Linguistics Commons^™

Continuing Christopher Tolkien’S Work In A Digital Age, James K. Tauber

Journal of Tolkien Research

Christopher Tolkien’s 12-volume History of Middle-earth is a remarkable achievement, yet Christopher repeatedly acknowledged how difficult the material was to present in print form and that “that there was no really satisfactory solution”.  This paper contends that a printed book is not scholarship but just one way of presenting its results. It explores how digital philology can overcome some of the limitations of print, giving examples from the Digital Tolkien Project. It shows how structural markup, version alignment, parallel reading environments, and other approaches can make relationships between drafts and published texts clearer. Importantly, these methods do not replace Christopher’s …

Sexuality-Related Lexical (In)Visibility In Asian Englishes: A Corpus-Based Study Using The International Corpus Of English (Ice), Jess V. Mendoza, April N. Salvador, Teri An Joy G. Magpale

Journal of English and Applied Linguistics

This study examines the visibility and invisibility of sexuality-related terms in four Asian Englishes using data from the International Corpus of English (ICE). Drawing on Wilkinson’s (2022) sexuality-related lexical set and informed by scholarship on heteronormativity, the study analyzes the proportional visibility of 19 target lexemes across Englishes in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, and India. The findings show that only a small subset of terms (gay, lesbian, same sex, sexual preference, bisexual, and sexual orientation) appear in the corpora, and even these occur at low frequencies. Among these, gay emerges as the most recurrent. The remaining terms are not …

The Unspoken And The Unseen: An Analysis Of Victim Gender And Linguistic Framing Of Sexual Assault In Judicial Discourse, Sarnika Ali

Quantitative Social Science Undergraduate Senior Theses

Sexual assault is a profound legal and social crisis. However, it is also fundamentally a linguistic one. The words used, or conspicuously not used, to describe victims, perpetrators, and their actions are not neutral arbiters of fact. They are powerful mechanisms that shape perceptions of harm, attributions of blame, and assignments of credibility. The central battleground for survivors is credibility, and while a “credibility discount” is often applied to female victims, the male victim is rendered nearly invisible. This research is therefore guided by one central, overarching question: how does a sexual assault victim’s gender influence the judicial language used, …

Here-, There-, And Every Where-: Exploring The Role Of Pronominal Adverbs In Legal Language, David Chandler

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Legal language is distinctive and sometimes difficult to understand. One type of word that appears to be part of so-called ‘legalese’ is the pronominal adverb (PA). The purpose of this thesis is to examine the prevalence of PAs in legal registers compared to more general registers of contemporary American English to determine the extent to which these words are distinctly legal. The study will also explore why different types of PAs may be (in)frequent in specific legal registers to better understand their use. The frequency of PAs was extracted from corpora that are designed to represent six registers of English …

Words And Phrases That Matter: A Corpus Analysis Of Vocabulary And Phraseological Coverage In Myanmar's High School English Textbooks, Kaung Hla Zan

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

"Myanmar’s high school education relies on centralized EFL textbooks as the primary source of English input for a significant population of Myanmar youth. Following curriculum reforms aiming for communicative competence, this study provides a corpus-based evaluation of the lexical and phraseological composition of Grades 10 to 12 (high school) textbooks. Using a multi-list approach, this study profiled the textbooks against the New General Service List (NGSL) and the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) for vocabulary coverage. To determine the frequency and coverage of academic phrases, the textbooks were profiled against three lists of academic bundles identified by Simpson-Vlach and Ellis (2010), …

Rationality And Discomfort: Stance In "The End Of The Altaic Controversy" And "In Defense Of The Comparative Method, Or The End Of The Vovin Controversy", Logan Mcdowall

University Honors Theses

This study will use corpus linguistics techniques and Hyland's framework for stance in academic discourse to analyze authors' discoursal roles in different framings of a famous controversy in historical linguistics: the classification of the Altaic language family. Two significant pieces of discourse in this debate include "The End of the Altaic Controversy" by A. Vovin and "In Defense of the Comparative Method, or the End of the Vovin Controversy" by A. Dybo and G. Starostin. Despite the importance of these works, no one has analyzed how these authors use stance to position themselves within it. After performing a corpus word …

