespeare’s language that they are so severe as to seem almost insurmountable. The solutions developed for the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus – often combining automated manipulation with manual interventions, and always principled – offer a way through.","PeriodicalId":73271,"journal":{"name":"ICAME journal : computers in English linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91336014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In spite of the wide agreement among linguists as to the significance of spoken language data, actual speech data have not formed the basis of empirical work on English as much as one would think. The present paper is intended to contribute to changing this situation, on a theoretical and on a practical level. On a theoretical level, we discuss different research traditions within (English) linguistics. Whereas speech data have become increasingly important in various linguistic disciplines, major corpora of English developed within the corpus-linguistic community, carefully sampled to be representative of language usage, are usually restricted to orthographic transcriptions of spoken language. As a result, phonological phenomena have remained conspicuously understudied within traditional corpus linguistics. At the same time, work with current speech corpora often requires a considerable level of specialist knowledge and tailor-made solutions. On a practical level, we present a new feature of BNCweb (Hoffmann et al. 2008), a user-friendly interface to the British National Corpus, which gives users access to audio and phonemic transcriptions of more than five million words of spontaneous speech. With the help of a pilot study on the variability of intrusive r we illustrate the scope of the new possibilities.
尽管语言学家对口语数据的重要性达成了广泛的共识，但实际的口语数据并没有像人们想象的那样成为英语实证研究的基础。本文旨在从理论和实践两方面为改变这种情况作出贡献。在理论层面上，我们讨论(英语)语言学中不同的研究传统。虽然语音数据在各个语言学科中变得越来越重要，但在语料库语言社区中开发的主要英语语料库，经过仔细采样以代表语言使用，通常仅限于口语的正字法转录。因此，在传统语料库语言学中，语音现象的研究明显不足。同时，使用当前的语音语料库通常需要相当水平的专业知识和量身定制的解决方案。在实践层面上，我们提出了BNCweb的一个新功能(Hoffmann et al. 2008)，这是一个对英国国家语料库的用户友好界面，使用户可以访问超过500万单词的自发语音的音频和音位转录。通过对侵入性r变异性的初步研究，我们阐明了新的可能性的范围。
{"title":"Better data for more researchers – using the audio features of BNCweb","authors":"S. Hoffmann, Sabine Arndt-Lappe","doi":"10.2478/icame-2021-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/icame-2021-0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In spite of the wide agreement among linguists as to the significance of spoken language data, actual speech data have not formed the basis of empirical work on English as much as one would think. The present paper is intended to contribute to changing this situation, on a theoretical and on a practical level. On a theoretical level, we discuss different research traditions within (English) linguistics. Whereas speech data have become increasingly important in various linguistic disciplines, major corpora of English developed within the corpus-linguistic community, carefully sampled to be representative of language usage, are usually restricted to orthographic transcriptions of spoken language. As a result, phonological phenomena have remained conspicuously understudied within traditional corpus linguistics. At the same time, work with current speech corpora often requires a considerable level of specialist knowledge and tailor-made solutions. On a practical level, we present a new feature of BNCweb (Hoffmann et al. 2008), a user-friendly interface to the British National Corpus, which gives users access to audio and phonemic transcriptions of more than five million words of spontaneous speech. With the help of a pilot study on the variability of intrusive r we illustrate the scope of the new possibilities.","PeriodicalId":73271,"journal":{"name":"ICAME journal : computers in English linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88831729","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This article introduces the new Corpus of Regional Indian Newspaper Englishes (CORINNE). The current version of CORINNE contains news and other text types from regional Indian newspapers published between 2015 and 2020, covering 13 states and regions so far. The corpus complements previous corpora, such as the Indian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE) as well as the Indian section of the South Asian Varieties of English (SAVE) corpus, by giving researchers the opportunity to analyse and compare regional (written) Englishes in India. In the first sections of the paper we discuss the rationale for creating CORINNE as well as the development of the corpus. We stress the potential of CORINNE and go into detail about selection criteria for the inclusion of newspapers as well as corpus compilation and the current word count. In order to show the potential of the corpus, the paper presents a case study of ‘intrusive as’, a syntactic feature that has made its way into formal registers of Indian English. Based on two subcorpora covering newspapers from Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand, we compare frequencies and usage patterns of call (as) and term (as). The case study lends further weight to the hypothesis that the presence or absence of a quotative in the majority language spoken in an Indian state has an impact on the frequency of ‘intrusive as’. Finally, we foreshadow the next steps in the development of CORINNE as well as potential studies that can be carried out using the corpus.
