In this paper, we address a key question that has been central to discussions on rationality: is the concept of rationality normative or merely descriptive? We present the findings of a corpus-linguistic study revealing that people commonly perceive the concept of rationality as normative.

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)

This study examined lexical bundles (LBs) used differently by Chinese and American PhD students of linguistics in their dissertation abstracts. Two corpora were built, with each having 700 dissertation abstracts produced by Chinese and American PhD students of linguistics, respectively. The study then used lexical analysis software to retrieve frequently used three-word LBs, from which LBs having different frequencies at a significant level across the two corpora were identified and termed as bundles used differently (BUDs). BUDs were then (...) categorized and analyzed manually in terms of structure, function, and distribution in rhetorical moves. The major findings were: (1) 57.14% of the frequently used LBs were BUDs, of which 90.67% had occurrences in both corpora. The BUDs distributed inequivalently across categories and moves, with the text-oriented category and the move of Result having the most BUDs; and (2) BUDs exhibited two major patterns: the Chinese and American students filled different constituents into structurally and functionally similar constructions, and used LBs of dissimilar functions to fulfill the same communicative purposes. These findings indicate that variations in LB use have a high pedagogic value and confirm the need for using corpora to identify and teach core genre-specific vocabularies to second/foreign language learners. (shrink)

This book fills a gap in studies of meaning by providing detailed case studies of attested corpus data on the meanings of words and phrases.

The paper reconciles the sociolinguistic concept of stance and stancetaking and Construction Grammar (CxG); it shows that overlapping allostructions may differ in terms of the stances they convey. Drawing on a corpus study of Wikipedia Talk pages, the paper presents a case study of German discourse management markers such as wo wir gerade dabei sind ‘speaking of which’ or wenn wir schon dabei sind ‘while we’re at it’. By statistically comparing the observed frequencies of the filler items (...) with the expected ones (using Hierarchical Configural Frequency Analysis and Distinctive Collexeme Analysis), I will argue that there are two different collocational types, namely wo wir/ich gerade bei NP sind/bin ‘as we are/I am just at NP’ and wenn wir/du schon bei NP sind/bist ‘as we/you are already at NP’. Both serve as discourse management markers, topic orientation markers in particular, whose purpose it is to shift the topic. They involve the same fixed pattern, combining the same categorical slots. However, they diverge in collocational preferences. I will argue that these collocational preferences are indicative of the stances the allostructions conventionally convey: While the allostruction wo wir/ich gerade PP sind/bin seems to be neutral in terms of stance (face-less stance), wenn wir/du schon PP sind/bist is often used to express negative evaluation of a previous utterance made by an interlocutor, thus marking disalignment. The expression of disalignment seems to be related to the construction’s propensity to reference utterances made by an interlocutor. (shrink)

Common arguments for realism about phenomenal consciousness contend that this is a folk concept, with proponents expecting it to be lexicalised in ordinary language. In English, the word ‘experience’ is typically regarded as the best candidate. This predicts that ‘experience’ will be used to refer to mental states and episodes, not only in philosophical but also in ordinary discourse. We conduct a corpus study in order to assess this claim and to understand the actual use of the word (...) in non-academic, academic, and philosophical discourse. In non-academic discourse, uses that refer to knowledge or sources of knowledge, and to public events, are found to dominate. Uses that refer to mental states or episodes dominate only in the philosophy of mind (and not even in philosophy at large). (shrink)

The paper engages in two metaphilosophical disputes. The first concerns the importance of studying original texts to establish the methods used by philosophers. The second addresses the role of intuitions in philosophical arguments. In this paper, I argue that a close reading of original texts is crucial for the methodological dispute on the role of intuitions in philosophy. I refer to the critique of this stance proposed by Landes, discuss it, and justify my claim by presenting the results and benefits (...) of a corpus study concerning the practice known as “intuition-talk” in the theory of reference. The study consists of an in-depth qualitative analysis of this practice with respect to four parameters: indicators of intuition-talk, the subject of that talk, the mode of that talk (whether intuition-talk is used by formulating a judgment on a particular case or ascribing a general property to a given phenomenon), and the issue of whether intuitive claims are supported by arguments. I discuss the results, their consequences, and outline some challenges that need to be addressed in future studies conducted within the proposed approach and thereby demonstrate why such a study, focused on the content of original texts, should be seen as metaphilosophically valuable. (shrink)

