Identifying communicative functions in discourse with content types

Texts are not monolithic entities but rather coherent collections of micro illocutionary acts which help to convey a unitary message of content and purpose. Identifying such text segments is challenging because they require a fine-grained level of analysis even within a single sentence. At the same time, accessing them facilitates the analysis of the communicative functions of a text as well as the identification of relevant information. We propose an empirical framework for modelling micro illocutionary acts at clause level, that we call content types, grounded on linguistic theories of text types, in particular on the framework proposed by Werlich in 1976. We make available a newly annotated corpus of 279 documents (for a total of more than 180,000 tokens) belonging to different genres and temporal periods, based on a dedicated annotation scheme. We obtain an average Cohen’s kappa of 0.89 at token level. We achieve an average F1 score of 74.99% on the automatic classification of content types using a bi-LSTM model. Similar results are obtained on contemporary and historical documents, while performances on genres are more varied. This work promotes a discourse-oriented approach to information extraction and cross-fertilisation across disciplines through a computationally-aided linguistic analysis

Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Annotation of Corpora for Research in the Humanities (ACRH-2). 29 November 2012, Lisbon, Portugal

Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Annotation of Corpora for Research in the Humanities (ACRH-2), held in Lisbon, Portugal on 29 November 2012

The Syntactic Complexity of Noun Phrases in Second Language Students’ Writing

Investigations on learners' writing have multiplied over the recent decades, but writings created by students of institutions of education are still mostly unstudied. This research looks into how noun phrases (NPs) were used in writings created by students at Ghanaian colleges of education (CoEs). Lu's (2010) three metrics for measuring overall NP complexity for text—a length-based metric of NP complexity, mean length of clause (MLC), and two specific NP complexity metrics—number of complex nominals per clause (CN/C) and number of complex nominals per T-Unit (CN/T)—were chosen and applied to a total of 318 texts written by Levels 100, 200, and 300 students from three colleges of education in Ghana. The results from the one-way ANOVA and its post hoc analysis showed a significant difference between Levels 100 and 300 students as well as between Levels 200 and 300 students in their use of complex noun phrases. Overall, Level 300 students significantly used more complex NPs than students in the other levels. It is recommended that in further studies, lexico-grammatical features such as relative clauses, prepositional phrases, and nominal clauses, should be analysed to assess complexity since academic language is a multifaceted entity which may be researched in various fields like SLA, applied linguistics, and language testing

A Corpus-Based Analysis of Cohesion in L2 Writing by Undergraduates in Ecuador

In finding out the nature of cohesion in L2 writing, the present study set out to address three research questions: (1) What types of cohesion relations occur in L2 writing at the sentence, paragraph, and whole-text levels? (2) What is the relationship between lexico-grammatical cohesion features and teachers’ judgements of writing quality? (3) Do expectations of cohesion suggested by the CEFR match what is found in student writing? To answer those questions, a corpus of 240 essays and 240 emails from college- level students learning English as a foreign language in Ecuador enabled the analysis of cohesion. Each text included the scores, or teachers’ judgements of writing quality aligned to the upper-intermediate level (or B2) as proposed by the Common European Framework of Reference for learning, teaching, and assessing English as a foreign language. Lexical and grammatical items used by L2 students to build relationships of meaning in sentences, paragraphs, and the entire text were considered to analyse cohesion in L2 writing. Utilising Natural Language Processing tools (e.g., TAACO, TextInspector, NVivo), the analysis focused on determining which cohesion features (e.g., word repetition/overlap, semantical similarity, connective words) predicted the teachers’ judgements of writing quality in the collected essays and emails. The findings indicate that L2 writing is characterised by word overlap and synonyms occurring at the paragraph level and, to a lesser degree, cohesion between sentences and the entire text (e.g., connective words). Whilst these cohesion features positively and negatively predicted the teachers’ scores, a cautious interpretation of these findings is required, as many other factors beyond cohesion features must have also influenced the allocation of scores in L2 writing

A preliminary bibliography on focus

[I]n its present form, the bibliography contains approximately 1100 entries. Bibliographical work is never complete, and the present one is still modest in a number of respects. It is not annotated, and it still contains a lot of mistakes and inconsistencies. It has nevertheless reached a stage which justifies considering the possibility of making it available to the public. The first step towards this is its pre-publication in the form of this working paper. […] The bibliography is less complete for earlier years. For works before 1970, the bibliographies of Firbas and Golkova 1975 and Tyl 1970 may be consulted, which have not been included here

Effects of Instruction on Chinese College Students’ Thematic Choice in Academic Writing

The Theme is a major aspect of how speakers construct their messages in a way which makes them fit smoothly into the unfolding language event. Thematic choice provides clues as to how English learners organize information and shape their texts. Previous studies reveal that English learners deviated from English native speakers in their thematic choices, leading to failure in signaling what the text is about. The findings have led to a consensus that English learners should be trained in thematic choices so that they are able to write well-developed essays. This quasi-experimental research aimed to investigate the effects of instruction on Chinese college students’ thematic choices in their academic English writing, and proved that instruction in thematic choice produced positive effects on Chinese college students’ use of topical Themes, interpersonal Themes, unmarked Themes, and conjunctive adjuncts. Keywords: Theme; thematic choice; instruction; Chinese college students; English academic writin

Inhibitory control and the speech patterns of second language users

Inhibitory control (IC), an ability to suppress irrelevant and/or conflicting information, has been found to underlie performance on a variety of cognitive tasks, including bilingual language processing. This study examines the relationship between inhibitory control and the speech patterns of second language (L2) users from the perspective of individual differences. While the majority of studies have supported the role of IC in bilingual language processing using single word production paradigms, this work looks at inhibitory processes in the context of extended speech, with a particular emphasis on disfluencies. We hypothesised that the speech of individuals with poorer IC would be characterised by reduced fluency. A series of regression analyses, in which we controlled for age and L2 proficiency, revealed that IC (in terms of accuracy on the Stroop task) could reliably predict the occurrence of reformulations and the frequency and duration of silent pauses in L2 speech. No statistically significant relationship was found between IC and other L2 spoken output measures, such as repetitions, filled pauses, and performance errors. Conclusions focus on IC as one out of a number of cognitive functions in the service of spoken language production. A more qualitative approach towards the question of whether L2 speakers rely on IC is advocated