The semantics of sustainable development: A corpus-assisted, ecological analysis of discourse across languages

In European societies, sustainable development is often mentioned by politicians and media. But what do politicians and media mean when they use the expression sustainable development? Linguistic research has shown that sustainable development is frequently intended as an unspecified condition that needs to be achieved with an anthropocentric attitude (Alexander 2002, Mahlberg 2007, Naeem et al. 2016). The present research aims at outlining the discursive construction of sustainable development in the political discourse of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and in news discourse appeared after the release of the UN’s resolution. The discursive construction of sustainable development is explored in English, Hungarian and Italian and it is identified by means of two concepts: cultural keywords, namely politically, socially and culturally salient lexemes (Williams 1983); and meaning by collocation, namely the semantics that lexemes acquire thanks to their co-occurring with a limited set of words belonging to certain word classes, fitting a common semantic area and sharing a mutual connotation (Firth 1957, Sinclair 1991). The study of cultural keywords and meaning by collocation is carried out within the theoretical framework of corpus-assisted, ecological analysis of discourse with a cross-linguistic approach. The discursive construction of sustainable development is investigated in two corpora: the 2030 Agenda Corpus and the Sustainable development Corpus (or SusCorp). The 2030 Agenda Corpus is a multilingual, parallel corpus of political discourse including the English, Hungarian and Italian versions of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development; the English, Hungarian and Italian sections of the corpus count between 15,000 and 18,000 tokens each. The SusCorp is a multilingual, comparable corpus of news discourse containing broadsheet articles published between 2016 and 2018 in the English, Hungarian and Italian press; the English, Hungarian and Italian sections of the corpus count between 250,000 and 450,000 tokens each. The two corpora are analysed in turn in search for cultural keywords and meaning by collocation. Cultural keywords are found among the most frequent and statistically salient lexemes of the English, Hungarian and Italian subcorpora. Meaning by collocation is outlined by extracting the collocational patterns of the English lexical items sustainable, sustainability, sustainable development and their Hungarian and Italian translational equivalents for the 2030 Agenda Corpus, and by collecting the collocational patterns of the English lexeme sustainable and its Hungarian and Italian translational equivalents for the SusCorp. The cultural keywords identified in both corpora and for all languages mainly refer to sustainable development and to the sustainability goals recommended by the UN’s 2030 Agenda. Also the international dimension of sustainability is tackled cross-linguistically by cultural keywords in both corpora. In addition, in the SusCorp environmental concerns like climate change feature among the cultural keywords of English and Italian, while Hungarian cultural keywords include issues like migration. The meaning by collocation extracted for the adjective sustainable in both corpora and for all languages makes the lexeme represent a positive quality associated with other positive qualities and characterising material processes of change, depletion, improving and supporting. The meaning by collocation of the noun sustainability in the 2030 Agenda makes the noun a property bound especially to economic matters. The meaning by collocation of sustainable development in the 2030 Agenda makes it a condition that needs to be achieved for the wellbeing of people worldwide thanks to the aid of the UN’s Agenda

Collocation Dictionaries: A Comparative Analysis

The importance of phraseological information in lexicographic resources is experiencing an exponential growth. This is evident in the publication in recent years of a wide variety of combinatorial or collocation dictionaries. This paper describes and compares the main monolingual collocation dictionaries for English and Spanish in regards to the following: (i) types of collocation encoded; (ii) kinds of collocational information offered; (iii) place for collocations in the micro or macrostructure of the dictionary. The objective of this analysis is to study the usefulness of these resources for translators.El creciente interés por la información fraseológica se constata en la gran cantidad de diccionarios combinatorios o de colocaciones que han surgido en los últimos años. En este artículo se describen y se comparan los principales diccionarios monolingües de colocaciones en inglés y en español teniendo en cuenta lo siguiente: (i) el tipo de colocaciones que codifican; (ii) el tipo de información colocacional que ofrecen; (iii) el lugar que ocupan las colocaciones en la micro y macroestructura del diccionario. El objetivo último de este análisis es estudiar la utilidad de estos recursos para los traductores.This research was carried out within the framework of the project RECORD: Representación del Conocimiento en Redes Dinámicas [Knowledge Representation in Dynamic Networks, FFI2011-22397], funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation

Technologies in computerized lexicography

Since the early eighties, computer technology has become increasingly relevant to lexicography. Computer science will probably not be the only technological discipline which may have implications for future computerized lexicography. Some developments in the fields of language technology, information technology and knowledge engineering, may support lexicographical practice and enhance the quality of the resulting dictionary. The present paper discusses how the analysis and interpretation of electronic corpus data by the lexicographer may be improved by automatic linguistic analysis, by better access to the corpus, and by a more flexible communication with the computer system. As a frame of reference, first an indication of the state of the art in computerized lexicography will be given, by a concise discussion of three projects at the Institute for Dutch Lexicology INL considered in an international context: the conversion of the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal WNT (Dictionary of the Dutch Language Based on Historical Principles) to electronic form, the compilation of the Vroegmiddelnederlands Woordenboek (Dictionary of Early Middle Dutch) in a computerized lexicographer's workbench, and the INL Taalbank (INL Language Database). Although the topic of this paper is technology, focus is on functional rather than technical aspects of computerized lexicography.Keywords: computerized lexicography, electronic dictionary, electronic text corpus, lexicographer's workbench, integrated language database, automatic linguistic analysis, information retrieval, user interfac

Developing a writing assistant to help EAP writers with collocations in real time

Corpora have given rise to a wide range of lexicographic resources aimed at helping novice users of academic English with their writing. This includes academic vocabulary lists, a variety of textbooks, and even a bespoke academic English dictionary. However, writers may not be familiar with these resources or may not be sufficiently aware of the lexical shortcomings of their emerging texts to trigger the need to use such help in the first place. Moreover, writers who have to stop writing to look up a word can be distracted from getting their ideas down on paper. The ColloCaid project aims to address this problem by integrating information on collocation with text editors. In this paper, we share the research underpinning the initial development of ColloCaid by detailing the rationale of (1) the lexicographic database we are compiling to support novice EAP users’ collocation needs and (2) the preliminary visualisation decisions taken to present information on collocation to EAP users without disrupting their writing. We conclude the paper by outlining the next steps in the research

A Contrastive Lexical description of Basic Verbs. Examples from Swedish and Czech.

This paper aims at a lexical description of frequent, but not enough cognitively salient uses of frequent lexical verbs in Swedish on the background of Czech, with some implications for the lexical description of basic verbs in general. It results in a draft of a production lexicon of Swedish basic verbs for advanced Czech learners of Swedish, with focus on their uses as light verbs

The Impact of Ideology on Lexical Borrowing in Arabic: A Synergy of Corpus Linguistics and CDA

Lexical borrowing is a natural outcome of language contact and one source of neologisms. The traditional view of lexical borrowing explains it as motivated mainly by lexical need or prestige where loans in the recipient language have more or less similar if not identical meanings with the borrowing language. Linguistic adaptation has been often seen grammatically based where grammarians or linguists assume the major task of nativizing foreign terms. This is typical in many studies on linguistic borrowing in Arabic while a secondary attention is given to semantic, sociolinguistic, and educational perspectives. The present study approached lexical borrowing as more language users’ task emphasizing their role in meaning construction. Three English loanwords in Arabic (agenda, liberal, lobby) were studied in naturally occurring language to see if their meanings and co-occurrence patterns correspond to their equivalents in English and, thus, agree with the notion of lexical need to linguistic borrowing. Some of the meanings of the loans fall under the domain of sociopolitics which is a fertile site believed to show ideological impact. Using two analytical frameworks of Sinclair (2005, 1998) and Van Dijk (2014, 2016b, 2016a), the three loanwords were investigated from corpus linguistics and CDA angles. The findings revealed different co-occurrence patterns in Arabic characterized by negative associations than in English. Negative associations were motivated by (religious, political, linguistic) ideological stances often implied in the connotations and attitudinal meanings of real language use. Ideological influence was also reproduced in Arabic dictionaries where some loanwords or their meanings are vi absent or excluded though used in formal settings. The connection between dictionary making and learning as influenced by dominant ideology was also explored

Multi‐ or Single‐Word Units? The Role of Collocation Use in Comprehensible and Contextually Appropriate Second Language Speech

The current study examined the degree to which collocation use (i.e., meaningful co‐occurrences of multiple words) is related to first language (L1) raters’ intuitive judgments of second language (L2) speech. Speech samples from a picture description task performed by 85 Japanese learners of English with varied L2 proficiency profiles were transcribed for 10 L1 raters to access for global comprehensibility (the extent to which speech can be easily understood) and lexical appropriateness (the extent to which words are used adequately and naturally in context). The samples were then submitted to a range of lexical measures tapping into the collocation (frequency, association), depth (abstractness), and breadth aspects (frequency, range) of L2 vocabulary use. Results of the statistical analyses showed that the raters’ comprehensibility and lexical appropriateness scores were strongly determined by the L2 speakers’ use of low‐frequency combinations containing infrequent, abstract, and complex words (i.e., mutual information)