Much previous work has suggested that word order preferences across languages can be explained by the dependency distance minimization constraint (Ferrer‐i Cancho, 2008, 2015; Hawkins, 1994). Consistent with this claim, corpus studies have shown that the average distance between a head (e.g., verb) and its dependent (e.g., noun) tends to be short cross‐linguistically (Ferrer‐i Cancho, 2014; Futrell, Mahowald, & Gibson, 2015; Liu, Xu, & Liang, 2017). This implies that on average languages avoid inefficient or complex structures for simpler structures. (...) But a number of studies in psycholinguistics (Konieczny, 2000; Levy & Keller, 2013; Vasishth, Suckow, Lewis, & Kern, 2010) show that the comprehension system can adapt to the typological properties of a language, for example, verb‐final order, leading to more complex structures, for example, having longer linear distance between a head and its dependent. In this paper, we conduct a corpus study for a group of 38 languages, which were either Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) or Subject–Object–Verb (SOV), in order to investigate the role of word order typology in determining syntactic complexity. We present results aggregated across all dependency types, as well as for specific verbal (objects, indirect objects, and adjuncts) and nonverbal (nominal, adjectival, and adverbial) dependencies. The results suggest that dependency distance in a language is determined by the default word order of a language, and crucially, the direction of a dependency (whether the head precedes the dependent or follows it; e.g., whether the noun precedes the verb or follows it). Particularly we show that in SOV languages (e.g., Hindi, Korean) as well as SVO languages (e.g., English, Spanish), longer linear distance (measured as number of words) between head and dependent arises in structures when they mirror the default word order of the language. In addition to showing results on linear distance, we also investigate the influence of word order typology on hierarchical distance (HD; measured as number of heads between head and dependent). The results for HD are similar to that of linear distance. At the same time, in comparison to linear distance, the influence of adaptability on HD seems less strong. In particular, the results show that most languages tend to avoid greater structural depth. Together, these results show evidence for “limited adaptability” to the default word order preferences in a language. Our results support a large body of work in the processing literature that highlights the importance of linguistic exposure and its interaction with working memory constraints in determining sentence complexity. Our results also point to the possible role of other factors such as the morphological richness of a language and a multifactor account of sentence complexity remains a promising area for future investigation. (shrink)

The nature of moral judgments, and, more specifically, the question of how they relate, on the one hand, to objective reality and, on the other, to subjective experience, are issues that have been central to metaethics from its very beginnings. While these complex and challenging issues have been debated by analytic philosophers for over a century, it is only relatively recently that more interdisciplinary and empirically-oriented approaches to such issues have begun to see light. The present chapter aims to make (...) a contribution of that kind. We will present the results of an empirical – specifically, corpus linguistic – study that offers evidence that moral predicates exhibit hallmarks of subjectivity at the linguistic level, but also, that they differ significantly from paradigmatically subjective predicates. (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)

In this paper we document the developmental trajectory of the complementizer system (CP-system) in Italian by looking at the earliest spontaneous production of eleven young children, whose transcriptions are available on CHILDES. We conducted a novel corpus analysis, tracking down a number of constructions in which the clausal left-periphery is activated. First, we considered the appearance of the different complementizer particles in the CP-system, which overtly realize the three distinct functional projections ForceP, IntP, and FinP. The analysis revealed that (...) children acquiring Italian correctly use these complementizer particles already in the third year of life. Second, we looked for the simultaneous activation of different functional projections within the CP-system. We went through our corpus searching for complex sentences in which more than one constituent was moved to the left periphery. This option is allowed by the adult grammar of Italian and, as our search revealed, it is also attested in the grammar of young children. Soon after their second birthday, sequences in which a left-dislocated Topic and a Wh- element co-occur are attested, directly supporting the existence of a (high) Topic position above FocusP. Moreover, movement in general conforms to the constraints of the adult grammar, with no attested violation of obligatory inversion (a consequence of the Q-Criterion). Importantly, “why-questions” did not require inversion, much as in the adult grammar of Italian. Taken together, children's use of complementizer particles and their activation of multiple landing sites for movement show that 2-year-olds already possess a richly articulated functional structure of the CP-system, aligned to the layered adult structure. In concluding the paper, we also discuss some temporal differences between constructions activating high and low portions of the CP-system. In particular, we detect a temporal precedence for wh-questions over why-questions. Since the former activate a lower projection, this is consistent with the recently proposedGrowing Treeshypothesis, according to which the development of the CP-system proceeds stepwise. (shrink)

Previous psycholinguistic studies have suggested that English and Spanish express temporal duration through different metaphors. English tends to use the time-as-length metaphor (e.g. I have been w...

Corpus analysis allows researchers to inform, illuminate, and investigate many problems. This chapter provides easy access to some of the central tools commonly used in corpus linguistics. After a short exploration of pre-built corpora and a brief literature review surveying corpus-analytic studies in philosophy, we illustrate these tools by running several corpus analyses on the term “conspiracy theory.” These analyses show that “conspiracy theory” is a strongly evaluative term. The reader of this chapter can follow each (...) of the steps of the corpus analyses using the online material that is freely available. (shrink)

Cappelen (2012) argues against the Thesis of Centrality, that is, against the idea that analytic philosophers rely on intuitions as evidential support for their theories. Cappelen challenges this notion by targeting the “Argument from ‘Intuition’-Talk”, i.e., the idea that intuitions must play a decisive role in the arguments of analytic philosophers because they use intuition talk profusely. This paper empirically examines this claim by assessing the prevalence of intuition talk in critical parts of the arguments. Specifically, it explores whether intuition (...) talk coincides with reasoning markers signifying premises and conclusions. To accomplish this, I will first compile a corpus of articles on taste disagreements. Then, I will conduct two types of analysis: a frequency list analysis, and an analysis of the dispersion of both types of vocabulary along the corpus. (shrink)

