Search results for: corpus analysis

Authors: Yee Yan Crystal Kwong

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The essence of rape is the absence of consent to sexual intercourse. Yet, the definition of consent is not absolute and allows for subjectivity. In this case, the accuracy of oral interpretation becomes very important as the narratives of events and situation, as well as the register and style of speakers would influence the juror decision making. This paper first adopts a corpus-based approach to investigate how court interpreters in Hong Kong handle expressions that refer to sexual activities. The data of this study will be based on online corpus :From legislation to translation, from translation to interpretation: The narrative of sexual offences. The corpus comprises the transcription of five separate rape trials and all of these trials were heard with the presence of an interpreter. Since there are plenty of sex-related expressions used by witnesses and defendants in the five cases, emphasis will be put on those which have an impact on the definition of rape. With an in-depth analysis of the interpreted utterances, different interpreting approaches will be identified to observe how interpreters retain the intended meanings. Interviews with experienced court interpreters will also be conducted to revisit the validity of the traditional verbatim standard. At the end of this research, various interpreting approaches will be compared and evaluated. A redefinition of interpreters' institutional role, as well as recommendations for interpreting learners will be provided.

Keywords: court interpreting, interpreters, legal translation, slangs

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Authors: S. Alansary, M. Nagi

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This paper presents an approach of conducting semantic annotation of Arabic corpus using the Universal Networking Language (UNL) framework. UNL is intended to be a promising strategy for providing a large collection of semantically annotated texts with formal, deep semantics rather than shallow. The result would constitute a semantic resource (semantic graphs) that is editable and that integrates various phenomena, including predicate-argument structure, scope, tense, thematic roles and rhetorical relations, into a single semantic formalism for knowledge representation. The paper will also present the Interactive Analysis​ tool for automatic semantic annotation (IAN). In addition, the cornerstone of the proposed methodology which are the disambiguation and transformation rules, will be presented. Semantic annotation using UNL has been applied to a corpus of 20,000 Arabic sentences representing the most frequent structures in the Arabic Wikipedia. The representation, at different linguistic levels was illustrated starting from the morphological level passing through the syntactic level till the semantic representation is reached. The output has been evaluated using the F-measure. It is 90% accurate. This demonstrates how powerful the formal environment is, as it enables intelligent text processing and search.

Keywords: semantic analysis, semantic annotation, Arabic, universal networking language

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Authors: Jian-Jun Gao

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Repetition is used for a variety of functions in conversation. When young children first learn to speak, they often repeat words from the adult’s recent utterance with the learning and social function. The objective of this study was to ascertain whether the repetitions are equivalent in indicating attention to new words and the initial repeat of information in conversation. Based on the observation of naturally occurring language use in Taiwan Corpus of Child Mandarin (TCCM), the results in this study provided empirical support to the previous findings that children are more likely to repeat new words they are offered than to repeat new information. When children get older, there would be a drop in the repetition of both new words and new information.

Keywords: acquisition, corpus, mandarin, new words, new information, repetition

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Authors: Jingwen Ou

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Writing for academic purposes in a second or foreign language poses a significant challenge for non-native speakers, particularly at the tertiary level, where English academic writing for L2 students is often hindered by difficulties in academic discourse, including vocabulary, academic register, and organization. The past two decades have witnessed a rising popularity in the application of the data-driven learning (DDL) approach in EAP writing instruction. In light of such a trend, this study aims to enhance the integration of DDL into English for academic purposes (EAP) writing classrooms by investigating the perception of Chinese college students regarding the use of corpus tools for improving EAP writing. Additionally, the research explores their corpus consultation behaviors during training to provide insights into corpus-assisted EAP instruction for DDL practitioners. Given the uprising popularity of DDL, this research aims to investigate Chinese university students’ use of corpus tools with three main foci: 1) the influence of corpus tools on learning behaviours, 2) the influence of corpus tools on students’ academic writing performance outcomes, and 3) students’ perceptions and potential perceptional changes towards the use of such tools. Three corpus tools, CQPWeb, Sketch Engine, and LancsBox X, are selected for investigation due to the scarcity of empirical research on patterns of learners’ engagement with a combination of multiple corpora. The research adopts a pre-test / post-test design for the evaluation of students’ academic writing performance before and after the intervention. Twenty participants will be divided into two groups: an intervention and a non-intervention group. Three corpus training workshops will be delivered at the beginning, middle, and end of a semester. An online survey and three separate focus group interviews are designed to investigate students’ perceptions of the use of corpus tools for improving academic writing skills, particularly the rhetorical functions in different essay sections. Insights from students’ consultation sessions indicated difficulties with DDL practice, including insufficiency of time to complete all tasks, struggle with technical set-up, unfamiliarity with the DDL approach and difficulty with some advanced corpus functions. Findings from the main study aim to provide pedagogical insights and training resources for EAP practitioners and learners.

Keywords: corpus linguistics, data-driven learning, English for academic purposes, tertiary education in China

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Authors: Elena Pozdnyakova

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“Government Relations” is a field of knowledge presently taught at the majority of universities around the globe. English as the default language can become the language of teaching since the issues discussed are both global and national in character. However for this field of knowledge key concepts and their word representations in English don’t often coincide with those in other languages. International master’s degree students abroad as well as students, taught the course in English at their national universities, are exposed to difficulties, connected with correct conceptualizing of terminology of GR in British and American academic traditions. The study was carried out during the GR English language course elaboration (pilot research: 2013 -2015) at Moscow State Institute of Foreign Relations (University), Russian Federation. Within this period, English language instructors designed and elaborated the three-semester course of GR. Methodologically the course design was based on elaboration model with the special focus on conceptual elaboration sequence and theoretical elaboration sequence. The course designers faced difficulties in concept selection and theoretical elaboration sequence. To improve the results and eliminate the problems with concept selection, a new, corpus-based approach was worked out. The computer-based tool WordSmith 6.0 was used with the aim to build a model of key concept selection. The corpus of GR English texts consisted of 1 million words (the study corpus). The approach was based on measuring effect size, i.e. the percent difference of the frequency of a word in the study corpus when compared to that in the reference corpus. The results obtained proved significant improvement in the process of concept selection. The corpus-based model also facilitated theoretical elaboration of teaching materials.