Linguistique Du Corpus, Littératie Scientifique Et Genre De Discours, Abdelfettah Nacer Idrissi

Dirassat

Literacy, which according to Jaffré (2004:31) designates “the set of human activities which involve the use of writing, in reception and production”, finds its origins in the various research studies relating to anthropology social in Anglo-Saxon countries (cf. Goody, 1979). She is particularly interested in scriptural practices in research writings taking into account their contextual and socio-cultural dimensions. It can be considered both as a term, as a multidisciplinary field, or even as an approach, which is interested in the multiplicity of discourses emanating from teachers and students and which can be written or oral.

Our purpose in this contribution …

Spoken Philippine English In Professional Contexts: Reflections On Research And The Need For A Targeted Corpus, Eric Friginal

Journal of English and Applied Linguistics

This article reflects on nearly two decades of research into spoken communication using corpora, particularly within professional and workplace settings in the Philippines, such as call centers and related industries. Drawing on this extensive body of work, the article explores the potential of corpus-based approaches to enhance our understanding of spoken discourse. A framework for corpus-assisted spoken discourse analysis (Friginal, 2024a) is discussed as a foundation for examining professional communication. Building on these insights, the development of a targeted Spoken Philippine English Corpus (SPEC) is proposed, aiming to systematically document and analyze the unique features of spoken professional English in …

Changes In Dialect Usage Across Generations In The Osaka Dialect Of Japanese, Chris Olson

Asian Languages and Cultures Honors Projects

Sociolinguistic research on Japanese regional dialects has generally found that regional dialects are assimilating to Standard Japanese, but that recently an increase in the popularity of dialects has led to reverse trends of “de-standardization” as well. This paper aims to utilize quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of Osaka dialect interviews in order to observe how usage of the dialect differs across generations. The quantitative results find that some dialect features are falling out of use among younger generations, while others stay consistent, and some features are actually used more by younger speakers than middle-aged generations. The qualitative analysis …

Analyzing Agency In Online News Reporting Of The Events Of January 6th, 2021: A Corpus-Based Investigation, Matthew W. Abernethy

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Over the last decade or so, politics in the United States has become increasingly polarized. A central focus of this polarization has been the news media, including both traditional print news, online news, and television news. Results of this have been a rapid rise in misinformation, disinformation, the demonization of news (especially political) providers as purveyors of ‘Fake News’, and distrust in mainstream news outlets. The central focus of this thesis is bias in news reporting, leading naturally to the question of how widespread this bias really is. This thesis uses corpus linguistic and discourse analytic methods to pursue this …

Codec-M: The Multi-Lingual Manosphere Subcorpus Of The Corpus Of Digital Extremism And Conspiracies, Rachel Mccullough, Daniel Drylie, Mindl Barta, Cass Dykeman, Daniel Smith

English Faculty Publications

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General warned the public of the current “loneliness epidemic” and its potential consequences on physical and mental health. One possible consequence of this epidemic is the growth of a movement defined by loneliness and isolation: the incel (“involuntary celibate”) movement. This warning presents a worrying glimpse at the future, as the incel movement, along with other parts of the manosphere, is one that espouses violently misogynist rhetoric which is intrinsically linked to right-wing extremism. While linguistic studies have been conducted on the speech of incels and other constituent movements of the manosphere, few of these …

Integrating Corpus Linguistics In Vietnamese English Education: A Qualitative Inquiry Into Scholarly Perspectives And Practices, Thi Thuy Tran, Trut Thuy Pham, Thanh Thao Le

Higher Learning Research Communications

Objective: Our qualitative study investigated the integration of corpus linguistics in English education research among Vietnamese scholars, focusing on the experiences and perceptions across different career stages.

Methods: Employing semi-structured interviews, we engaged nine linguistics scholars, including novices as well as those at mid-career and near-end career stages, from two prominent Vietnamese institutions.