Keyword analysis is used to compare the reporting strategies of three major UK newspapers on the topic of Edward Snowden and state surveillance. Differences are identified in the reporting strategies of The Guardian, Daily Mail and The Sun that provide insight into the ideology of the British press. There is significant variation in the style, content and stances of each newspaper towards state surveillance, as well as clear evidence of ideology within each paper: The Guardian is critical of surveillance and (...) defensive of its decision to publish classified documents; the Daily Mail focuses heavily on personalisation and the personal life of Edward Snowden; and The Sun perpetuates an us/them ideology that is highly supportive of state surveillance. These differences are motivated by each newspaper’s ideology, news values and audience considerations and demonstrate how British newspapers offer radically different perspectives on the same events. (shrink)

This paper aims at combining different theoretical and methodological approaches for the analysis of discourse, focusing in particular on argumentative structures. At a first level an attempt is made to include argumentation in critical discourse analysis in order to extend the analysis of interaction between “structures of discourse” and “structures of ideologies” (T. A. van Dijk, R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. Sage, London, 1995) to higher levels of language description. At a second level the (...) study will integrate the qualitative approaches of critical discourse analysis and argumentation theory with the quantitative tools of corpus linguistics, so that the analysis can be carried out on a representative amount of texts and in a more systematic way. Even though corpus linguistics tends to be focused on meanings localized at the level of words, while argumentative structures stretch out through longer units of text, an integration can be attempted by circumscribing the enquiry to those aspects of argumentation which are signalled by indicators, and are therefore electronically retrievable. In particular, this paper investigates the use of dissociation and presupposition in a corpus of newspaper articles published in the run up to the war on Iraq. Both structures respond to retrievability criteria while being powerful instruments to convey ideologically oriented messages. (shrink)

One of the tasks faced by young children is the segmentation of a continuous stream of speech into discrete linguistic units. Early in development, syllables emerge as perceptual primitives, and the wholesale storage of syllable chunks is one possible strategy for bootstrapping the segmentation process. Here, we investigate what types of chunks children store. Our method involves selecting syllabified utterances from corpora of child-directed speech, which we vary according to (a) their length in syllables, (b) the mutual predictability of their (...) syllables, and (c) their frequency. We then use the number of utterances within which words are contained to predict the time course of word learning, arguing that utterances which perform well at this task are also more likely to be stored, by young children, as undersegmented chunks. Our results show that short utterances are best-suited for predicting when children acquire the words contained within them, although the effect is rather small. Beyond this, we also find that short utterances are the most likely to correspond to words. Together, the two findings suggest that children may not store many complete utterances as undersegmented chunks, with most of the units that children store as hypothesized words corresponding to \textit{actual} words. However, dovetailing with an item-based account of language-acquisition, when children do store undersegmented chunks, these are likely to be short sequences -- not frequent or internally predictable multi-word chunks. We end by discussing implications for work on formulaic multi-word sequences. (shrink)

As more and more sophisticated software is created to allow the mining of arguments from natural language texts, this paper sets out to examine the suitability of the well-established and readily available methods of corpus linguistics to the study of argumentation. After brief introductions to corpus linguistics and the concept of meta-argument, I describe three pilot-studies into the use of the terms Straw man, Ad hominem, and Slippery slope, made using the open access News on the Web (...) corpus. The presence of each of these phrases on internet news sites was investigated and assessed for correspondence to the norms of use by argumentation theorists. All three pilot-studies revealed interesting facts about the usage of the terms by non-specialists, and led to numerous examples of the types of arguments mentioned. This suggests such corpora may be of use in two different ways: firstly, the wider project of improving public debate and educating the populace in the skills of critical thinking can only be helped by a better understanding of the current state of knowledge of the technical terms and concepts of argumentation. Secondly, theorists could obtain a more accurate picture of how arguments are used, by whom, and to what reception, allowing claims on such matters to be evidence, rather than intuition, based. (shrink)

This study investigates the use of modal verbs in Chinese–English government press conference interpretation. Modal verbs mark the speaker’s opinion of or attitude toward the event described in a sentence. Interpreters also use modal verbs to indicate the stances of the source language speakers. The use of modal verbs has been examined in such contexts as research papers, textbooks, and second language learners’ output; however, studies that compare differences in modal verbs between source and target languages in the context (...) of interpreting are sparse. The investigation being reported is based on a comparable corpus—an original Chinese GPC and its English-translated version—and a parallel corpus—a translated English GPC and the original English version from the US. The results of the comparable corpus analysis indicate that the frequency of modal verbs in translated English is significantly higher than in original Chinese, in which only 40% of the modal verbs in translated English are consistent with their Chinese counterparts, while others are employed through amplification and value variation. The results of the parallel corpus analysis suggest that the increase of modal verbs in the target texts may help to achieve certain types of pragmatic functions in English. (shrink)

This volume seeks to advance and popularise the use of corpus-driven quantitative methods in the study of semantics. The first part presents state-of-the-art research in polysemy and synonymy from a Cognitive Linguistic perspective. The second part presents and explains in a didactic manner each of the statistical techniques used in the first part of the volume. A handbook both for linguists working with statistics in corpus research and for linguists in the fields of polysemy and synonymy.