Keywords: corpus-based study, English as the default language, key concepts, measuring effect size, model of key concept selection

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Authors: Stefanie Rukavina, Sascha Gruss, Steffen Walter, Holger Hoffmann, Harald C. Traue

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OPEN-EmoRecII is an open multimodal corpus with experimentally induced emotions. In the first half of the experiment, emotions were induced with standardized picture material and in the second half during a human-computer interaction (HCI), realized with a wizard-of-oz design. The induced emotions are based on the dimensional theory of emotions (valence, arousal and dominance). These emotional sequences - recorded with multimodal data (mimic reactions, speech, audio and physiological reactions) during a naturalistic-like HCI-environment one can improve classification methods on a multimodal level. This database is the result of an HCI-experiment, for which 30 subjects in total agreed to a publication of their data including the video material for research purposes. The now available open corpus contains sensory signal of: video, audio, physiology (SCL, respiration, BVP, EMG Corrugator supercilii, EMG Zygomaticus Major) and mimic annotations.

Keywords: open multimodal emotion corpus, annotated labels, intelligent interaction

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Authors: Fitria Ningsih

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This study concerns on the process of making corpus obtained from Indonesian year 4 students’ free writing compared to the vocabulary taught in English language textbooks. 369 students’ sample writings from 19 public elementary schools in Malang, East Java, Indonesia and 5 selected English textbooks were analyzed through corpus in linguistics method using AdTAT -the Adelaide Text Analysis Tool- program. The findings produced wordlists of the top 100 words most frequently used by students and the top 100 words given in English textbooks. There was a 45% match between the two lists. Furthermore, the classifications of the top 100 most frequent words from the two corpora based on part of speech found that both the Indonesian and English languages employed a similar use of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and prepositions. Moreover, to see the contextualizing the vocabulary of learning materials towards the students’ need, a depth-analysis dealing with the content and the cultural views from the vocabulary taught in the textbooks was discussed through the criteria developed from the checklist. Lastly, further suggestions are addressed to language teachers to understand the students’ background such as recognizing the basic words students acquire before teaching them new vocabulary in order to achieve successful learning of the target language.

Keywords: corpus, frequency, English, Indonesian, linguistics, textbooks, vocabulary, wordlists, writing

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Authors: Sun-Hee Lee, Amanda Kraley

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The “MeToo” movement is a social movement against sexual abuse and harassment. Though the hashtag went viral in 2017 following different cultural flashpoints in different countries, the initial response was quiet in South Korea. This radically changed in January 2018, when a high-ranking senior prosecutor, Seo Ji-hyun, gave a televised interview discussing being sexually assaulted by a colleague. Acknowledging public anger, particularly among women, on the long-existing problems of sexual harassment and abuse, the South Korean media have focused on several high-profile cases. Analyzing the media representation of these cases is a window into the evolving South Korean discourse around “MeToo.” This study presents a linguistic analysis of “MeToo” discourse in South Korea by utilizing a corpus-based approach. The term corpus (pl. corpora) is used to refer to electronic language data, that is, any collection of recorded instances of spoken or written language. A “MeToo” corpus has been collected by extracting newspaper articles containing the keyword “MeToo” from BIGKinds, big data analysis, and service and Nexis Uni, an online academic database search engine, to conduct this language analysis. The corpus analysis explores how Korean media represent accusers and the accused, victims and perpetrators. The extracted data includes 5,885 articles from four broadsheet newspapers (Chosun, JoongAng, Hangyore, and Kyunghyang) and 88 articles from two Korea-based English newspapers (Korea Times and Korea Herald) between January 2017 and November 2020. The information includes basic data analysis with respect to keyword frequency and network analysis and adds refined examinations of select corpus samples through naming strategies, semantic relations, and pragmatic properties. Along with the exponential increase of the number of articles containing the keyword “MeToo” from 104 articles in 2017 to 3,546 articles in 2018, the network and keyword analysis highlights ‘US,’ ‘Harvey Weinstein’, and ‘Hollywood,’ as keywords for 2017, with articles in 2018 highlighting ‘Seo Ji-Hyun, ‘politics,’ ‘President Moon,’ ‘An Ui-Jeong, ‘Lee Yoon-taek’ (the names of perpetrators), and ‘(Korean) society.’ This outcome demonstrates the shift of media focus from international affairs to domestic cases. Another crucial finding is that word ‘defamation’ is widely distributed in the “MeToo” corpus. This relates to the South Korean legal system, in which a person who defames another by publicly alleging information detrimental to their reputation—factual or fabricated—is punishable by law (Article 307 of the Criminal Act of Korea). If the defamation occurs on the internet, it is subject to aggravated punishment under the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection. These laws, in particular, have been used against accusers who have publicly come forward in the wake of “MeToo” in South Korea, adding an extra dimension of risk. This corpus analysis of “MeToo” newspaper articles contributes to the analysis of the media representation of the “MeToo” movement and sheds light on the shifting landscape of gender relations in the public sphere in South Korea.

