Introducing a Romanian Frequency List and the Romanian Vocabulary Levels Test

Vocabulary is considered essential to language learning, thus English word lists and tests based on frequency information have become the centre of attention for researchers, teachers and learners alike. As a result, it is argued hereby that frequency based word lists and tests should be adapted and regarded as key elements for teaching and learning Romanian as an additional language as well. Since there are currently no reliable frequency lists and lexical tests in Romanian, this paper aims to bridge this gap by introducing the first Romanian Word List and the Romanian Vocabulary Levels Test. The list contains the 10,000 most frequent Romanian words and is based on the Romanian Balanced Annotated Corpus (ROMBAC, Ion, Irimia, Ștefănescu, Tufiș 2012). The primary objective of the paper is to elaborate on the compilation criteria, the challenges involved and the benefits of such a list in the case of teaching, learning and curriculum design for Romanian as an additional language. The secondary objective is to present a practical application of the word list by introducing an exemplary Romanian lexical test, the Romanian Vocabulary Levels Test and examine its reliability and validity

Conflicting Tendencies in the Development of Scientific and Technical Language Varieties: Metaphorization vs. Standardization

The present paper discusses relations between meaning and context as an interactive process that promotes cognition and communication, both intralingual and interlingual. The article also studies two evident conflicting tendencies in the development of technical language: metaphorization and standardization. Metaphorical meaning extension is characteristic of technical vocabulary in all discourse domains. At the same time, contemporary development of corpus linguistics facilitates standardization of terms. Taking into account pragmatic aspects of the text environment, i.e. referential, situational, cultural and social contexts, language users can interpret the meaning of new terms, establish relations and interconnections between terms and concepts within a text, domain and entire scientific and technical discourse. In the present article, observations on the nature and application of contemporary technical terminology are made on the basis of extensive empirical research

Arguments for exception in US security discourse

In his influential State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben proposes that, even in apparently liberal western democracies, the state will routinely use the contingency of national emergency to suspend civil liberties and justify expansion of military and police powers. We investigated rhetorical strategies deployed in the web pages of US security agencies, created or reformed in the aftermath of the 9/11 events, to determine whether they present argumentation conforming to Agamben’s model. To expose rhetorical content, we examined strategies operating at two levels within our corpus. Argument schemes and underlying warrants were identified through close examination of systematically selected core documents. Semantic fields establishing themes of threat and danger were also explored, using automatic corpus tools to expose patterns of lexical selection established across the whole corpus. The study recovered evidence of rhetoric broadly consistent with the logic predicted by State of Exception theory, but also presented nuanced findings whose interpretation required careful re-appraisal of core ideas within Agamben’s work

Epistemologies of evidence-based medicine:a plea for corpus-based conceptual research in the medical humanities

Evidence-based medicine has been the subject of much controversy within and outside the field of medicine, with its detractors characterizing it as reductionist and authoritarian, and its proponents rejecting such characterization as a caricature of the actual practice. At the heart of this controversy is a complex linguistic and social process that cannot be illuminated by appealing to the semantics of the modifier evidence-based. The complexity lies in the nature of evidence as a basic concept that circulates in both expert and non-expert spheres of communication, supports different interpretations in different contexts, and is inherently open to contestation. We outline a new methodology that combines a social epistemological perspective with advanced methods of corpus linguistics and elements of conceptual history to investigate this and other basic concepts that underpin the practice and ethos of modern medicine. The potential of this methodology to offer new insights into controversies such as those surrounding EBM is demonstrated through a case study of the various meanings supported by evidence and based, as attested in a large electronic corpus of online material written by non-experts as well as a variety of experts in different fields, including medicine

Let's Talk about Sex Education: A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Advice Column Discourses

This thesis examines sex education discourses in magazines in an attempt to understand how language helps uphold and/or challenge attitudes in sex education. Specifically, it investigates the advice columns of Dolly, an Australian fashion, beauty, lifestyle and celebrity magazine aimed at teenage girls. The data are taken from two time periods, the mid-1990s and mid-2010s, to allow comparison of the discourses of the past twenty years. Corpus linguistics and Appraisal are used to identify these discourses and the linguistic resources used to construct them. The data are also analysed dialogically, or across the question and answer, to examine how these discourses are negotiated in interaction. This analysis reveals the linguistic strategies used to reproduce or challenge the discourse of the question in the corresponding answer, with certain discourses being ‘mirrored’ (i.e. reproduced) and others being ‘shifted’ (i.e. challenged). This thesis extends existing work on Appraisal to examine evaluation in a large corpus of written dialogic texts. It also extends existing research in corpus linguistics which is primarily concerned with patterns across a number of texts (intertextual analysis) rather than within texts (intratextual analysis). In this way, it offers methodological innovations in addition to important findings on the linguistic construction of sex education discourses