A joint text mining-rank size investigation of the rhetoric structures of the US Presidents’ speeches

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd This work presents a text mining context and its use for a deep analysis of the messages delivered by politicians. Specifically, we deal with an expert systems-based exploration of the rhetoric dynamics of a large collection of US Presidents’ speeches, ranging from Washington to Trump. In particular, speeches are viewed as complex expert systems whose structures can be effectively analyzed through rank-size laws. The methodological contribution of the paper is twofold. First, we develop a text mining-based procedure for the construction of the dataset by using a web scraping routine on the Miller Center website – the repository site collecting the speeches. Second, we explore the implicit structure of the discourse data by implementing a rank-size procedure over the individual speeches, being the words of each speech ranked in terms of their frequencies. The scientific significance of the proposed combination of text-mining and rank-size approaches can be found in its flexibility and generality, which let it be reproducible to a wide set of expert systems and text mining contexts. The usefulness of the proposed method and of the speeches analysis is demonstrated by the findings themselves. Indeed, in terms of impact, it is worth noting that interesting conclusions of social, political and linguistic nature on how 45 United States Presidents, from April 30, 1789 till February 28, 2017 delivered political messages can be carried out. Indeed, the proposed analysis shows some remarkable regularities, not only inside a given speech, but also among different speeches. Moreover, under a purely methodological perspective, the presented contribution suggests possible ways of generating a linguistic decision-making algorithm

Klíčová a frekventovaná slova v románu J.D. Salingera The Catcher in the Rye

This BA thesis aims to perform a corpus-stylistic analysis of J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye. The starting point for this analysis is a list of frequent and key words of Salinger's novel which are generated on the basis of comparison of frequency information in two corpora. The reference corpus consists of five novels published between 1996 and 2014 which share some fundamental similarities with Salinger's novel (i.e. the same target audience, informal language, first person narration). The theoretical part focuses predominantly on the relevant research in the area of corpus stylistics and at the same time, it provides definitions for the basic terms which are applied in the practical part. The methodology then introduces the texts which are employed for the analysis, as well as the software used, along with its main functions. In the analytical part, top hundred keywords are sorted into three groups (proper names, grammatical and lexical words) and they are subject to further examination, focusing predominantly on their collocations and n-grams. This analysis uncovered not only the features of the idiolect of the main hero of Salinger's novel, but also some basic characteristics of teenage language in use. At the same time, this research suggests that some of these characteristics...Bakalářská práce si klade za cíl podat korpusově-stylistickou analýzu románu J. D. Salingera The Catcher in the Rye (Kdo chytá v žitě). Analýza se opírá o seznam frekventovaných a klíčových slov Salingerova románu, která jsou vygenerována na základě porovnání frekvencí slov v cílovém a referenčním korpusu. Referenční korpus tvoří pět knih, které vyšly mezi lety 1996 a 2014, a které jsou určeny stejné věkové skupině a sdílí se Saligerovým románem jisté charakteristcké prvky (zejm. neformální jazyk a vyprávění v první osobě). Teoretická část popisuje především hlavní přínosy elektronické analýzy (literárních) textů a dále definuje nejdůležitější pojmy, které budou dále využívány v praktické části. Metodologická část pak uvádí konkrétní texty, které tvoří použité korpusy, a hlavní funkce softwaru, který byl pro analýzu využit. V praktické části bylo prvních sto klíčových slov rozděleno do tří skupin (vlastní jména, slova gramatická a lexikální) a tato slova byla následně podrobena dalšímu zkoumání, přičemž důraz byl kladen především na jejich kolokace a n- gramy. Analýza identifikovala jak charakteristické rysy idiolektu hrdiny Salingerova románu, tak i rysy jazyka teenagerů obecně. Práce zároveň nažnačuje, že se některé tyto rysy během posledních šedesáti let změnily.Ústav anglického jazyka a didaktikyDepartment of the English Language and ELT MethodologyFaculty of ArtsFilozofická fakult