Keywords: corpus linguistics, MeToo, newspapers, South Korea

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Authors: Yi Gu

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The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu has been a bestseller Chinese Sci-Fi novel for years since 2008. The book was translated into English by Ken Liu in 2014 and won the prestigious 2015 science fiction and fantasy writing Hugo Award, drawing greater attention from wider international communities. The story exposes the horrors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, in an intriguing narrative for readers at home and abroad. However, without the access to the source text, western readers may not be aware that the original Chinese version of the book is rich in gender-bias. Some Chinese scholars have applied feminist translation theories to their analysis on this book before, based on isolated selected, cherry-picking examples. Thus this paper aims to obtain a more thorough picture of how translators can cope with gender discrimination and reshape the gendered discourse from the source text, by systematically investigating the lexical and syntactic patterns in the translation of Liu’s entire book of 400 pages. The source text and the translation were downloaded into digital files, automatically aligned at paragraph level and then manually post-edited. They were then compiled into a parallel corpus of 114,629 English words and 204,145 Chinese characters using Sketch Engine. Gender-discrimination markers such as the overuse of ‘girl’ to describe an adult woman were searched in the source text, and the alignment made it possible to identify the strategies adopted by the translator to mitigate gender discrimination. The results provide a framework for translators to address gender bias. The study also shows how corpus methods can be used to further research in feminist translation and critical discourse analysis.

Keywords: corpus, discourse analysis, feminist translation, science fiction translation

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Authors: Martina Katalin Szabó, Bernadett Lipóczi, Csenge Guba, István Uveges

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In this study, an exhaustive analysis was carried out about the historical development of negative emotive intensifiers in the Hungarian language via NLP methods. Intensifiers are linguistic elements which modify or reinforce a variable character in the lexical unit they apply to. Therefore, intensifiers appear with other lexical items, such as adverbs, adjectives, verbs, infrequently with nouns. Due to the complexity of this phenomenon (set of sociolinguistic, semantic, and historical aspects), there are many lexical items which can operate as intensifiers. The group of intensifiers are admittedly one of the most rapidly changing elements in the language. From a linguistic point of view, particularly interesting are a special group of intensifiers, the so-called negative emotive intensifiers, that, on their own, without context, have semantic content that can be associated with negative emotion, but in particular cases, they may function as intensifiers (e.g.borzasztóanjó ’awfully good’, which means ’excellent’). Despite their special semantic features, negative emotive intensifiers are scarcely examined in literature based on large Historical corpora via NLP methods. In order to become better acquainted with trends over time concerning the intensifiers, The exhaustively analysed a specific historical corpus, namely the Magyar TörténetiSzövegtár (Hungarian Historical Corpus). This corpus (containing 3 millions text words) is a collection of texts of various genres and styles, produced between 1772 and 2010. Since the corpus consists of raw texts and does not contain any additional information about the language features of the data (such as stemming or morphological analysis), a large amount of manual work was required to process the data. Thus, based on a lexicon of negative emotive intensifiers compiled in a previous phase of the research, every occurrence of each intensifier was queried, and the results were stored in a separate data frame. Then, basic linguistic processing (POS-tagging, lemmatization etc.) was carried out automatically with the ‘magyarlanc’ NLP-toolkit. Finally, the frequency and collocation features of all the negative emotive words were automatically analyzed in the corpus. Outcomes of the research revealed in detail how these words have proceeded through grammaticalization over time, i.e., they change from lexical elements to grammatical ones, and they slowly go through a delexicalization process (their negative content diminishes over time). What is more, it was also pointed out which negative emotive intensifiers are at the same stage in this process in the same time period. Giving a closer look to the different domains of the analysed corpus, it also became certain that during this process, the pragmatic role’s importance increases: the newer use expresses the speaker's subjective, evaluative opinion at a certain level.

Keywords: historical corpus analysis, historical linguistics, negative emotive intensifiers, semantic changes over time

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Authors: Fang Tan

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This research focuses on the appropriate use of lexical bundles in spoken discourse, particularly in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms in Northeast China. While previous studies have mainly examined lexical bundles in written discourse, there is a need to investigate their usage in spoken discourse due to the limited availability of spoken discourse corpora. English teachers’ use of lexical bundles is crucial for effective teaching and communication in the EFL classroom. The aim of this study is to investigate the functions of four-word lexical bundles in native English teachers’ EFL oral English classes in Northeast China. Specifically, the research focuses on the usage of stance bundles, which were found to be the most significant type of bundle in the analyzed corpus. By comparing the self-built university spoken English classroom discourse corpus with the other self-built university English for General Purposes (EGP) corpus, the study aims to highlight the difference in bundle usage between native and non-native teachers in EFL classrooms. The research employs a corpus-based study. The observed corpus consists of more than 300,000 tokens, in which the data has been collected in the past five years. The reference corpus is composed of over 800,000 tokens, in which the data has been collected over 12 years. All the primary data collection involved transcribing and annotating spoken English classes taught by native English teachers. The analysis procedures included identifying and categorizing four-word lexical bundles, with specific emphasis on stance bundles. Frequency counts, and comparisons with the Chinese English teachers’ corpus were conducted to identify patterns and differences in bundle usage. The research addresses the following questions: 1) What are the functions of four-word lexical bundles in native English teachers’ EFL oral English classes? 2) How do stance bundles differ in usage between native and non-native English teachers’ classes? 3) What implications can be drawn for English teachers’ professional development based on the findings? In conclusion, this study provides valuable insights into the usage of four-word lexical bundles, particularly stance bundles, in native English teachers’ EFL oral English classes in Northeast China. The research highlights the difference in bundle usage between native and non-native English teachers’ classes and provides implications for English teachers’ professional development. The findings contribute to the understanding of lexical bundle usage in EFL classroom discourse and have theoretical importance for language teaching methodologies. The self-built university English classroom discourse corpus used in this research is a valuable resource for future studies in this field.

Keywords: EFL classroom discourse, four-word lexical bundles, stance, implication

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Authors: Na Xiao

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Animal metaphors have many different connotations, ranging from loving emotions to derogatory epithets, but gender expressions using animal metaphors are often imbalanced. Generally, animal metaphors related to females tend to be negative. Little known about the reasons for the negative expressions of animal female metaphors in Chinese contexts still have not been quantified. The Modern Chinese Corpus at the Center for Chinese Linguistics at Peking University (CCL Corpus) provided the data for this research, which aims to identify the influencing variables of gender differences in the description of animal metaphors mapping humans in Chinese by observing the percentage of "tiger" metaphor, which is based on the conceptual metaphor theory. A quantitative research method was used in this study to statistically examine the gender attitude percentage of the "tiger" metaphor using corpus data. This study has proved that the tiger metaphors associated with humans in the Chinese context tend to be negative. Importantly, this study has also shown that the high proportion of tiger metaphorical idioms is what causes the high proportion of negative tiger metaphors that are related to women. This finding can be used as crucial information for future studies on other gender-related animal metaphorical idioms and can offer additional insights for understanding trends in other animal metaphors.

