Contesting international trade agreements. Argumentative patterning in embedded discourses

This chapter looks at the ideological positioning and argumentation patterning of three sets of interrelated data, which can be considered vertically organized in a hierarchical configuration: these sub-corpora consist of the drafts of a major International Trade Agreement, the TiSA, (Trade in Services Agreement), a series of revelations and exposures authored by WikiLeaks, and a collection of online publications produced by the campaigning group, Friends of the Earth International. The objective is to identify how a process of ‘entextualization’ is realized through the various discourses—from the normative codification of legislation, on to the detailed specialist exposition and critique from legal experts, and over to the affectively-charged discourse of resistance and protest in the public domain. The conceptual and explanatory frameworks for the analysis derive from two disciplinary fields, argumentative studies and discourse analysis, where the role of language studies in describing discursive construal has traditionally played rather different roles. The analysis of the corpus starts from a linguistic perspective, comparing and contrasting semantic profiling, topicalization, and verb usage over the three sub-corpora. Using accounts of argumentative structure and procedures—elaborating the notions of schema, frames, moves and strategies, it is possible to identify distinctive patterns of reasoning, revealed through linguistic indexicality. In this way, argumentation can be related to the three varying communicative contexts, their authorship, audiences and rhetorical purposes. This study is, therefore, an attempt to integrate the two fields of argumentation studies and discourse analysis more systematically, recognizing the mutual benefits this carries for both, providing a body of empirical evidence necessary to further theoretical models and theories of argumentation, on the one hand, while extending discourse analysis into more challenging areas of investigation and taking a wider textual perspective than has often been common to date

The Use of Adjectives and Adverbs in Estonian and British Student Writing: A Corpus Comparison

Käesoleva töö eesmärk on kirjeldada omadus- ja määrsõnade kasutust eesti-inglise õppijakeeles, võrreldes seda inglise keelt emakeelena kõnelevate gümnaasiumiõpilaste keelekasutusega. Võrdlusaluseks on järgmised parameetrid: leksikaalne variatiivsus ja keerukus, akadeemiliste omadus- ja määrsõnade osakaal ning kasutatud omadus- ja määrsõnade tüübid. Töö teoreetilises osas antakse ülevaade uurimustest edasijõudnud õppijate vahekeele teemal, sõnasageduste sobivusest ja kitsaskohtadest õppijakeele kirjeldamisel ning olulistest aspektidest korpuste võrdlemisel. Töö empiirilises osas rakendati korpuste võrdlemise metodoloogiat, kasutades andmete saamiseks allalaaditavat programmi AntConc ning andmete kirjeldamiseks veebipõhiseid programme veebisaidil Lextutor, mis võimaldasid näha teksti leksikaalset profiili lähtudes sõnasagedustest inglise keeles Briti Rahvuskorpuse (British National Corpus) põhjal. Andmete analüüsi tulemusena selgus, et eesti õppijate omadus- ja määrsõnade kasutus on inglise keelt emakeelena kõnelejate keelekasutusega võrreldes väiksema variatiivsuse ja keerukusega. Ühtlasi kasutavad õppijad vähemal määral akadeemilisi sõnu ning kalduvad sagedamini kordama ühtesid ja samu sõnu. Õppijaid võiks aidata suurema tähelepanu pööramine määrsõnade derivatsioonile ning omadussõnade liitmisele

SemEval-2010 Task 17: All-words Word Sense Disambiguation on a Specific Domain

Domain portability and adaptation of NLP components and Word Sense Disambiguation systems present new challenges. The difficulties found by supervised systems to adapt might change the way we assess the strengths and weaknesses of supervised and knowledge-based WSD systems. Unfortunately, all existing evaluation datasets for specific domains are lexical-sample corpora. This task presented all-words datasets on the environment domain for WSD in four languages (Chinese, Dutch, English, Italian). 11 teams participated, with supervised and knowledge-based systems, mainly in the English dataset. The results show that in all languages the participants where able to beat the most frequent sense heuristic as estimated from general corpora. The most successful approaches used some sort of supervision in the form of hand-tagged examples from the domain