Address and the Semiotics of Social Relations

This thesis is concerned with the realm of the interpersonal: broadly, those linguistic phenomena involved in the negotiation of social relations and the expression of personal attitudes and feelings. The initial contention is that this realm has been consistently marginalised not only within linguistic theory, but more broadly within western culture, for cultural and ideological reasons whose implications extend into the bases of classical linguistic theory. Chapter 1 spells out the grounds for this contention and is followed by two further chapters, constituting Part I: Language and Social Relations. Chapter 2 identifies and critiques the range of ways in which the interpersonal has been conventionally interpreted: as style, as formality, as politeness, as power and solidarity, as the expressive, etc. This chapter concludes with an argument for the need for a stratified model of language in order to deal adequately with these phenomena. Chapter 3 proposes such a model, based on the systemic-functional approach to language as social semiotic. The register category tenor within this model is extended to provide a model of social relations as a semiotic system. The basis for the identification of the three tenor dimensions, power, distance and affect, is the identification of three modes of deployment or realisation of the interpersonal resources of English in everyday discourse: reciprocity, proliferation and amplification. Parts II and III turn their attention to one significant issue in the negotiation of social relations: address. The focus is explicitly on Australian English, but there is considerable evidence that most if not all of the forms discussed in Part II occur in other varieties of English, especially British and American, and that some at least of the practices discussed in Part III involve the same patterns of social relations with respect to the tenor dimensions of power, distance and affect. Because most varieties of contemporary English do not have a set of options for second-person pronominal address, as is the case in many of the world's languages, English speakers use names and other nominal forms which need to be described. Part II is descriptive in orientation, providing an account of the grammar of VOCATION in English, including a detailed description of the nominal forms used. Chapter 4 investigates the identification and functions of vocatives, and includes empirical investigations of vocative position in clauses and vocative incidence in relation to speech function or speech act choices. Chapter 5 presents an account of the grammar of English name forms, organised as a paradigmatic system. This chapter incorporates an account of the processes used to produce the various name-forms used in address, including truncation, reduplication and suffixation. Chapter 6 consists of an account of non-name forms of address, organised in terms of the systemic-functional account of nominal group structure. This chapter deals with single-word non-name forms of address and the range of nominal group structures used particularly to communicate attitude, both positive and negative. Part III is ethnographic in orientation. It describes some aspects of the use of the forms described in Part II in contemporary address practice in Australia and interprets such practice using the model of social relations as semiotic system presented in Part I. The major focuses of attention is on address practice in relation to the negotiation of gender relations, with some comment on generational relations of adults with children, on class relations and on ethnic relations in nation with a diverse population officially committed to a policy of a multiculturalism. Part III functions simultaneously as a coda for this thesis, and a prologue for the kind of ethnographic study that the project was originally intended to be, but which could not be conducted in the absence of an adequate linguistically-based model of social relations and an adequate description of the resources available for address in English