Keywords: Chinese, CCL corpus, gender differences, metaphorical idioms, tigers

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Authors: Zaharani Ahmad, Nor Hashimah Jalaluddin

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The aim of this paper is to examine and identify the issue of linguistic redundancy in two competing grammars of Malay, namely the school grammar and the corpus grammar. The former is a normative grammar which is formally and prescriptively taught in the classroom, whereas the latter is a descriptive grammar that is informally acquired and mastered by the students as native speakers of the language outside the classroom. Corpus grammar is depicted based on its actual used in natural occurring texts, as attested in the corpus. It is observed that the grammar taught in schools is incompatible with the grammar used in the corpus. For instance, a noun phrase containing nominal reduplicated form which denotes plurality (i.e. murid-murid ‘students’ which is derived from murid ‘student’) and a modifier categorized as quantifiers (i.e. semua ‘all’, seluruh ‘entire’, and kebanyakan ‘most’) is not acceptable in the school grammar because the formation (i.e. semua murid-murid ‘all the students’ kebanyakan pelajar-pelajar ‘most of the students’) is claimed to be redundant, and redundancy is prohibited in the grammar. Redundancy is generally construed as the property of speech and language by which more information is provided than is precisely required for the message to be understood, so that, if some information is omitted, the remaining information will still be sufficient for the message to be comprehended. Thus, the correct construction to be used is strictly the reduplicated form (i.e. murid-murid ‘students’) or the quantifier plus the root (i.e. semua murid ‘all the students’) with the intention that the grammatical meaning of plural is not repeated. Nevertheless, the so-called redundant form (i.e. kebanyakan pelajar-pelajar ‘most of the students’) is frequently used in the corpus grammar. This study shows that there are a number of redundant forms occur in the morphology of the language, particularly in affixation, reduplication and combination of both. Apparently, the so-called redundancy has grammatical and socio-cultural functions in communication that is to give emphasis and to stress the importance of the information delivered by the speakers or writers.

Keywords: corpus grammar, morphology, redundancy, school grammar

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Authors: S. Nakayama

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For non-native English speakers, using English modal auxiliary verbs appropriately can be among the most challenging tasks. This research sought to identify differences in modal verb usage between Japanese non-native English speakers (JNNS) and native speakers (NS) from two different perspectives: frequency of use and distribution of verb phrase structures (VPS) where modal verbs occur. This study can contribute to the identification of JNNSs' interlanguage with regard to modal verbs; the main aim is to make a suggestion for the improvement of teaching materials as well as to help language teachers to be able to teach modal verbs in a way that is helpful for learners. To address the primary question in this study, usage of nine central modals (‘can’, ‘could’, ‘may’, ‘might’, ‘shall’, ‘should’, ‘will’, ‘would’, and ‘must’) by JNNS was compared with that by NSs in the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE). This corpus is one of the largest freely-available corpora focusing on Asian English learners’ language use. The ICNALE corpus consists of four modules: ‘Spoken Monologue’, ‘Spoken Dialogue’, ‘Written Essays’, and ‘Edited Essays’. Among these, this research adopted the ‘Written Essays’ module only, which is the set of 200-300 word essays and contains approximately 1.3 million words in total. Frequency analysis revealed gaps as well as similarities in frequency order. Specifically, both JNNSs and NSs used ‘can’ with the most frequency, followed by ‘should’ and ‘will’; however, usage of all the other modals except for ‘shall’ was not identical to each other. A log-likelihood test uncovered JNNSs’ overuse of ‘can’ and ‘must’ as well as their underuse of ‘will’ and ‘would’. VPS analysis revealed that JNNSs used modal verbs in a relatively narrow range of VPSs as compared to NSs. Results showed that JNNSs used most of the modals with bare infinitives or the passive voice only whereas NSs used the modals in a wide range of VPSs including the progressive construction and the perfect aspect, both of which were the structures where JNNSs rarely used the modals. Results of frequency analysis suggest that language teachers or teaching materials should explain other modality items so that learners can avoid relying heavily on certain modals and have a wide range of lexical items to reflect their feelings more accurately. Besides, the underused modals should be more stressed in the classroom because they are members of epistemic modals, which allow us to not only interject our views into propositions but also build a relationship with readers. As for VPSs, teaching materials should present more examples of the modals occurring in a wide range of VPSs to help learners to be able to express their opinions from a variety of viewpoints.

Keywords: corpus linguistics, Japanese learners of English, modal auxiliary verbs, International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English

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Authors: Ana Elvira Ojanguren Lopez, Javier Martin Arista