Enlightened Romanticism: Mary Gartside’s colour theory in the age of Moses Harris, Goethe and George Field

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the work of Mary Gartside, a British female colour theorist, active in London between 1781 and 1808. She published three books between 1805 and 1808. In chronological and intellectual terms Gartside can cautiously be regarded an exemplary link between Moses Harris, who published a short but important theory of colour in the second half of the eighteenth century, and J.W. von Goethe’s highly influential Zur Farbenlehre, published in Germany in 1810. Gartside’s colour theory was published privately under the disguise of a traditional water colouring manual, illustrated with stunning abstract colour blots (see example above). Until well into the twentieth century, she remained the only woman known to have published a theory of colour. In contrast to Goethe and other colour theorists in the late 18th and early 19th century Gartside was less inclined to follow the anti-Newtonian attitudes of the Romantic movement

Disseminating and Hiding Information in Technical Communication Courses: The Case of Patents from the Perspectives of Digital Humanities

Despite their ostensibly aseptic nature, technical texts involve a multifaceted net of institutional, social and pragmatic functions. Patents, in particular, are characterized by a multi-layered rhetorical exercise in which information is provided, and hidden, in light of patent disclosure lawsDrawing on the Cooperative Patent Classification scheme, a corpus of patents related to environmental issues has been compiled. The objective is to investigate the main keywords emerging in the corpus and to analyse their semantic context in this patent type. More specifically, the analysis focuses on the patents’ semantic preference and semantic prosody in order to pinpoint and examine the semantic complexities emerging in this genre and to identify the strategies employed (such as the use of linguistic vagueness) in order to provide the necessary information while not disclosing precious data. Patents represent a complex, hybrid and cross-disciplinary genre and a finer understanding of their discursive features may contribute to spreading awareness of the importance that semantics plays within the rhetorical pattern of the text. Therefore, they may be fruitfully employed in Technical Communication courses in order to improved reading comprehension and analytical skills

A COMPARISON OF THE ACADEMIC WORD LIST AND THE ACADEMIC VOCABULARY LIST: SHOULD THE AVL REPLACE THE AWL?

In this commentary, we begin with the discussion on a brief history of academic wordlists. Adopting a comparative perspective, then, the merits and demerits of the Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000) and its competing counterpart the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) (Gardner & Davies, 2014) are presented. We also explore whether the AWL can still be considered as “the best list†(Nation, 2001, p. 12) for improving academic words, or whether its counterpart is reasonably “the most current, accurate, and comprehensive list†(Gardner & Davies, 2014, p. 325). The comparison was made in terms of twelve aspects: corpus size, types of corpus texts, sources of corpus texts, text balance, disciplines included, counting unit, wordlist items, method for excluding highfrequency words, minimum frequency, method for excluding technical words, sequence of list items and lexical coverage. The comparison reveals that the AVL is far from complete and cannot replace the AWL. The results of the comparison can have implications for practitioners and course developers

Mapping Digital Discourses of the Capital Region of Finland : Combining Onomastics, CADS, and GIS

Peer reviewe

Mapping Digital Discourses of the Capital Region of Finland : Combining Onomastics, CADS, and GIS

Peer reviewe

Ontology learning from Italian legal texts

The paper reports on the methodology and preliminary results of a case study in automatically extracting ontological knowledge from Italian legislative texts. We use a fully-implemented ontology learning system (T2K) that includes a battery of tools for Natural Language Processing (NLP), statistical text analysis and machine language learning. Tools are dynamically integrated to provide an incremental representation of the content of vast repositories of unstructured documents. Evaluated results, however preliminary, show the great potential of NLP-powered incremental systems like T2K for accurate large-scale semi-automatic extraction of legal ontologies