Resumen: En el ámbito de los Estudios de Traducción Basados en Corpus (ETBC), la exploración del estilo de traducción ha emergido como un eje de análisis cada vez más relevante. El presente, fundamentado en un corpus paralelo autoconstruido, se orienta a analizar los perfiles estilísticos de la traducción de los culturemas de las Analectas (Lunyu) realizadas por Pérez Arroyo (1999) y Suárez Girard (1997). Este corpus, que se configura mediante una combinación metodológica cuantitativa y cualitativa, nos permite (...) profundizar en las características estilísticas en el plano léxico, sintáctico y discursivo e identificar sus similitudes y particularidades entre las versiones traducidas, así como las tendencias que los traductores siguen al abordar los culturemas. A partir de los resultados obtenidos, se aportan sugerencias para la traducción de los culturemas con el objetivo de mejorar las futuras traducciones del clásico confuciano. Abstract: The study of translation style is becoming increasingly significant in the field of Corpus-Based Translation Studies (CBTS). This research, grounded in a self-constructed parallel corpus, aims to analyze the stylistic profiles in the translation of culture-specific items in the Analects (Lunyu) by Pérez Arroyo (1999) and Suárez Girard (1997). This corpus, created through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, allows us to explore the stylistic characteristics at the lexical, syntactic, and discursive levels, and to identify the similarities and particularities among the translated versions, as well as the trends followed by the translators in addressing culture-specific items. Based on the results obtained, suggestions are provided for the translation of culture-specific items with the goal of enhancing future translations of this Confucian classic. (shrink)

Palm-up (PU) is among the most frequent manual forms across signed languages, yet its functional range and form-function mapping remain poorly understood. This study presents a corpus-based analysis of PU in Chinese Sign Language (CSL), drawing on 793 tokens from 15.6 h of naturalistic interaction across three generations of signers. All tokens were coded for function, handshape, movement, clausal position, and non-manual features. PU in CSL is restricted to three functional domains: negation (61 %), discourse marking (28 %), (...) and interrogation (11 %), which together account for 100 % of the corpus with no propositional functions attested. Each domain is associated with a stable bundle of formal features, forming a gradient from context-dependent discourse uses to morphologically bound affixal forms. Age-based analysis shows that the functional inventory is stable across cohorts while internal weighting has shifted, reflecting differential entrenchment consistent with ongoing grammaticalization. These findings support the view that PU is specialized for intersubjective meaning, managing cognitive coordination between signer and addressee, and that this specialization reflects both the iconic, addressee-directed properties of the open-palm form and the conventionalization history of individual signing communities. (shrink)

Since the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 has been sweeping the world on an unprecedented scale. As an important means of fighting the virus, vaccines have provoked heated discussions. Motivated by this practical concern, the present study aims at contributing to the understanding of public opinions about vaccines, which may provide implications for the government in their making and implementation of related policies. This research adopts a corpus-based approach in conjunction with a Critical Discourse Analysis. Data for this (...) class='Hi'>study drawn from the Coronavirus corpus show what people are actually saying in online newspapers and magazines in 20 different English-speaking countries. The collocation and frequency of the word “vaccine” are arranged in concordance contextually. Overall, this study reveals that the collocation of vaccine can be divided into several categories, and people’s major concerns about COVID-19 vaccination include global progress, equality, and the latest development. (shrink)

The reasonable person standard is key to both Criminal Law and Torts. What does and does not count as reasonable behavior and decision-making is frequently deter- mined by lay jurors. Hence, laypeople’s understanding of the term must be considered, especially whether they use it predominately in an evaluative fashion. In this corpus study based on supervised machine learning models, we investigate whether laypeople use the expression ‘reasonable’ mainly as a descriptive, an evaluative, or merely a value-associated term. We (...) find that ‘reasonable’ is predicted to be an evaluative term in the majority of cases. This supports prescriptive accounts, and challenges descriptive and hybrid accounts of the term—at least given the way we operationalize the latter. Interestingly, other expressions often used interchangeably in jury instructions (e.g. ‘careful,’ ‘ordinary,’ ‘prudent,’ etc), however, are predicted to be descriptive. This indicates a discrepancy between the intended use of the term ‘reasonable’ and the understanding lay jurors might bring into the court room. (shrink)