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The aims of this paper are to present the automatisation procedure adopted in the implementation of a parallel corpus of Old English, as well as, to assess the progress of automatisation with respect to tagging, annotation, and lemmatisation. The corpus consists of an aligned parallel text with word-for-word comparison Old English-English that provides the Old English segment with inflectional form tagging (gloss, lemma, category, and inflection) and lemma annotation (spelling, meaning, inflectional class, paradigm, word-formation and secondary sources). This parallel corpus is intended to fill a gap in the field of Old English, in which no parallel and/or lemmatised corpora are available, while the average amount of corpus annotation is low. With this background, this presentation has two main parts. The first part, which focuses on tagging and annotation, selects the layouts and fields of lexical databases that are relevant for these tasks. Most information used for the annotation of the corpus can be retrieved from the lexical and morphological database Nerthus and the database of secondary sources Freya. These are the sources of linguistic and metalinguistic information that will be used for the annotation of the lemmas of the corpus, including morphological and semantic aspects as well as the references to the secondary sources that deal with the lemmas in question. Although substantially adapted and re-interpreted, the lemmatised part of these databases draws on the standard dictionaries of Old English, including The Student's Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, and A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. The second part of this paper deals with lemmatisation. It presents the lemmatiser Norna, which has been implemented on Filemaker software. It is based on a concordance and an index to the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, which comprises around three thousand texts and three million words. In its present state, the lemmatiser Norna can assign lemma to around 80% of textual forms on an automatic basis, by searching the index and the concordance for prefixes, stems and inflectional endings. The conclusions of this presentation insist on the limits of the automatisation of dictionary-based annotation in a parallel corpus. While the tagging and annotation are largely automatic even at the present stage, the automatisation of alignment is pending for future research. Lemmatisation and morphological tagging are expected to be fully automatic in the near future, once the database of secondary sources Freya and the lemmatiser Norna have been completed.

Keywords: corpus linguistics, historical linguistics, old English, parallel corpus

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Authors: Adriane Orenha-Ottaiano

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Collocations are conventionalized, recurrent and arbitrary lexical combinations. Due to the fact that they are highly specific for a particular language and may be contextually restricted, collocations pose a problem to EFL/ESL learners with regard to production or encoding. Taking that into account, the compilation of monolingual and bilingual collocations dictionaries for the referred audience is highly crucial and significant. Thus, the aim of this paper is to discuss the importance of the compilation of an Online Corpus-based Bilingual Collocations Dictionary, in the English-Portuguese and Portuguese-English directions. On a first phase, with the use of WordSmith Tools, the collocations were extracted from a Translation Learner Corpus (TLC), a parallel corpus made up of university students’ translations in the Portuguese-English direction, with approximately 100,000 words. In a second stage, based on the keywords analyzed from the TLC, more collocational patterns were extracted using the Sketch Engine. In order to include more collocations as well as to ensure dictionary users will have access to more frequent and recurrent collocations, we also use the frequency list from The Corpus of Contemporary American English, with the purpose of extracting more patterns. The dictionary focuses on all types of collocations (verbal, noun, adjectival and adverbial collocations), in order to help the referred audience use them more accurately and productively – so far the dictionary has more than 330 entries, and more than 3,500 collocations extracted. The idea of having the proposed dictionary in online format may allow to incorporate more qualitatively and quantitatively collocational information. Besides, more examples may be included, different from conventional printed collocations dictionaries. Being the first bilingual collocations dictionary in the aforementioned directions, it is hoped to achieve the challenge of meeting learners’ collocational needs as the collocations have been selected according to learners’ difficulties regarding the use of collocations.

Keywords: Corpus-Based Collocations Dictionary, Collocations , Bilingual Collocations Dictionary, Collocational Patterns

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Authors: Raquel Mateo Mendaza, Carmen Novo Urraca

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The current paper presents the elaboration of a corpus database that aligns two different corpora in order to simplify the search of information both for researchers and students of Old English. This database comprises the information contained in two main reference corpora, namely the Dictionary of Old English Corpus (DOEC), compiled at the University of Toronto, and the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English (YCOE). The first one provides information on all surviving texts written in the Old English language. The latter offers the syntactical and morphological annotation of several texts included in the DOEC. Although both corpora are closely related, as the YCOE includes the DOE source text identifier, the main problem detected is that there is not an alignment of texts that allows for the search of whole fragments to be further analysed in terms of morphology and syntax. The database proposed in this paper gathers all this information and presents it in a simple, more accessible, visual, and educational way. The alignment of fragments has been done in an automatized way. However, some problems have emerged during the creating process particularly related to the lack of correspondence in the division of fragments. For this reason, it has been necessary to revise the whole entries manually to obtain a truthful high-quality product and to carefully indicate the gaps encountered in these corpora. All in all, this database contains more than 60,000 entries corresponding with the DOE fragments annotated by the YCOE. The main strength of the resulting product is its research and teaching implications in the study of Old English. The use of this database will help researchers and students in the study of different aspects of the language, such as inflectional morphology, syntactic behaviour of given words, or translation studies, among others. By means of the search of words or fragments, the annotated information on morphology and syntax will be automatically displayed, automatizing, and speeding up the search of data.

Keywords: alignment, corpus database, morphosyntactic analysis, Old English

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Authors: Amr Anany

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This study offers a corpus-based analysis of the conceptual metaphors of RESPONSIBILITY inherent in the Arabic political speeches of King Abdulla II and their English translations rendered by the translators of the Royal Hashemite Court ("RHC translators"). In view of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), the current study aims to uncover the extent to which the dominant ideology in the source Arabic speeches of King Abdulla II is conveyed into the target English translation. The study explores a bilingual corpus, including eleven authentic Arabic speeches delivered by King Abdulla II and their English translations. The study finds that both Arabic and English share several metaphorical expressions of RESPONSIBILITY that are based on bodily experience such as RESPONSIBILITY IS UP, RESPONSIBILITY IS AN OBJECT, and RESPONSIBILITY IS AN HONOR. Apparently, the study concludes that RHC translators succeed to convey the dominant ideology from the source Arabic speeches to the English ones using specific translation strategies.

