Annotating a corpus of Early Modern English writing for categories of discourse presentation

This article discusses the process of annotating a small corpus of Early Modern English writing that we have constructed in order to investigate the diachronic development of speech, writing and thought presentation. The work we have done so far is a pilot investigation for a planned larger project. We have constructed a corpus of approximately 40,000 words of Early Modern English (EModE) fiction and news journalism and annotated it for categories of discourse presentation (DP) drawn from a model originally proposed by Leech and Short (1981). This has allowed us to quantify the types of discourse presentation within the corpus and to compare our findings against those from a similarly annotated corpus of Present Day English (PDE) writing (reported in Semino and Short 2004). Our results so far appear to indicate developing stylistic tendencies in fiction and news texts in the Early Modern period, and suggest that it would be profitable to extend the project through the construction of a larger corpus incorporating a greater number of text-types in order to test our hypotheses more rigorously. In this article we concentrate specifically on describing the annotation phase of the project. We discuss the criteria by which we defined the various discourse presentation categories in order to make clear our analytical methodology, as well as the issues we were confronted with in 2 trying to annotate in a systematic and retrievable way. We conclude with some preliminary results to illustrate the value of this kind of annotation and suggest some hypotheses resulting from this pilot investigation

Welfare and warfare an uneasy mix: personal experiences of and organisational responses to emotional and mental health issues in young ex-service personnel

'Shell-shock', which is now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), was first identified during the First World War and since this time the mental health of service personnel has been an issue of concern, particularly during times of armed conflict. This is an exploratory piece of research, the purpose of which is to provide information from a range of stakeholders, primarily ex-service personnel but also their families and welfare staff about the mental health needs of young military personnel

Fern (Walker) Epler, a One-Room School Teacher: An Oral History

Transcript of an oral history of Fern (Walker) Epler, a one-room schoolteacher.https://scholars.fhsu.edu/ors/1298/thumbnail.jp

Dan Walker of Mayville: Germany, World War II

North Dakota Prisoner of War Report by Dan Walker (1921-2003) of Mayville. Walker was a POW of Germany during the Second World War. 17 page

Thinking about the news : thought presentation in early modern English news writing

Walker and McIntyre investigate the forms and functions of discourse presentation in a corpus of Early Modern English news reporting, concentrating particularly on thought presentation. They describe they manually annotated the corpus using discourse presentation categories and consider the methodological issues associated with corpus annotation for categories that are function rather than form-based. They explain how they ensured the replicability of their annotation using principles that are likely to be valuable for anyone manually annotating a corpus for function-based categories. They compare quantitative findings from their corpus against a similarly annotated corpus of present day English news journalism in order to determine diachronic changes in discourse presentation frequencies. They then offer a qualitative analysis of the function of thought presentation in Early Modern English news

Velocity dominated singularities in the cheese slice universe

We investigate the properties of spacetimes resulting from matching together exact solutions using the Darmois matching conditions. In particular we focus on the asymptotically velocity term dominated property (AVTD). We propose a criterion that can be used to test if a spacetime constructed from a matching can be considered AVTD. Using the Cheese Slice universe as an example, we show that a spacetime constructed from a such a matching can inherit the AVTD property from the original spacetimes. Furthermore the singularity resulting from this particular matching is an AVTD singularity.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in the International Journal of Modern Physics

Oceanographic observations at the Amundsen sea shelf break

Introduction: The continental shelf environment of the Amundsen and Bellingshausen seas differs markedly from that of the other circumpolar seas, where water temperatures are close to the surface freezing point throughout. In the Amundsen/Bellingshausen sector near-freezing temperatures are encountered only in the upper few hundred metres of the water column. Below this surface layer a broad thermocline trends towards upper Circumpolar Deep Water (uCDW), which is found in a form that is almost unmodified from its off-shelf manifestation (Giulivi and Jacobs, 1996). This means that the ice shelves of the Amundsen and Bellingshausen seas experience ocean temperatures some three degrees warmer than those experienced by the other Antarctic ice shelves, and the rates of basal melting are correspondingly high (Jacobs et al., 1996)

Determining Extension\u27s Role in Controversial Issues: Content, Process, Neither, or Both?

Controversial issues offer Extension faculty opportunities to facilitate community dialogue and apply conflict resolution strategies to help communities achieve higher ground. Handled appropriately, the long-term benefits to the community, the Extension organization, and the faculty member of facilitating public issues outweigh the costs. This article explores Extension\u27s place in facilitating public issues dialogue and provides an initial first step in the decision-making process regarding what Extension\u27s role should be. An approach is proposed that can help faculty decide whether to respond to an issue with content, process, or a more comprehensive approac