Since the bilateral commerce between the USA and China changes greatly and Chinese government continues to reform and delegate power in the economic field, it is of importance to study the Uniform Commercial Code of the USA. The study specifically studies the features of modal verbs in the UCC through the comparison with the United States Code and Frown. With the help of Antconc, the distribution of modal verbs, the modal value of the three sets of corpora are (...) examined and analyzed based on the theory of Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar. The results show that there are significant differences between the three sets of corpora and the three main features of modal verbs in the UCC are: the high frequency use of may, the relatively lower frequency use of legal modal verb shall, and the much higher frequency of must and may not. The seemingly contrary usages within the UCC are discussed and explained with the background of the legislation and the legal thoughts of the major legislator in a sociosemiotic approach. With both the quantitative and qualitative analysis combining the examples, the study hopes to shed light on the related legal translation and further enhance the understanding of the modal verbs in the UCC as well as legal discourse in a more general context. (shrink)

Appraisal is the way language users express their attitude towards things, people, behaviour or ideas. In the last few decades, significant achievements have been made in Appraisal Theory research, yet little attention has been paid to appraisal in scientific texts, especially in relation to the contrast to how it is applied in English and Chinese. This title examines the similarities and differences of Appraisal systems in English and Chinese scientific research articles. Using a self-constructed corpus of scientific research articles, (...) the authors make cross-linguistic comparisons in terms of the quantity and distribution patterns of categories of appraisals. They creatively categorise articles into theoretical scientific research articles and applied studies and discover that for both languages, each genre can have its own favorite mode of distribution for the realization of appraisal systems. In addition, this research helps appraisal theory systems to become more explicit, specific, and more applicable for the analysis of scientific research articles. Students and scholars of applied linguistics, comparative linguistics and corpus linguistics will find this an essential reference. (shrink)

This study investigates the rhetorical function of adjectives and adverbs as boosters in dissenting opinions issued by judges of the _Supreme Court of the United States_. It focuses on the linguistic strategies through which dissenting judges assert their individual stance, engage critically with the majority’s reasoning and position themselves within the broader institutional discourse of the Court. Drawing on an ad hoc corpus comprising 934,370 tokens from dissenting opinions delivered between 2021 and 2025, the analysis employs corpus (...) linguistic tools, including TagAnt and AntConc, to identify and categorise lexical items that intensify evaluative meaning. Boosters are examined in terms of their pragmatic function, with five primary categories emerging, namely, Criticising (C), Emphasising (E), Hedging (H), Stance (S) and Shared Values (SV). These categories reveal how lexical choices signal varying degrees of alignment, resistance and persuasion. Particular attention is paid to multi-word expressions or n-grams, specifically adverb-adjective and adverb-adverb combinations, through which judges construct nuanced evaluative meanings and reinforce rhetorical force. The study shows how these lexico-grammatical patterns contribute to the construction of judicial authority, the negotiation of institutional identity and the performative aspects of dissent. By foregrounding the role of linguistic intensification, the research contributes to a richer understanding of dissent as a site of rhetorical agency within legal discourse. (shrink)

This article reports on an inquiry that investigated the development of ba constructions in early childhood Mandarin. All cases of ba construction were extracted from the Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus collected from 168 preschoolers aged 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, and 5;6. Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus, University of Hong Kong. Data analysis indicated that: Mandarin-speaking children produced a repertoire of 11 types of ba construction, and the children in the youngest age group were able to produce six types of them; (...) children at 4 years old experienced a critical developmental period of pragmatic use, and at 5 years old they had attained cognitive and linguistic maturity in understanding the semantic and syntactic features of ba constructions; and there was a significant age effect on the production of three types of ba construction, but no significant association between the children’s gender and their production of ba constructions. These findings offer fresh insights into understanding Chinese children’s innate capacity to understand the co-occurrence constraints concerning the syntactic, semantic and verb features inherent in ba construction, and their developmental ability to denote telic events by resorting to the appropriate ba sentence patterns. (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)

How evaluative are legal texts? Do legal scholars and jurists speak a more descriptive or perhaps a more evaluative language? In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study in which we examined the use of evaluative language in both the legal domain as well as public discourse. For this purpose, we created two corpora. Our legal professional corpus is based on court opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We compared this professional corpus (...) to a public corpus, which is based on blog discussions on the internet forum Reddit. While many linguistic phenomena can give insights into evaluativity, we investigated the use of a wide selection of evaluative adjectives (more specifically, thick adjectives) to gain a more comprehensive picture of the degree of evaluativity in the legal domain. Our analysis shows that legal professionals use thick terms less evaluatively than laypeople, which suggests that legal texts are less evaluative than ordinary discussions. This result, more generally, supports the philosophical idea that thick concepts may vary in their evaluative intensity. (shrink)