Keywords: cognitive linguistics, CDA, conceptual metaphor theory, ideology, responsibility

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Authors: Amaal Ali Al-Gamde

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The Syrian revolution is a major issue in the Middle East, which draws in world powers and receives a great focus in international mass media since 2011. The heavy global reliance on cyber news and digital sources plays a key role in conveying a sense of bias to a wide range of online readers. Thus, based on the assumption that media discourse possesses ideological implications, this study investigates the representation of Syrian revolution in online media. The paper explores the discursive constructions of anti and pro-government powers in Syrian revolution in 1000,000-word corpus of Fars online reports (an Iranian news agency), issued between 2013 and 2015. Taking a corpus assisted discourse analysis approach, the analysis investigates three types of lexicosemantic relations, the semantic macrostructures within which the two social actors are framed, the lexical collocations characterizing the news discourse and the discourse prosodies they tell about the two sides of the conflict. The study utilizes computer-based approaches, sketch engine and AntConc software to minimize the bias of the subjective analysis. The analysis moves from the insights of lexical frequencies and keyness scores to examine themes and the collocational patterns. The findings reveal the Fars agency’s ideological mode of representations in reporting events of Syrian revolution in two ways. The first is by stereotyping the opposition groups under the umbrella of terrorism, using words such as (law breakers, foreign-backed groups, militant groups, terrorists) to legitimize the atrocities of security forces against protesters and enhance horror among civilians. The second is through emphasizing the power of the government and depicting it as the defender of the Arab land by foregrounding the discourse of international conspiracy against Syria. The paper concludes discussing the potential importance of triangulating corpus linguistic tools with critical discourse analysis to elucidate more about discourses and reality.

Keywords: discourse prosody, ideology, keyness, semantic macrostructure

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Authors: Aiza Dalman

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Words are powerful when these are used wisely and strategically. In this study, twelve (12) campaign speeches of President Donald J. Trump were analyzed as to frequently used words and ethos, pathos and logos being employed. The speeches were read thoroughly, analyzed and interpreted. With the use of Word Counter Tool and Text Analyzer software accessible online, it was found out that the word ‘will’ has the highest frequency of 121, followed by Hillary (58), American (38), going (35), plan and Clinton (32), illegal (30), government (28), corruption (26) and criminal (24). When the speeches were analyzed as to ethos, pathos and logos, on the other hand, it revealed that these were all employed in his speeches. The statements under these pointed out against Hillary or in his favor. The unique strategy of President Donald J. Trump as to frequently used words and ethos, pathos and logos in persuading people perhaps lead the way to his victory.

Keywords: campaign speeches, corpus analysis, ethos, logos and pathos, power of words

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Authors: Theng Theng Ong

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This study adopts a multidisciplinary method by combining the corpus-based discourse analysis study and language attitude study to explore the construction of Malaysia airline tragedies: MH370, MH17 and QZ8501 in the selected Malaysian and United Kingdom (UK) online news. The study aims to determine the ways in which Malaysian Airline tragedies MH370, MH17 and QZ8501 are linguistically defined and constructed in terms of keyword and collocation. The study also seeks to identify the types of discourse that are presented in the new articles. The differences or similarities in terms of keywords, topics or issues covered by the selected Malaysian and UK news media will also be examined. Finally, the language attitude study will be carried out to examine the Malaysia and UK university students’ attitudes toward the keywords, topics or issues covered by the selected Malaysian and UK news media pertaining to Malaysian Airline tragedies MH370, MH17 and QZ8501. The analysis is divided into two parts with the first part focusing on corpus-based discourse analysis on the media text. The second part of the study is to investigate Malaysians and UK news readers’ attitudes towards the online news being reported by the Malaysian and UK news media pertaining to the Airline tragedies. The main findings of corpus-based discourse analysis are essential in designing the questions in the questionnaires and interview and therefore led to the identification of the attitudes among Malaysian and UK news. This study adopts a multidisciplinary method by combining the corpus-based discourse analysis study and language attitude study to explore the construction of Malaysia airline tragedies: MH370, MH17 and QZ8501 in the selected Malaysian and United Kingdom (UK) online news. The study aims to determine the ways in which Malaysian Airline tragedies MH370, MH17 and QZ8501 are linguistically defined and constructed in terms of keyword and collocation. The study also seeks to identify the types of discourse that are presented in the new articles. The differences or similarities in terms of keywords, topics or issues covered by the selected Malaysian and UK news media will also be examined. Finally, the language attitude study will be carried out to examine the Malaysia and UK university students’ attitudes toward the keywords, topics or issues covered by the selected Malaysian and UK news media pertaining to Malaysian Airline tragedies MH370, MH17 and QZ8501. The analysis is divided into two parts with the first part focusing on corpus-based discourse analysis on the media text. The second part of the study is to investigate Malaysians and UK news readers’ attitudes towards the online news being reported by the Malaysian and UK news media pertaining to the Airline tragedies. The main findings of corpus-based discourse analysis are essential in designing the questions in the questionnaires and interview and therefore led to the identification of the attitudes among Malaysian and UK news.

Keywords: corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, news media, tragedies study

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Authors: Seham El Kareh, Miramar Etman

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Recently, detecting liars and extracting features which distinguish them from truth-tellers have been the focus of a wide range of disciplines. To the author’s best knowledge, most of the work has been done on facial expressions and body gestures but only few works have been done on the language used by both liars and truth-tellers. This paper sheds light on four axes. The first axis copes with building an audio corpus for deceptive and truthful speech for Egyptian Arabic speakers. The second axis focuses on examining the human perception of lies and proving our need for computational linguistic-based methods to extract features which characterize truthful and deceptive speech. The third axis is concerned with building a linguistic analysis program that could extract from the corpus the inter- and intra-linguistic cues for deceptive and truthful speech. The program built here is based on selected categories from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program. Our results demonstrated that Egyptian Arabic speakers on one hand preferred to use first-person pronouns and present tense compared to the past tense when lying and their lies lacked of second-person pronouns, and on the other hand, when telling the truth, they preferred to use the verbs related to motion and the nouns related to time. The results also showed that there is a need for bigger data to prove the significance of words related to emotions and numbers.