From Body to Web. An Introduction to the Web as Corpus

In this book the web’s controversial status as a corpus is investigated on both theoretical and applicative grounds. While the notion of a linguistic corpus as a body of texts rests on some related issues such as finite size, balance, permanence, the very idea of a web of texts brings about notions of non-finiteness, flexibility, provisionality. It is against this background that the book revisits key issues in corpus linguistics from the perspective of the web and explores the new issues that the emerging notion of the web as corpus possibly raises

A corpus-based discourse analysis of representations of people with schizophrenia in the British press between 2000 and 2015

Roughly one in a hundred people experience symptoms of schizophrenia during their lifetime, symptoms which include experiencing delusions and hallucinations, such as hearing voices (Johnstone and Frith, 2004). The frequency and intensity of symptoms is exacerbated by widespread negative attitudes and increases the likelihood that an individual will comply with command hallucinations (Harrison and Gill, 2010; Goldstone et al., 2012). In spite of this, the mass media continues to represent people with schizophrenia in an inaccurate and stereotypical way (Clement and Foster, 2008; Chopra and Doody, 2007). This fosters widespread misunderstandings and negative assumptions around the disorder. These misunderstandings gain traction because schizophrenia is widely misunderstood by the public at large (Jensen et al., 2016), and because people are unlikely to have first-hand experiences with people with schizophrenia. Despite the harmful nature of media representations, no study to date has seriously considered how misconceptions of schizophrenia and people with schizophrenia are mediated linguistically in the media. This is curious given that scholars in fields outside of Linguistics are increasingly recognising that the manner in which mental illness is represented plays an important role in reproducing stereotypical and prejudiced attitudes (Goulden et al., 2011, Kalucy et al., 2011). With these considerations in mind, this thesis draws on theories and methods from the field of Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) to examine representations of people with schizophrenia in articles published in the British press between 2000 and 2015. This thesis uses a combination of corpus toolkits (Wordswmith 5.0, Sketch Engine) to examine repetitive lexicogrammatical patterns in articles published in the press that refer to schizophrenia and people with schizophrenia. It takes a particular interest in ‘non-obvious meaning’ (Partington, 2012:11), meanings that are only visible when examining how lexicogrammatical patterns converge around broader semantic and evaluative structures in large repositories of text. Do these patterns, working cumulatively over hundreds and thousands of texts suggest certain ways of understanding or viewing schizophrenia that would not be discernible to the naked eye? The root of the problem revealed in the analysis was a tension between reporting schizophrenia accurately and the press’ interest in reporting on schizophrenia in a way that is newsworthy in accordance with news values (Galtung and Ruge, 1965; Jewkes, 2015). In particular, there was a tendency to report on exceptional cases of people with schizophrenia (e.g. worst cases where people experience florid symptoms, people with schizophrenia who have succeeded creatively) that do not represent the majority of people diagnosed with the disorder. In the same vein, there was also a tendency for the press to repackage hard news as entertainment, for instance, by interdiscursively drawing on language and tropes associated with horror fiction. Salient language patterns converged around two main discourses: (1) that people with schizophrenia pose a risk to others, and (2) that people with schizophrenia who kill are intentional immoral agents. The analysis also identified a problematic metaphorical usage, which potentially reproduced the widespread misassumption that schizophrenia refers to a ‘split personality disorder’ (e.g. Jensen et al., 2015). I conclude by supporting a suggestion made in the academic literature (e.g. Ellison et al., 2018) that the diagnostic term ‘schizophrenia’ should be relabelled so that individuals diagnosed with the disorder do not carry the additional burden of negative stereotypes and misassumptions associated with the label

The concept of 'Genetic Modification' in a Descriptive Translation Study (DTS) of an English-Spanish corpus of Popular Science Books on Genetic Engineering: Denominative Variation, Semantic Prosody and Ideological Aspects of Translation Strategies

El objetivo general consiste en examinar el concepto de 'modificación genética' a través de tres fenómenos lingüísticos: la variación denominativa, la prosodia semántica y los aspectos ideológicos de las principales estrategias de traducción. Para estudiar la variación denominativa se han seleccionado dos términos técnicos 'DNA' y 'gene/s' y dos subtécnicos 'food/s' y 'crop/s'. Para el estudio de la prosodia semántica se han analizado las concordancias de 'genetic' + N y 'genetically'`+ Adj. La comparación de las variantes denominativas y las prosodias semánticas en un corpus paralelo inglés-español de ingenería genética arrojan resultados sobre los aspectos ideológicos de las principales estrategias de traducción encontradas en el corpus.Departamento de Filología Ingles