Drawing on the epistemology of logic literature on anti-exceptionalism about logic, we set out to investigate the following metaphilosophical questions empirically: Is philosophy special? Are its methods (dis)continuous with science? More specifically, we test the following metaphilosophical hypotheses empirically: philosophical deductivism, philosophical inductivism, and philosophical abductivism. Using indicator words to classify arguments by type (namely, deductive, inductive, and abductive arguments), we searched through a large corpus of philosophical texts mined from the JSTOR database (N = 435,703) to find patterns (...) of argumentation. The results of our quantitative, corpus-based study suggest that deductive arguments are significantly more common than abductive arguments and inductive arguments in philosophical texts overall, but they are gradually and steadily giving way to non-deductive (i.e. inductive and abductive) arguments in academic philosophy. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore the dynamic aspect of deepening our understanding of concepts and reality that involves experiences and thought at later stages of our lives along personal and social dimensions. We take a linguistic approach, using corpus data focusing on examples of Japanese hontōno {jibun/ shiawase} ‘true {self/ happiness}’ and their lexical variants. Insights about the concept and reality of hontōno {jibun/ shiawase} are identified and organized in terms of classification and contrast. Then qualitative and quantitative analyses (...) of the corpus data that are annotated with the identified insights are provided. The analysis demonstrates that the meaning of jibun and shiawase extends beyond lexical and encyclopedic knowledge and reflects the process of seeking and approaching truth with a critical stance toward the world around us (e.g. a common sense of values). Hontōno is fundamentally involved in this process and functions as a contrast marker reflecting human critical thinking. The discussion includes a comparison between the empirical insights about shiawase and Aristotle’s philosophical thought on eudimonia ‘happiness’ as presented in Nicomachean Ethics. The findings suggest that the proposed corpus-based analysis serves as an effective means for obtaining and utilizing empirical data for the exploration of philosophical issues as well as lexical semantics and pragmatics. (shrink)

Resumen: El corpus, siendo una herramienta eficaz, se está empleando en múltiples ámbitos, entre los que se encuentran los estudios de traducción. Sin embargo, dicho recurso no se utiliza con mucha frecuencia en las investigaciones traductológicas cuando una de las lenguas en cuestión es chino clásico (la lengua escrita empleada antiguamente en China), y autores que sí hacen estas investigaciones suelen no mencionar los pasos a seguir cuando se trata un corpus paralelo ad hoc. El objetivo del presente (...) artículo es presentar cómo se elabora un corpus paralelo chino clásico-español tomando como ejemplo la novela histórica Romance de los Tres Reinos y sus traducciones al español. Para ello, hemos descrito la problemática de creación y explotación de este tipo de corpus, siguiendo el orden de las fases del proceso. Resulta que algunas fases del proceso son universales, mientras que otras son propias de lenguas clásicas y de la combinación lingüística chino-otra lengua, en cuyo caso sí faltan aplicaciones eficaces. Con el trabajo, esperamos deparar información a los estudiosos que quieran realizar y profundizar las investigaciones basadas en corpus paralelo y en las obras clásicas de China. Abstract: The corpus, being an effective tool, is utilized in multiple fields. One of them is the Translation. However, this resource isn´t used frequently in translation studies when one of the languages in question is classical chinese (written language used anciently in China). And when it comes to an ad hoc parallel corpus, the steps of how to create it are usually omitted by researchers who make such investigations. The objective of this article is to present how to elaborate a classic Chinese-Spanish parallel corpus taking as example the historic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms and its two translations into Spanish. To reach the objective, we have described the problem of creation and exploitation of this type of corpus, following the order of the phases of the process. We’ve found that some of the phases are universal while other phases are unique for old languages and for the linguistic combination Chinese-other language. And in this latter case, there’s a lack of effective applications. With the current work, we hope to offer useful information to those scholars who are willing to carry out their own investigations based on self-built parallel corpus and at the same time related to the classic Chinese works. (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)

Studies in Hittite Economic Administration: A New Edition of the Hittite Palace-Temple Administrative Corpus and Research on Allied Texts Found at Ḫattuša. By James M. Burgin. 2 vols. Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten, vols. 70, 71. Harrassowitz Verlag, 2022. Pp. xx + 666 (vol. 1), xxi + 650 (vol. 2). €120 each.

The aim of this research is to analyze the political discourse and the language they used in public addresses provided by two former presidents of the United States, specifically, President Barak Obama and President Donald Trump. This research reflects on the material that has been collected for several months which aimed to contribute on the analysis of the corpus, distinctions and similarities, as well as their attitudes towards the public opinion. The objectives of this study are mainly empirical (...) and theoretical. Considering the empirical objectives, this study seeks to explore, identify and categorize the most used words in a political speech according to the categories, form, function and meaning, whereas, the theoretical objectives of this study are to provide a description of the language that is used in major events from well-known politicians when aiming to capture people’s attention. Their rhetorical habits were examined, in every delivery of Mr. Obama’s political speech; his speeches were carefully and well-articulated throughout his 8 year political service in the oval office, portraying him as a kind person. On the other hand, Mr. Trump’s, as a non-politician, more as a businessman, political speeches throughout his campaign and 4 years in the office were very often seen as aggressive, unforeseen, and nonetheless straight to the point. This study covers the linguistic level analysis as well as semantic and pragmatic levels. Initially, the selected corpora were analyzed using the Ant Conc software regarding frequency of usage and then move into detailed analysis. (shrink)