{"title":"Comparing written Indian Englishes with the new Corpus of Regional Indian Newspaper Englishes (CORINNE)","authors":"Asya Yurchenko, S. Leuckert, C. Lange","doi":"10.2478/icame-2021-0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/icame-2021-0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article introduces the new Corpus of Regional Indian Newspaper Englishes (CORINNE). The current version of CORINNE contains news and other text types from regional Indian newspapers published between 2015 and 2020, covering 13 states and regions so far. The corpus complements previous corpora, such as the Indian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE) as well as the Indian section of the South Asian Varieties of English (SAVE) corpus, by giving researchers the opportunity to analyse and compare regional (written) Englishes in India. In the first sections of the paper we discuss the rationale for creating CORINNE as well as the development of the corpus. We stress the potential of CORINNE and go into detail about selection criteria for the inclusion of newspapers as well as corpus compilation and the current word count. In order to show the potential of the corpus, the paper presents a case study of ‘intrusive as’, a syntactic feature that has made its way into formal registers of Indian English. Based on two subcorpora covering newspapers from Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand, we compare frequencies and usage patterns of call (as) and term (as). The case study lends further weight to the hypothesis that the presence or absence of a quotative in the majority language spoken in an Indian state has an impact on the frequency of ‘intrusive as’. Finally, we foreshadow the next steps in the development of CORINNE as well as potential studies that can be carried out using the corpus.","PeriodicalId":73271,"journal":{"name":"ICAME journal : computers in English linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80451439","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Evidentiality in gendered styles in spoken English","authors":"E. Söderqvist","doi":"10.2478/icame-2020-0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/icame-2020-0001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":73271,"journal":{"name":"ICAME journal : computers in English linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78428150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Corpus linguistics and the description of English","authors":"Stefan Diemer","doi":"10.2478/icame-2020-0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/icame-2020-0006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":73271,"journal":{"name":"ICAME journal : computers in English linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75267780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Applications of pattern-driven methods in corpus linguistics","authors":"C. Geisler","doi":"10.2478/icame-2020-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/icame-2020-0005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":73271,"journal":{"name":"ICAME journal : computers in English linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77481583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Corpus linguistics and African Englishes","authors":"Frederic Zähres","doi":"10.2478/icame-2020-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/icame-2020-0004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":73271,"journal":{"name":"ICAME journal : computers in English linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73979055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In this article I discuss the issues and challenges of compiling a corpus of historical plays by a range of playwrights that is highly suitable for use in comparative, corpus-based research into language style in Shakespeare’s plays. In discussing sources for digitised historical play-texts and criteria for making a selection for the present study, I argue that not just any set of Early Modern English plays constitutes a suitable basis upon which to make reliable claims about language style in Shakespeare’s plays relative to those of his peers. I point out factors outside of authorial choice which potentially have bearing on language style, such as sub-genre features and change over time. I also highlight some particular difficulties in compiling a corpus of historical texts, notably dating and spelling variation, and I explain how these were addressed. The corpus detailed in this article extends the prospects for investigating Shakespeare’s language style by providing a context into which it can be set and, as I indicate, is a valuable new publicly accessible resource for future research.
{"title":"Issues and challenges in compiling a corpus of Early Modern English plays for comparison with those of William Shakespeare","authors":"J. Demmen","doi":"10.2478/icame-2020-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/icame-2020-0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this article I discuss the issues and challenges of compiling a corpus of historical plays by a range of playwrights that is highly suitable for use in comparative, corpus-based research into language style in Shakespeare’s plays. In discussing sources for digitised historical play-texts and criteria for making a selection for the present study, I argue that not just any set of Early Modern English plays constitutes a suitable basis upon which to make reliable claims about language style in Shakespeare’s plays relative to those of his peers. I point out factors outside of authorial choice which potentially have bearing on language style, such as sub-genre features and change over time. I also highlight some particular difficulties in compiling a corpus of historical texts, notably dating and spelling variation, and I explain how these were addressed. The corpus detailed in this article extends the prospects for investigating Shakespeare’s language style by providing a context into which it can be set and, as I indicate, is a valuable new publicly accessible resource for future research.","PeriodicalId":73271,"journal":{"name":"ICAME journal : computers in English linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73366773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
S. Gries, Santa Barbara, J. Liebig, Sandra C. Deshors
Abstract Corpus-based studies of learner language and (especially) English varieties have become more quantitative in nature and increasingly use regression-based methods and classifiers such as classification trees, random forests, etc. One recent development more widely used is the MuPDAR (Multifactorial Prediction and Deviation Analysis using Regressions) approach of Gries and Deshors (2014) and Gries and Adelman (2014). This approach attempts to improve on traditional regression- or tree-based approaches by, firstly, training a model on the reference speakers (often native speakers (NS) in learner corpus studies or British English speakers in variety studies), then, secondly, using this model to predict what such a reference speaker would produce in the situation the target speaker is in (often non-native speakers (NNS) or indigenized-variety speakers). Crucially, the third step then consists of determining whether the target speakers made a canonical choice or not and explore that variability with a second regression model or classifier. Both regression-based modeling in general and MuPDAR in particular have led to many interesting results, but we want to propose two changes in perspective on the results they produce. First, we want to focus attention on the middle ground of the prediction space, i.e. the predictions of a regression/classifier that, essentially, are made non-confidently and translate into a statement such as ‘in this context, both/all alternants would be fine’. Second, we want to make a plug for a greater attention to misclassifications/-predictions and propose a method to identify those as well as discuss what we can learn from studying them. We exemplify our two suggestions based on a brief case study, namely the dative alternation in native and learner corpus data.
