351 research outputs found
De-verbalization and Nominal Categories in Mandarin Chinese: A corpus-driven study in both Mainland Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin
This paper probes into the issue of de-verbalization in Chinese by starting from two potential and innovative uses of de-verbalization in Mainland Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin, respectively. Then, we move to the exploration of various nominal categories in Chinese, with regard to their grammatical behaviors as well as their ontological differences. Crucially, we find that nominal categories in Chinese diverge upon individualization, which can be realized along either spatial or temporal dimension, as evidenced by the application of different types of classifiers. Specifically, event nouns and deverbal nouns allow temporal individualization only, while xingwei-marked nouns are exclusively compatible with spatial individualization. By contrast, entity nouns and dongzuo-marked nouns allow both spatial and temporal individualization. Hence, individualization is the key to our understanding of nominal categories in Chinese.
Negative vaccine voices in Swedish social media
Vaccinations are one of the most significant interventions to public health, but vaccine hesitancy creates concerns for a portion of the population in many countries, including Sweden. Since discussions on vaccine hesitancy are often taken on social networking sites, data from Swedish social media are used to study and quantify the sentiment among the discussants on the vaccination-or-not topic during phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Out of all the posts analyzed a majority showed a stronger negative sentiment, prevailing throughout the whole of the examined period, with some spikes or jumps due to the occurrence of certain vaccine-related events distinguishable in the results. Sentiment analysis can be a valuable tool to track public opinions regarding the use, efficacy, safety, and importance of vaccination
Phraseology in Corpus-Based Translation Studies: A Stylistic Study of Two Contemporary Chinese Translations of Cervantes's Don Quijote
The present work sets out to investigate the stylistic profiles of two modern Chinese versions of
Cervantes’s Don Quijote (I): by Yang Jiang (1978), the first direct translation from Castilian to Chinese,
and by Liu Jingsheng (1995), which is one of the most commercially successful versions of the
Castilian literary classic. This thesis focuses on a detailed linguistic analysis carried out with the help
of the latest textual analytical tools, natural language processing applications and statistical packages.
The type of linguistic phenomenon singled out for study is four-character expressions (FCEXs), which
are a very typical category of Chinese phraseology. The work opens with the creation of a descriptive
framework for the annotation of linguistic data extracted from the parallel corpus of Don Quijote.
Subsequently, the classified and extracted data are put through several statistical tests. The results of
these tests prove to be very revealing regarding the different use of FCEXs in the two Chinese
translations. The computational modelling of the linguistic data would seem to indicate that among
other findings, while Liu’s use of archaic idioms has followed the general patterns of the original and
also of Yang’s work in the first half of Don Quijote I, noticeable variations begin to emerge in the
second half of Liu’s more recent version. Such an idiosyncratic use of archaisms by Liu, which may be
defined as style shifting or style variation, is then analyzed in quantitative terms through the application
of the proposed context-motivated theory (CMT). The results of applying the CMT-derived statistical
models show that the detected stylistic variation may well point to the internal consistency of the
translator in rendering the second half of Part I of the novel, which reflects his freer, more creative and
experimental style of translation. Through the introduction and testing of quantitative research methods
adapted from corpus linguistics and textual statistics, this thesis has made a major contribution to
methodological innovation in the study of style within the context of corpus-based translation studies
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