Results: Thematic analysis revealed three key themes: (1) challenges in incorporating corpus linguistics into teaching practices, (2) perceived benefits in enhancing language proficiency, and (3) the importance of institutional support for corpus linguistics research. The findings indicated that despite recognizing the pedagogical benefits of corpus linguistics, scholars …

Six Connotations Of Sustainability In Civil And Construction Engineering: A Corpus Linguistics Study, Xiaomei Wang, Andrew South, Brett James Hashimoto, Clifton Farnsworth

Faculty Publications

This research explores the historic use of the concept of sustainability in civil engineering academic literature and identifies its conceptual evolution and connotative treatment over the last 40 years. We find that academic research addressing sustainability is exponentially increasing and that the focus on sustainability is enlarging from a primarily environmental perspective to include more social elements. Additionally, we propose a set of six connotations of sustainability: assessment, progress, permanence, abstractness, multidimensional, and intersectional. These connotations provide conceptual clarity for academics and practitioners in better-defining sustainability objectives and measuring outcomes. These connotations also promote more efficient collaboration with other necessary …

Viral Peer Advice: Health Memes Used As Speech Acts Of Advising In English, Laurel Smith Stvan

Linguistics & TESOL Faculty Publications & Presentations - Archive

To better represent online health communication modes, an English-language corpus of lay health discourse was expanded to include health-related memes. Using these forms of peer-to-peer lay communication, I propose ways to categorize the illocutionary force of memes when they function as speech acts of advice. The subcorpus contains 200 English-language health-related memes gathered during 2018-2023 through Google image searches. I found the affiliative and disaffiliative strategies that Placencia (2012) noted within Yahoo! Respuestas advice exchanges; with meme multimodality, however, additional versions of these strategies appeared: characters used as sympathetic or encouraging affiliative features, but also chastising or disapproving characters as …

The Ring Cycle: Journeying Through The Language Of Tolkien’S Third Age With Corpus Linguistics, Michael Livesey

Journal of Tolkien Research

This article explores the journey taken by the One Ring across J.R.R. Tolkien’s Third Age writings. It employs a digital humanities approach to analyse linguistic patterns in Tolkien’s use of the word ring, across The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Specifically, the article employs corpus linguistic methods to track shifts in the quantities and qualities of the Ring’s appearance across these texts. It uses techniques of keyness and collocation analysis to trace transformations in these quantities/qualities, including: a) the Ring’s transition from a central to a peripheral place in the Third Age’s narrative arc; and b) …

What’S In A Threat: A Corpus-Based, Speech Act And Lexicogrammatical Approach To Threats In English, Natalie Raun Carter

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Threats can be made without using language at all, but previous research on the language of threats is limited and primarily examines threats with a small amount of constructed data. Building on Austin (1962) and Searle (1965; 1969)’s speech act theory and using a corpus of naturally occurring data consisting of 827 threatening texts from publicly available websites and law enforcement, this dissertation determines what constitutes a threat, as well as the interdependence between words and grammar.

Pragmatically, this dissertation identifies four required felicity conditions that must be met to constitute a threat—building on those set by John Searle, Bruce …

Gaps And Overlaps In Conversation: Analyses Of Differentiating Factors, David W. Edwards

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Human social behavior relies on communication, and much of that communication occurs in conversation. A crucial feature of conversation is turn-taking, the (usually) orderly pattern of listening and speaking that humans employ in conversation. In analyzing details of actual conversations, Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson (1974) launched the field of Conversation Analysis by outlining a set of observations of turn-taking behavior and by proposing a list of rules to explain that behavior. They noted that the vast majority of transitions from one speaker to another happen with very little gap or overlap (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974: 700–701). More recently, researchers …

‘People With Disabilities,’ ‘Disabled People,’ Or ‘The Disabled’: A Corpus Analysis Of Disability Labeling Constructions, Eliza Forrest