Keywords: Egyptian Arabic corpus, computational analysis, deceptive features, forensic linguistics, human perception, truthful features

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Authors: Mahul Bhattacharyya, Niladri Sekhar Dash

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The present research paper is an experimental attempt to investigate the nature of variation in the register in three major text domains, namely, social, cultural, and political texts collected from the corpus of Bangla printed mass media texts. This present study uses a corpus of a moderate amount of Bangla mass media text that contains nearly one million words collected from different media sources like newspapers, magazines, advertisements, periodicals, etc. The analysis of corpus data reveals that each text has certain lexical properties that not only control their identity but also mark their uniqueness across the domains. At first, the subject domains of the texts are classified into two parameters namely, ‘Genre' and 'Text Type'. Next, some empirical investigations are made to understand how the domains vary from each other in terms of lexical properties like both function and content words. Here the method of comparative-cum-contrastive matching of lexical load across domains is invoked through word frequency count to track how domain-specific words and terms may be marked as decisive indicators in the act of specifying the textual contexts and subject domains. The study shows that the common lexical stock that percolates across all text domains are quite dicey in nature as their lexicological identity does not have any bearing in the act of specifying subject domains. Therefore, it becomes necessary for language users to anchor upon certain domain-specific lexical items to recognize a text that belongs to a specific text domain. The eventual findings of this study confirm that texts belonging to different subject domains in Bangla news text corpus clearly differ on the parameters of lexical load, lexical choice, lexical clustering, lexical collocation. In fact, based on these parameters, along with some statistical calculations, it is possible to classify mass media texts into different types to mark their relation with regard to the domains they should actually belong. The advantage of this analysis lies in the proper identification of the linguistic factors which will give language users a better insight into the method they employ in text comprehension, as well as construct a systemic frame for designing text identification strategy for language learners. The availability of huge amount of Bangla media text data is useful for achieving accurate conclusions with a certain amount of reliability and authenticity. This kind of corpus-based analysis is quite relevant for a resource-poor language like Bangla, as no attempt has ever been made to understand how the structure and texture of Bangla mass media texts vary due to certain linguistic and extra-linguistic constraints that are actively operational to specific text domains. Since mass media language is assumed to be the most 'recent representation' of the actual use of the language, this study is expected to show how the Bangla news texts reflect the thoughts of the society and how they leave a strong impact on the thought process of the speech community.

Keywords: Bangla, corpus, discourse, domains, lexical choice, mass media, register, variation

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Authors: Timothy William Lawrence

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The goal of this paper is to research and categorize the four basic verb types found in the Spanish descriptive grammar book Método de los Relojes using verb clauses as representation as found in M.A.K. Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar with the purpose of establishing theoretical along with syntactical parallels and deviations between English and Spanish. Results confirm theoretical correlations exist therefore leading to an analysis of English grammar syntax resulting in delineating commonalities and differences from Spanish. Corpora searches were carried out on different patterns of syntactical structures confirming divergences in verb syntax, making it possible to establish parameters to adapt English verbs to the criteria of the four basic Método de los Relojes verb types.

Keywords: corpus studies, Método de los Relojes, structural-functional grammar, verb syntax

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Authors: Anood Al-Shibli

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Designing a learner corpus is not an easy task to accomplish because dealing with learners’ language has many variables which might affect the results of any study based on learners’ language production (spoken and written). Also, it is very essential to systematically design a learner corpus especially when it is aimed to be a reference to language research. Therefore, designing the Omani Learner Corpus (OLEC) has undergone many explicit and systematic considerations. These criteria can be regarded as the foundation to design any learner corpus to be exploited effectively in language use and language learning studies. Added to that, OLEC is manually error-annotated corpus. Error-annotation in learner corpora is very essential; however, it is time-consuming and prone to errors. Consequently, a navigating tool is designed to help the annotators to insert errors’ codes in order to make the error-annotation process more efficient and consistent. To assure accuracy, error annotation procedure is followed to annotate OLEC and some preliminary findings are noted. One of the main results of this procedure is creating an error-annotation system based on the Omani learners of English language production. Because OLEC is still in the first stages, the primary findings are related to only one level of proficiency and one error type which is verb related errors. It is found that Omani learners in OLEC has the tendency to have more errors in forming the verb and followed by problems in agreement of verb. Comparing the results to other error-based studies indicate that the Omani learners tend to have basic verb errors which can found in lower-level of proficiency. To this end, it is essential to admit that examining learners’ errors can give insights to language acquisition and language learning and most errors do not happen randomly but they occur systematically among language learners.

Keywords: error-annotation system, error-annotation manual, learner corpora, verbs related errors

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Authors: Jingwen Ou

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Writing for academic purposes in a second or foreign language is one of the most important and the most demanding skills to be mastered by non-native speakers. Traditionally, the EAP writing instruction at the tertiary level encompasses the teaching of academic genre knowledge, more specifically, the disciplinary writing conventions, the rhetorical functions, and specific linguistic features. However, one of the main sources of challenges in English academic writing for L2 students at the tertiary level can still be found in proficiency in academic discourse, especially vocabulary, academic register, and organization. Data-Driven Learning (DDL) is defined as “a pedagogical approach featuring direct learner engagement with corpus data”. In the past two decades, the rising popularity of the application of the data-driven learning (DDL) approach in the field of EAP writing teaching has been noticed. Such a combination has not only transformed traditional pedagogy aided by published DDL guidebooks in classroom use but also triggered global research on corpus use in EAP classrooms. This study endeavors to delineate a systematic review of research in the intersection of DDL and EAP writing instruction by conducting a systematic literature review on both indirect and direct DDL practice in EAP writing instructional settings in China. Furthermore, the review provides a synthesis of significant discoveries emanating from prior research investigations concerning Chinese university students’ perception of Data-Driven Learning (DDL) and the subsequent impact on their academic writing performance following corpus-based training. Research papers were selected from Scopus-indexed journals and core journals from two main Chinese academic databases (CNKI and Wanfang) published in both English and Chinese over the last ten years based on keyword searches. Results indicated an insufficiency of empirical DDL research despite a noticeable upward trend in corpus research on discourse analysis and indirect corpus applications for material design by language teachers. Research on the direct use of corpora and corpus tools in DDL, particularly in combination with genre-based EAP teaching, remains a relatively small fraction of the whole body of research in Chinese higher education settings. Such scarcity is highly related to the prevailing absence of systematic training in English academic writing registers within most Chinese universities' EAP syllabi due to the Chinese English Medium Instruction policy, where only English major students are mandated to submit English dissertations. Findings also revealed that Chinese learners still held mixed attitudes towards corpus tools influenced by learner differences, limited access to language corpora, and insufficient pre-training on corpus theoretical concepts, despite their improvements in final academic writing performance.