Cyberbullying transmits negative information and inflicts verbal harm by means of evaluative language. Drawing on the Appraisal system, this study investigates the usage patterns and coupling patterns of attitude and engagement resources in cyberbullying discourse through a corpus-based approach that integrates quantitative annotation and qualitative interpretation. The corpus consists of 585 comments extracted from nine representative cyberbullying incidents on Sina Weibo. The findings reveal an uneven distribution of appraisal resources: within the attitude system, judgement resources (particularly those (...) related to propriety) predominate, reflecting a strong emphasis on moral evaluation. Within the engagement system, contractive heteroglossia (specifically deny and concur) is the most prevalent, serving to suppress dissenting voices. More importantly, cyberbullies tend to deploy these resources in combination rather than in isolation, strategically coupling attitude resources (notably negative judgement) with engagement resources (notably dialogic contraction). This coupling generates three discursive mechanisms: establishing the hegemony of moral judgment, amplifying emotional venting for group incitement, and shaping public perception to evade responsibility. Collectively, these patterns construct a hostile communicative environment targeted at the victim. These findings may provide linguistic insights for the identification and governance of cyberbullying contents on social media. (shrink)

This paper presents the results of an empirical study following up on Mizrahi (2021). Using the same methods of text mining and corpus analysis used by Mizrahi (2021), we test empirically a philosophical account of scientific progress that Mizrahi (2021) left out of his empirical study, namely, the so-called functional-internalist account of scientific progress according to which the aim or goal or scientific research is to solve problems. In general, our results do not lend much empirical evidence (...) in support of the problem-solving model of scientific progress over the other philosophical accounts of scientific progress (namely, the epistemic, noetic, and semantic accounts of scientific progress) tested in Mizrahi (2021) and in this follow-up study. Of all the subjects in the JSTOR database we have tested in this study, however, Mathematics is an interesting exception as far as the problem-solving model of scientific progress is concerned. For, in Mathematics alone, we have found that there is significantly more talk of the aims and/or goals of research in terms of solutions than in terms of truth, knowledge, or understanding. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This corpus-assisted critical discourse study examines news reports published by China’s official English-language media from 2000 to 2018, with the goal of understanding how they represent LGBTQ+ issues within the China’s socio-political context. Analysis reveals that the discussion of LGBTQ+-related topics has been consistently discouraged in China’s official English-language media, and the few news reports which have appeared in these media sources have focused on preventing the spread of HIV/aids through homosexual behaviors, on promoting LGBTQ+ rights, and (...) on advocating for the liberalization of sex education in China. The range of these focuses indicates that, despite widely-held negative stereotypes regarding homosexual behaviors and their relation to the spread of HIV/aids, the official English-language media of China have endeavored to project a positive image of the Chinese central government’s efforts to construct a society that is open, inclusive, and tolerant of LGBTQ+ individuals. This study also discusses positive changes in the social well-being of LGBTQ+ persons in China as evidenced first by the more liberal attitudes that gradually have resulted from the efforts of Chinese netizens to influence LGBTQ+-related governmental policies and second, by the more positive representations of LGBTQ+ issues being communicated to global audiences through the China’s official English-language media. (shrink)

Studies show that identity cannot only be self-constructed but also be other-constructed, taking on cultural-specific features and being dynamically constructed in interaction. In cyberbullying incidents, netizens construct identities for victims and wield these images as a fist to launch their attacks. Adopting Bucholtz and Hall’s principles on identity, this paper conducts a corpus-based study of other-constructed victim identities in a Chinese cyberbullying case on Sina Weibo. Three questions are addressed: What identities are constructed for the victim by netizens? (...) How are these identities discursively and intersubjectively constructed in cyberbullying? And what cultural norms and social practices influence the construction of these identities? Data analysis shows that three other-constructed victim identities, employing Chinese cultural and social elements under the principles of indexicality and relationality, are identified: (i) a party member who undermines the social trust; (ii) a ‘fairy’ who exhibits double standards; and (iii) a ‘good student’ who manipulates social media. This study concludes that in cyberbullying cases, netizens utilize linguistic tools including labelling, implicature, and stance staking to construct negative identities for the victim through intersubjective relations, and resort to cultural and social contexts rooted in Chinese traditions, beliefs, and values to launch attacks. This case study may hopefully shed light on the detection of cyberbullying through corpus-based analysis. (shrink)