Linguistics ETDs

The way language shapes perceptions about disability is a complex and long-debated topic within popular disability discourse. With the rise of “person-first” language in recent decades, this debate has shifted toward a grammatical, rather than lexical one, contrasting forms such as people with disabilities, disabled people, and the disabled. While these different construction types—prepositional, attributive, and nominalized, respectively—refer to the same entity, the purported connotations of each have been highly contested. Despite this, research on the topic has been limited and mixed, particularly for studies focusing on actual usage. By analyzing these constructions in the Corpus of …

From Three-Pillars To Three-Environments: Shifting The Paradigm Of Sustainability In Civil And Construction Engineering, Xiaomei Wang, Andrew South, Clifton Farnsworth, Brett James Hashimoto

Faculty Publications

This research explores the usage of sustainability in literature and presents ‘three environments’ for addressing sustainability in the Civil and Construction Engineering (CCE) disciplines. Scholars have increasingly studied sustainability and sustainable development across CCE disciplines as the importance of sustainability awareness and action in society has increased. However, the vastness of its conceptual breadth and depth in CCE research is difficult to holistically evaluate. As a result, CCE researchers often focus on specific aspects of sustainability applied to discrete contexts, or address sustainability in broad aspirational terms and guiding motivations. This research utilized a rigorous analytical corpus linguistics approach for …

The Relationships Between L1, Writing Quality, And Complexity, Accuracy, And Fluency In L2 Writing, Tuc C. Chau

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the current dissertation is to map the relationships between first language (L1), writing quality, and syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and fluency (CALF) in second language (L2) writing. CALF are characteristics of language production that have been of significant interest in L2 writing research for the past few decades. Though they have been extensively studied as dependent variables that may vary as a function of other factors, they have been rarely studied together, much less in relation to L1 as an independent variable. Thus, this study explored the effects of L1 and writing quality, operationalized as score …

Linguistic Abstractions In Children’S Very Early Utterances, Qihui Xu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How early do children produce multiword utterances? Do children's early utterances reflect abstract syntactic knowledge or are they the result of data-driven learning? We examine this issue through corpus analysis, computational modeling, and adult simulation experiments. Chapter 1 investigates when children start producing multiword utterances; we use corpora to establish the development of multiword utterances and a probabilistic computational model to account for the quantitative change of early multiword utterances. We find that multiword utterances of different lengths appear early in acquisition and increase together, and the length growth pattern can be viewed as a probabilistic and dynamic process.

Chapter …

Gender-Related Language Trends In Online Written News: Comparative Corpus Analysis Of Prescribed Vs. Actual Usage, Brooke James

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Contrary to traditional thought in linguistics and editing, recent studies using corpus-based evidence suggest that historical English usage patterns influenced prescriptive usage manuals’ guidelines more than the other way around. To investigate the modern relationship between English language prescriptions and usage, this study focuses on the wide-reaching genre of written online news and the topic of gender-fair language. It compares changes regarding gender-specific language in the Associated Press’s stylebooks to actual usage trends as documented in the News on the Web (NOW) corpus. Results from NOW show -man title variants as the dominant form in the early 2010s, consistent AP …

Trademark Fame And Corpus Linguistics, Jake Linford, Kyra Nelson

Scholarly Publications

Trademark law recognizes that the same word can mean different things in different commercial contexts. Legal protection might extend to two or more owners who use the same symbol (like Delta) to indicate different sources of disparate goods or services, such as airlines and faucets. Generally, only those uses that threaten to confuse consumers-the use of similar symbols on identical or related goods-are subject to legal sanction.