Address and the Semiotics of Social Relations

This thesis is concerned with the realm of the interpersonal: broadly, those linguistic phenomena involved in the negotiation of social relations and the expression of personal attitudes and feelings. The initial contention is that this realm has been consistently marginalised not only within linguistic theory, but more broadly within western culture, for cultural and ideological reasons whose implications extend into the bases of classical linguistic theory. Chapter 1 spells out the grounds for this contention and is followed by two further chapters, constituting Part I: Language and Social Relations. Chapter 2 identifies and critiques the range of ways in which the interpersonal has been conventionally interpreted: as style, as formality, as politeness, as power and solidarity, as the expressive, etc. This chapter concludes with an argument for the need for a stratified model of language in order to deal adequately with these phenomena. Chapter 3 proposes such a model, based on the systemic-functional approach to language as social semiotic. The register category tenor within this model is extended to provide a model of social relations as a semiotic system. The basis for the identification of the three tenor dimensions, power, distance and affect, is the identification of three modes of deployment or realisation of the interpersonal resources of English in everyday discourse: reciprocity, proliferation and amplification. Parts II and III turn their attention to one significant issue in the negotiation of social relations: address. The focus is explicitly on Australian English, but there is considerable evidence that most if not all of the forms discussed in Part II occur in other varieties of English, especially British and American, and that some at least of the practices discussed in Part III involve the same patterns of social relations with respect to the tenor dimensions of power, distance and affect. Because most varieties of contemporary English do not have a set of options for second-person pronominal address, as is the case in many of the world's languages, English speakers use names and other nominal forms which need to be described. Part II is descriptive in orientation, providing an account of the grammar of VOCATION in English, including a detailed description of the nominal forms used. Chapter 4 investigates the identification and functions of vocatives, and includes empirical investigations of vocative position in clauses and vocative incidence in relation to speech function or speech act choices. Chapter 5 presents an account of the grammar of English name forms, organised as a paradigmatic system. This chapter incorporates an account of the processes used to produce the various name-forms used in address, including truncation, reduplication and suffixation. Chapter 6 consists of an account of non-name forms of address, organised in terms of the systemic-functional account of nominal group structure. This chapter deals with single-word non-name forms of address and the range of nominal group structures used particularly to communicate attitude, both positive and negative. Part III is ethnographic in orientation. It describes some aspects of the use of the forms described in Part II in contemporary address practice in Australia and interprets such practice using the model of social relations as semiotic system presented in Part I. The major focuses of attention is on address practice in relation to the negotiation of gender relations, with some comment on generational relations of adults with children, on class relations and on ethnic relations in nation with a diverse population officially committed to a policy of a multiculturalism. Part III functions simultaneously as a coda for this thesis, and a prologue for the kind of ethnographic study that the project was originally intended to be, but which could not be conducted in the absence of an adequate linguistically-based model of social relations and an adequate description of the resources available for address in English

‘Jaysus, keep talking like that and you’ll fit right in’- an investigation of oral Irish English in contemporary Irish fiction

This project is an interdisciplinary and comparative investigation of the reproduction of linguistic features of Irish English (IrE) present in contemporary IrE fiction. To do this, a corpus of over 1 million words comprising 16 works of fiction published in the Republic of Ireland by 8 authors was compiled: the Corpus of Contemporary Fictionalized Irish English (CoFIrE). The goal of this thesis, therefore, is to determine 1) which are the most frequently reproduced features of IrE orality in contemporary IrE fiction, 1a) how realistic is their fictional portrayal when contrasted against real spoken uses, 2) what does the use of the most frequently reproduced features in the corpus encode with regard to speaker identity, and 3) in what manner may modern Irishness be encoded through the reproduction of pragmatic items in fiction. Utilizing a variety of interdisciplinary methodologies, including Corpus Stylistics, Corpus Linguistics, Sociolinguistic, and Pragmatic techniques, the thesis identifies signature linguistic features that are thought to be representative of IrE in the corpus via quantitative and qualitative, comparative corpus analysis. To evaluate the level of realism inherent in the fictional rendition, the findings are contrasted against the Limerick Corpus of Irish English and the BNC2014. A second corpus comprising books by one of the CoFIrE authors, i.e. Paul Howard, was also compiled. Thus, the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly Corpus (CoROCK) was created given this series’ reputation for being a chronicler of modern Ireland and because of the high frequency of IrE orality reproduction these books were found to contribute to CoFIrE. Two case studies on non-standard, non-traditionally IrE high frequency intensifiers are conducted on CoROCK to better answer the research questions regarding the potential indexation of modern Irishness through speech reproduction in fiction. Finally, by evaluating the type of speaker identity these features may index when used in contemporary fiction, this thesis determines the type of modern Irishness that appears to be encoded through fictional speech representations.N