Keywords: corpus linguistics, data-driven learning, EAP, tertiary education in China

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Authors: Chayanika Hazarika Bordoloi

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This paper is an attempt to work on a highly inflectional language called Assamese. This is also one of the national languages of India and very little has been achieved in terms of computational research. Building a language processing tool for a natural language is not very smooth as the standard and language representation change at various levels. This paper presents inflectional suffixes of Assamese verbs and how the statistical tools, along with linguistic features, can improve the tagging accuracy. Conditional random fields (CRF tool) was used to automatically tag and train the text data; however, accuracy was improved after linguistic featured were fed into the training data. Assamese is a highly inflectional language; hence, it is challenging to standardizing its morphology. Inflectional suffixes are used as a feature of the text data. In order to analyze the inflections of Assamese word forms, a list of suffixes is prepared. This list comprises suffixes, comprising of all possible suffixes that various categories can take is prepared. Assamese words can be classified into inflected classes (noun, pronoun, adjective and verb) and un-inflected classes (adverb and particle). The corpus used for this morphological analysis has huge tokens. The corpus is a mixed corpus and it has given satisfactory accuracy. The accuracy rate of the tagger has gradually improved with the modified training data.

Keywords: CRF, morphology, tagging, tagset

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Authors: Wolfram Karg

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The Occupy-Movement came into in 2011 existence in the US as a reaction to one of the worst economic crisis since World War II. With cuts in benefits and social services, with people being evicted from their homes on the one hand and high bonuses granted to their managers of the very same companies, a strong feeling of injustice besieged people in the US and caused them to voice their anger peacefully in social media and on the streets. Due to the world-wide-web, users all around the world read about this movement and recognized the same injustice in their own countries, making Occupy a global movement. The vast array of topics covered by Occupy offers a unique chance to carry out a corpus-based discourse analysis based on the DIMEAN-Model. The focus on this paper is limited to two aspects of DIMEAN: intertextual references and the use of connectors in texts. Because the discourse is to a large extent carried out via posts in blogs, online-articles and comments, the paper also analyses, in how far modern (i.e. computer-based media) there is a correlation between the use of connectors in different communicative types used by the Occupy-Movement.

Keywords: discourse, new media, occupy, corpus analysis

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Authors: Jie Zheng, Ruifeng Luo

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The United States is the world’s most developed economy with the strongest military power. China is the fastest growing country with growing comprehensive strength and its economic strength is second only to the US. However, the conflict between them is getting serious in recent years. President’s address is the representative of a nation’s ideology. The paper has built up a small sized corpus of President Xi Jinping and Trump’s speech in Davos to investigate their respective use and types of metaphors and calculate the respective percentage of each type of metaphor. The result shows President Xi Jinping employs more metaphors than Trump. The metaphors of Xi includes “building” metaphor, “plant” metaphor, “journey” metaphor, “ship” metaphor, “traffic” metaphor, “nation is a person” metaphor, “show” metaphor, etc while Trump’s comprises “war” metaphor, “building” metaphor, “journey” metaphor, “traffic” metaphor, “tax” metaphor, “book” metaphor, etc. After investigating metaphor use differences, the paper makes an analysis of the underlying ideology between the two nations. China is willing to strengthen ties with all the countries all over the world and has built a platform of development for them and itself to go to the destination of social well being while the US pays much concern to itself, emphasizing its first leading position and is also willing to help its alliances to development. The paper’s comparison of the ideology difference between the two countries will help them get a better understanding and reduce the conflict to some extent.

Keywords: metaphor; corpus; ideology; conflict

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Authors: Qiao-Yu Warren Cai

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Due to the rise of big data, building corpora and using them to analyze ChineseL2 learners’ language output has become a trend. Various empirical research has been conducted using Chinese corpora built by different academic institutes. However, most of the research analyzed the data in the Chinese corpora usingcorpus-based qualitative content analysis with descriptive statistics. Descriptive statistics can be used to make summations about the subjects or samples that research has actually measured to describe the numerical data, but the collected data cannot be generalized to the population. Comte, a Frenchpositivist, has argued since the 19th century that human beings’ knowledge, whether the discipline is humanistic and social science or natural science, should be verified in a scientific way to construct a universal theory to explain the truth and human beings behaviors. Inferential statistics, able to make judgments of the probability of a difference observed between groups being dependable or caused by chance (Free Geography Notes, 2015)and to infer from the subjects or examples what the population might think or behave, is just the right method to support Comte’s argument in the field of TCSOL. Also, inferential statistics is a core of quantitative research, but little research has been conducted by combing corpora with inferential statistics. Little research analyzes the differences in Chinese L2 learners’ language corpus output errors by using theOne-way ANOVA so that the findings of previous research are limited to inferring the population's Chinese errors according to the given samples’ Chinese corpora. To fill this knowledge gap in the professional development of Taiwanese TCSOL, the present study aims to utilize the One-way ANOVA to analyze corpus output errors of Chinese L2 learners from America, Myanmar, and Singapore. The results show that no significant difference exists in ‘shì (是) sentence’ and word order errors, but compared with Americans and Singaporeans, it is significantly easier for Myanmar to have ‘sentence blends.’ Based on the above results, the present study provides an instructional approach and contributes to further exploration of how Chinese L2 learners can have (and use) learning strategies to lower errors.

Keywords: Chinese corpus, error analysis, one-way analysis of variance, Chinese L2 learners, Americans, myanmar, Singaporeans

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