But the law extends special protection to famous trademarks, not only against confusing use, but also against dilution: non-confusing use that blurs or tarnishes the distinctiveness of the famous mark. The result of …

Representation Of Muslims In Time Magazine: A Corpus Linguistic Study, Constantia Rhinehart

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis sought to explore the representation of Muslims in US-American

Press. In order to do this, the Time Magazine Corpus was used to observe words that collocate with the word “Muslim” in Time Magazine. The frequency of the word “Muslim” was observed for each decade and coded to determine the semantic prosody of each token. The 1960s-2006 were observed in order to provide a more comprehensive view of Muslim representation in Western media and how this representation has changed over time. The majority of collocations were considered to be neutral, however, a large number of collocations were considered …

A Discipline In Search Of A Voice: A Corpus Linguistic Study Of Evaluation Scholarly Literature, Aaron Wilson Kates

Dissertations

Linguists use the concept of discourse community (DC) to describe the speech of groups of people associated by some extrinsic purpose or interest (Swales, 1990). One defining feature of a DC is a shared lexicon. Scriven (1994), in his discussion of evaluation as a discipline, addresses the need for evaluation to have a “core subject” which would then allow, among other things, the development of “concepts and language to deal with core problems,” while noting that there exists a definite lack of clarity of language among evaluators (p. 147). Christie and Rose (2003) suggest that the lack of clarification around …

Legal Corpus Linguistics And The Half-Empirical Attitude, Anya Bernstein

Journal Articles

Legal writers have recently turned to corpus linguistics to interpret legal texts. Corpus linguistics, a social-science methodology, provides a sophisticated way to analyze large data sets of language use. Legal proponents have touted it as giving empirical grounding to claims about ordinary language, which pervade legal interpretation. But legal corpus linguistics cannot deliver on that promise because it ignores the crucial contexts in which legal language is produced, interpreted, and deployed.

First, legal corpus linguistics neglects the relevant legal context—the conditions that give legal language authority. Because of this, legal corpus studies’ evidence about language use perversely obscures and misstates …

Stages Of Creating Parallel Corpus Of English-Uzbek Similes, Anorkhon Ahmedova

Philology Matters

In recent years, corpus linguistics has been mentioned in the scientific literature as the main tool for the elaboration of dictionaries and grammar manuals, the creation of corpus analysis, the practical use of corpus, as well as the statistical study of linguistic analysis using corpus. Articles, textbooks, manuals on the creation of general and special electronic corpus have been published, but as the Uzbek language is a relatively new field of corpus linguistics, there is a need for research on some issues. The development of corpus linguistics and the increasing focus on statistical methods of processing linguistic materials have led …

Legal Corpus Linguistics And The Half-Empirical Attitude, Anya Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

Legal writers have recently turned to corpus linguistics to interpret legal texts. Corpus linguistics, a social-science methodology, provides a sophisticated way to analyze large data sets of language use. Legal proponents have touted it as giving empirical grounding to claims about ordinary language, which pervade legal interpretation. But legal corpus linguistics cannot deliver on that promise because it ignores the crucial contexts in which legal language is produced, interpreted, and deployed.

First, legal corpus linguistics neglects the relevant legal context—the conditions that give legal language authority. Because of this, legal corpus studies’ evidence about language use perversely obscures and misstates …

The Materiality Of Metaphor In Mayan Hieroglyphic Texts : Metaphor In Changing Political Climates, Rebecca Ann Dinkel

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Recent research on the discursive and rhetorical forms of Mayan hieroglyphic texts has demonstrated how language and writing were used to frame, not just represent, Pre-Columbian Mayan history. Research on the role of metaphor in this framing has only just begun, and despite the well-known multimodal character of Mayan hieroglyphic texts, research on the role of metaphors in pictorial images has been even more limited. Previous research has not fully documented metaphor variation, particularly as it materializes across different modalities, media, places, and times. Doing so will allow for more subtle and elaborate interpretations of metaphor use and meaning in …

Semantic Analysis And Synthesis In The Automatic Analysis Of The Text, Shakhnoza Kakhramonovna Gulyamova

Scientific reports of Bukhara State University

Introduction. In the information-search engine, semantic analysis and synthesis occupy a leading place. When we say automatic semantic analysis, using specially developed linguistic algorithms, we understand a set of methods and techniques that can be used with sufficient accuracy to express the meaning of random speech in a natural language with the help of a rigorous, accurate tool that is carried out on a computer. Highlighting the importance of the semantic analyzer in the information search engine, it is first of all associated with the study of the process of semantic analysis and synthesis in the automatic analysis of the …