{"title":"There’s more to alternations than the main diagonal of a 2×2 confusion matrix: Improvements of MuPDAR and other classificatory alternation studies","authors":"S. Gries, Santa Barbara, J. Liebig, Sandra C. Deshors","doi":"10.2478/icame-2020-0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/icame-2020-0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Corpus-based studies of learner language and (especially) English varieties have become more quantitative in nature and increasingly use regression-based methods and classifiers such as classification trees, random forests, etc. One recent development more widely used is the MuPDAR (Multifactorial Prediction and Deviation Analysis using Regressions) approach of Gries and Deshors (2014) and Gries and Adelman (2014). This approach attempts to improve on traditional regression- or tree-based approaches by, firstly, training a model on the reference speakers (often native speakers (NS) in learner corpus studies or British English speakers in variety studies), then, secondly, using this model to predict what such a reference speaker would produce in the situation the target speaker is in (often non-native speakers (NNS) or indigenized-variety speakers). Crucially, the third step then consists of determining whether the target speakers made a canonical choice or not and explore that variability with a second regression model or classifier. Both regression-based modeling in general and MuPDAR in particular have led to many interesting results, but we want to propose two changes in perspective on the results they produce. First, we want to focus attention on the middle ground of the prediction space, i.e. the predictions of a regression/classifier that, essentially, are made non-confidently and translate into a statement such as ‘in this context, both/all alternants would be fine’. Second, we want to make a plug for a greater attention to misclassifications/-predictions and propose a method to identify those as well as discuss what we can learn from studying them. We exemplify our two suggestions based on a brief case study, namely the dative alternation in native and learner corpus data.","PeriodicalId":73271,"journal":{"name":"ICAME journal : computers in English linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84870247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
P. Petré, Lynn Anthonissen, Sara Budts, Enrique Manjavacas, Emma-Louise Silva, William H. Standing, Odile A. O. Strik
Abstract The present article provides a detailed description of the corpus of Early Modern Multiloquent Authors (EMMA), as well as two small case studies that illustrate its benefits. As a large-scale specialized corpus, EMMA tries to strike the right balance between big data and sociolinguistic coverage. It comprises the writings of 50 carefully selected authors across five generations, mostly taken from the 17th-century London society. EMMA enables the study of language as both a social and cognitive phenomenon and allows us to explore the interaction between the individual and aggregate levels. The first part of the article is a detailed description of EMMA’s first release as well as the sociolinguistic and methodological principles that underlie its design and compilation. We cover the conceptual decisions and practical implementations at various stages of the compilation process: from text-markup, encoding and data preprocessing to metadata enrichment and verification. In the second part, we present two small case studies to illustrate how rich contextualization can guide the interpretation of quantitative corpus-linguistic findings. The first case study compares the past tense formation of strong verbs in writers without access to higher education to that of writers with an extensive training in Latin. The second case study relates s/th-variation in the language of a single writer, Margaret Cavendish, to major shifts in her personal life.
{"title":"Early Modern Multiloquent Authors (EMMA): Designing a large-scale corpus of individuals’ languages","authors":"P. Petré, Lynn Anthonissen, Sara Budts, Enrique Manjavacas, Emma-Louise Silva, William H. Standing, Odile A. O. Strik","doi":"10.2478/icame-2019-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/icame-2019-0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The present article provides a detailed description of the corpus of Early Modern Multiloquent Authors (EMMA), as well as two small case studies that illustrate its benefits. As a large-scale specialized corpus, EMMA tries to strike the right balance between big data and sociolinguistic coverage. It comprises the writings of 50 carefully selected authors across five generations, mostly taken from the 17th-century London society. EMMA enables the study of language as both a social and cognitive phenomenon and allows us to explore the interaction between the individual and aggregate levels. The first part of the article is a detailed description of EMMA’s first release as well as the sociolinguistic and methodological principles that underlie its design and compilation. We cover the conceptual decisions and practical implementations at various stages of the compilation process: from text-markup, encoding and data preprocessing to metadata enrichment and verification. In the second part, we present two small case studies to illustrate how rich contextualization can guide the interpretation of quantitative corpus-linguistic findings. The first case study compares the past tense formation of strong verbs in writers without access to higher education to that of writers with an extensive training in Latin. The second case study relates s/th-variation in the language of a single writer, Margaret Cavendish, to major shifts in her personal life.","PeriodicalId":73271,"journal":{"name":"ICAME journal : computers in English linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90739725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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