Phrase Frames in English Pharmaceutical Discourse: A Corpus-Driven Study of Intradisciplinary Register Variation

Focusing on the exploration of intra-disciplinary register variation in the pharmaceutical domain, this corpus-driven study attempts to describe the use, composition and discourse functions of phrase frames, that is, contiguous sequences of words identical except for one (Fletcher, 2002-2007), found in samples of four English pharmaceutical text types, such as patient information leaflets, summaries of product characteristics, clinical trial protocols and chapters/sections from academic textbooks on pharmacology. The study deals with a specific sub-type of phrase frames, that is, 4-word units with a variable slot in the medial position, e.g. be * with caution, to take * medicine. The results showed, among others, that the use and discourse functions of phrase frames vary across pharmaceutical text types, that the correlation between the frequency of phrase frames and their pattern variability may depend on a register or genre, and that it is justified to treat the discourse functions of phrase frames as distinct from those of their textual variants

Semantic space of the research paper abstract

The article explores semantic structure of the abstract of geological research papers (GRPA) and proposes a model of its semantic space. Consideration is given to the functional level. Its semantics is concluded to be built by two segments of content – referential and textual ones. GRPA is defined to be a super-segmental sign of secondary denotation and co-reference, which reflects a complex system of semiotic, semiological, and textual relations between two lingual signs – the research paper and the abstract. GRPA referential semantics is studied via the GRPA semiotic relations and establishes coding, patterning, and indexing functions to frame GRPA semiotic semantics, while also recognizing instrumental, indicatory, identifying, substitution, and compensatory functions to be complementary to the GRPA semiotic nature. GRPA semiological relations establish reportive, referential, and reflective functions to be fundamental to GRPA textual semantics, which is supplemented by informative, visualizing, and educative functions. Informativeness, evidentiality, and credibility are determined to constitute core attributes of the GPRA functional semantics. The descriptors of informative semantics of the texts of academic genres and the GRPA, in particular, are concluded to be the predicates of existence, state, identification, movement, physical and intellectual action, location, and characterization

English Index

No abstract

The development of phrasal verbs in British English from 1650 to 1990: A corpus-based study

Phrasal verbs or particle verbs are one of the most idiosyncratic features of the English language, as well as of other Germanic languages, such as German or Dutch. They pose many problems for non-native speakers, because their meanings have to be learned separately from the meanings of their verbal bases (give vs. give up), given that the union of the two elements of the compound (the verb and the particle) very often gives rise to new non-compositional forms very similar to idioms. This dissertation tackles some of the questions concerning the nature of phrasal verbs. First, I intend to delimit the concept of phrasal verb as conceived of in Present-day English. One of the topics often discussed in relation to this category is precisely that of the difficulty of establishing the boundaries between phrasal verbs and other related categories. Second, I aim at filling a gap in the literature of phrasal verbs by carrying out a corpus analysis of the development of these structures in the recent history of English, more precisely between 1650 and 1990. After comparing the recent history of phrasal verbs with their status in earlier stages of the language as described in the literature, a third aim of the present dissertation is to establish a relationship between these structures and the processes of grammaticalization, lexicalization and idiomatization. For these purposes, data have been extracted from several sources, in particular from ARCHER 3.1 (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), although many illustrative examples, especially those involving Present-day English combinations, have also been obtained from the BNC (British National Corpus) or the Internet. Recurrent use has also been made of several dictionaries of English, most notably the Oxford English Dictionary, as well as dictionaries specialized in phrasal verbs and related structures

Semantic frames and semantic networks in the Health Science Corpus

[eng] The aim of this paper is to apply frame semantics principles to the analysis of a specialized corpus, the Health Science Corpus, implemented in the lexical database SciE-Lex. Taking FrameNet as the basis for this research, I will assign frame semantic features to Scie-Lex data in order to highlight the shared semantic and syntactic background of the related words in the biomedical register, give motivation to their patterns of collocates and establish frame-based semantic networks of related lexical units.[spa] El objetivo de este artículo es aplicar los principios de la semántica de marcos al análisis de un corpus especializado, el Health Science Corpus, implementado en la base de datos léxica SciE-Lex. Tomando FrameNet como base para esta investigación, se aplica la semántica de marcos a los datos de Scie-Lex para destacar los aspectos sintácticos y semánticos communes de los términos del registro biomédico, motivar sus patrones combinatorios y establecer redes semánticas basadas en marcos

Semantic frames and semantic networks in the Health Science Corpus

The aim of this paper is to apply frame semantics principles to the analysis of a specialized corpus, the Health Science Corpus, implemented in the lexical data b ase SciE-Lex. Taking FrameNet as the basis for this research, I will assign frame semantic features to Scie-Lex data in order to highlight the shared semantic and syntactic background of the related words in the biomedical register, give motivation to their patterns of collocates and establish frame-based semantic networks of related lexical units.El objetivo de este artículo es aplicar los principios de la semántica de marcos al análisis de un corpus especializado, el Health Science Corpus, implementado en la base de datos léxica SciE-Lex. Tomando FrameNet como base para esta investigación, se aplica la semántica de marcos a los datos de Scie-Lex para destacar los aspectos sintácticos y semánticos communes de los términos del registro biomédico, motivar sus patrones combinatorios y establecer redes semánticas basadas en marcos

Different forms, different meanings? A lexicographic and corpus-based study of four sets of English near-synonyms

ope

Risk and Threat during the Covid-19 Pandemic: a Micro-Diachronic Perspective.

Communicating risk during the Covid-19 pandemic Since the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak, media content has focused on issues related to the virus, ranging from scientific and medical information (i.e. structure of the virus, effects, vaccines, etc.) to safety measures and government restrictions (i.e. lockdown, curfews, use of masks, etc.). Covid-19 discourse has raised much interest in academia, both in linguistics and the social sciences especially concerning the frequently used metaphor of war (Sabucedo et al 2020, Wagener 2020, Castro Seixas 2021, Panzeri et al. 2021, Taylor 2021). Other studies have focused on the communication of risk during Covid-19 from a health perspective to address eventual gaps in the interaction between doctors and virologists and patients and non-experts (Abrams and Greenhawt 2020, Chesser et al. 2020). However, to our knowledge risk is yet to be studied from a linguistic perspective. The aim of this paper is to analyse how risk was conveyed in newspapers and on online magazines during 2020. More specifically, we present a diachronic analysis of the words risk and threat in the Coronavirus Corpus which was created to keep record of the economic, social and political impact of the pandemic. By tracing changes (if there are any) in frequency and meaning over the months, we aim at identifying collocates and phraseology used to convey issues related to risk and virus menace since the start of the outbreak. Results will shed light on the communication of risk and on significant patterns associated to the semantic field of threat during a health emergency