This article presents an interdisciplinary socio-philosophical study that seeks to integrate corpus linguistics with philosophical analysis of metamodernism and its eschatological potential. The authors argue that today’s global political, ecological, and technological challenges call for a renewed mode of thinking about the future – one that transcends both postmodern skepticism and the linear teleology of modernism. As a cultural and methodological framework, metamodernism is capable of holding the tension between a belief in progress and a critical reassessment of (...) past utopias. Therefore, the authors contend, metamodernism offers fertile ground for the emergence of new eschatological imaginaries. The central claim is that philosophy, which relies on quantitative analysis of philosophical texts (e.g., concordances, collocations, frequency data) – not only allows for empirical validation of philosophical intuitions but also helps overcome subjectivism in interpreting complex concepts, particularly those related to eschatology. Through corpus analysis, the authors reconstruct eschatological sensibilities in the works of Marx, Engels, leading metamodernists (such as Freinacht and van den Akker), and eco-socialist theorists, highlighting not only critiques of capitalism but also emerging efforts to articulate positive visions of the future. Eco-socialism, in this context, is interpreted as one of the few paradigms capable of uniting ecological ethics, social justice, and materially grounded utopia. Though, drawing on international sociological surveys, the study demonstrates that contemporary imaginaries of the future are polyphonic, conflictual, and saturated with existential anxiety – underscoring the need for new forms of eschatological reasoning. Ultimately, the article offers a corpus-supported reconstruction of metamodern eschatology – one that incorporates dialectical thinking about the end, political commitment, openness to a multiplicity of futures, and attentiveness to the voices of the marginalized. This form of eschatology is not abstract; rather, it emerges as a tool of critique and political engagement in an age of ecological, political, and economic polycrisis. (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 paper presents the outcomes of the project ORFEO (tools for the study of spoken and written French). The outcomes consist of a 4M words spoken French and 6M written French sampled corpus. Detailed metadata allows the user to build his own study corpus according to his research purposes. Oral resources have been unified under trs. Format aligned with sound files. Spoken data have been segmented and annotated into POS and dependency relations. The precision of these (...) annotations has been evaluated and meets the current standards. Queries are possible through a platform adapted from ANNIS free software. The whole resource will be available during the year 2017. (shrink)

Stephen RAPP (R.) has embarked on a very ambitious project – to investigate Georgian cultural contacts with the Byzantine and Iranian worlds through Georgian historial writing from its beginnings to medieval times. This involves nothing less than a presentation in English of all the relevant texts, save where a recent translation has already made them accessible, a survey of modern scholarship in Georgian as well as western languages, and a critical assessment of the dates of composition of the various works, (...) their motivation and reception. The volume under review is the first of a planned trilogy. Based on research dating back over a decade, it concentrates on those texts in the Georgian “Chronicles” which predate the political unification of the country. The second volume will tackle the literary dimension of Georgia's conversion to Christianity, the invention of a native script, and the beginnings of ecclesiastical literature; while the third volume will study the reorientation of the Georgian élite from their original Iranian background towards the Byzantine world as this is reflected in local historiography. All in all, this massive undertaking will update, expand and carry forward the work of Cyril TOUMANOFF reflected in his Studies in Christian Caucasian History, which was published exactly forty years before R.'s first volume appeared. (shrink)

Despite the large number of studies conducted on polysemy, they mostly compare the different methods and techniques to learn a language and establish the extent to which particular sense relations facilitate the learning of second language vocabulary. To our best knowledge, no research has been conducted to determine whether or not polysemy is emphasized in non-native English textbooks. The objective of the present research was to determine the degree to which polysemy is incorporated in English textbooks. Thus, the research question (...) guiding the current study is: To what extent is polysemy incorporated in non-native English textbooks? The study is corpus-based research that used a data set of 500 words, i.e., 250 words from each of the two books, utilizing the Sketch Engine word list tool and concordance. The polysemy of the resulting words in the concordance lines generated was semantically annotated manually using WordNet and English dictionaries. The results indicated that polysemy is barely stressed in the textbooks under investigation. The study’s results have substantial implications for polysemy in particular and second or foreign language teaching in general. (shrink)

From Wodehouse to the White House: A Corpus-Assisted Study of Play, Fantasy and Dramatic Incongruity in Comic Writing and Laughter-TalkIn this paper I consider two discourse types, one written and literary, the other spoken and semi-conversational, in an attempt to discover if there are any similarities in the ways in which humour is generated in such apparently diverse forms of communication. The first part of the paper is concerned with the explicitly comic prose of P. G. Wodehouse, whilst (...) in the second part of the paper, we investigate the laughter-talk, defined as the talk preceding and provoking, intentionally or otherwise, an episode of laughter, occurring during press briefings held at the White House during the Clinton era and the subsequent Bush administration. Both studies, by employing corpus analysis techniques together with detailed discourse reading, integrate quantitative and qualitative approaches to the respective data sets. (shrink)

Notre article vise à décrire la constitution et l’annotation d’un corpus multimodal et multilingue (français, anglais et chinois mandarin) pour l’étude de l’acquisition d’une langue seconde et du développement professionnel en enseignement des langues. Le corpus a été construit dans le cadre d’un projet de recherche dont l’objectif principal est de déterminer quelles compétences techno-sémio-pédagogiques peuvent être développées de manière informelle et lesquelles nécessitent une formation formelle. Nous expliquons le cadre théorique adopté, caractérisé par une approche écologique de (...) l’environnement interactif. Nous illustrons ensuite les procédures de collecte de données audio, vidéo et oculométriques. Nous détaillons également l’annotation des données brutes pour produire un corpus d’analyse s’appuyant sur différents outils d’annotation automatiques et semi-automatiques. Enfin, nous expliquons comment un tel corpus nous permet d’étudier le développement de la compétence multimodale des apprenants et de la compétence techno-pédagogique des tuteurs et pointons vers d’autres questions de recherche possibles. (shrink)