Corpus Stylistics and Henry James’s Syntax

The starting point of this dissertation is a methodological question: how can corpus stylistics be used to analyse the syntax of literary fiction? A comparison of the syntax of Henry James’s late style in The Golden Bowl (1904) and his early style in Washington Square (1881) was used as a case study. While James’s late style is very widely discussed by literary critics and often seen as ‘difficult’, there has been very little evidence offered to substantiate this description. Within the extensive field of Henry James studies, there have been few linguistic descriptions of James’s prose. To remedy this, I compiled The Henry James Parsed Corpus (HJPC) from five chapters from each of the two novels. My analysis of the corpus showed that The Golden Bowl is more syntactically complex than Washington Square in a number of ways but only in sentences which do not contain direct speech. James’s idiosyncratic use of parenthesis was defined precisely using syntactic criteria and named delay. The Golden Bowl has more delay than Washington Square but also only in non-speech sentences. Only a small number of sentences have very high numbers of dependent clauses and/or delay. I argue that these exceptional sentences create the impression that the later text is homogeneously difficult. My research shows that this impression is deceptive; in fact the overwhelming majority of sentences in The Golden Bowl are no more syntactically complex than those of Washington Square. A secondary use of the HJPC is to assist close reading. Chapter outlines of the central chapter of each novel were generated and were found to mirror plot developments and dialogue sections. Salient sentences highlighted many key moments in the plot, or revealed aspects of characters’ personalities

Doing things with words across time. Snapshots of communicative practices in and from the past

Knowing our contextualized (hi)story means being able to understand ourselves and how the world works. This kind of knowledge is key to self-awareness and self-empowerment, which also have a close connection with how we use language to communicate, to develop social interactions, to build relationships, and to project our identity. The diachronic evolution of languages is therefore a crucial part of a social being’s historical situatedness. The account of this evolution, i.e. historical linguistics, has traditionally focused on formal aspects of language as a grammatical system, investigating changes affecting or reflected in orthography, phonetics-phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary. More recently, however, scholarly attention has broadened its scope to include functional aspects of language use, such as strategies and conventions of communicative affordances over time, thus giving rise to historical pragmatics. In this special issue, the contributions encompass three main areas within historical pragmatics: language use in earlier periods (pragmaphilology), the development of language use (diachronic pragmatics) and causes of language change (discourse-oriented historical linguistics). In particular, the papers offer complementary insights into communicative practices, examining interactional strategies in classical languages, politeness phenomena in grammar and discourse, the evolution of discursive practices, the pragmatic use of lexemes and the teaching of sociopragmatics. Significantly, the issue presents a cross-linguistic approach, since it considers pragmatic phenomena in English, Korean, Italian, Slavonic languages, Ancient Greek and Latin, thus helping us understand how current discursive forms are in fact both unique and comparable in several languages and cultures

A corpus linguistic approach to meaning-making patterns in surveillance discourse

This thesis analyses meaning-making patterns in surveillance discourse using a corpus linguistic approach. As a widespread and contested social issue, surveillance lends itself well to an analysis of meaning in discourse. The thesis puts forward three principles of meaning-making that are explored empirically: (i) meaning evolves with the discourse, (ii) meaning emerges via comparison and (iii) meaning takes shape in co-occurrence patterns. The first principle states that meaning is dynamic and changes across text types and over time. Comparison is therefore necessary to recognise meaning (see principle ii). According to the final principle, meaning can be identified in co-occurrence patterns in discourse. The thesis follows the three principles by taking a comparative approach to co-occurrence patterns of surveillance in corpora that reflect three different social domains: academic discourse, represented by a journal that specialises on surveillance, digital discourse, represented by blog posts that are related to surveillance and, finally, news discourse, represented by a newspaper corpus. The analysis highlights the complexity of surveillance discourses. The thesis develops a methodology that combines traditional corpus linguistic techniques with more qualitative and multimodal elements. By incorporating theoretical frameworks from other disciplines, the thesis demonstrates the interdisciplinary potential of corpus linguistics