The spoken core of British English: a diachronic analysis based on the BNC

This research takes as its starting point a frequency analysis of the demographicspoken subcorpus of the British National Corpus in order to focus on two aspects of the evolution of spoken core vocabulary in British English. The first is the impact on the core of contact with other languages and, the second, the role of lexical innovation and/or replacement in the history of this core. Our analysis, which, to a certain extent, follows up on that carried out in Fuster (2007) questions the hypothesis that the spoken core is immune to foreign influence or that it is highly resistant to [email protected]; [email protected]

Creation of a large news corpus for the discourse analysis of Violence Against Women (VAW)

The press is considered to play a fundamental social role, as it shapes public opinion. In this regard, CDA Critical discourse analysis (CDA) has as a primary aim to study “the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context” with the purpose of resisting “social inequality (van Dijk, 1991: 353). The analysis of ideologies in news discourse has a long tradition, but only recently have linguists started to use large corpora and corpus techniques to study them. This presentation describes the process of developing a large corpus of journalistic news in English, Spanish and Catalan on Violence Against Women (VAW) in the digital press, which contains over 80,000 texts and 70 million words so far. This corpus is part of the NEWSGEN project of the University of Valencia, which aims to document and investigate the historical evolution and the political, cultural, social, and ideological impact of discourses on VAW in recent times. Methodologically, the three phases for creating this corpus will be described: design, compilation, and annotation. The seed words on VAW have been defined in the design phase. The Factiva database was used for the compilation of the corpus, and then the texts were cleaned of irrelevant data and duplicates were eliminated. Finally, the texts were annotated with metadata such as the article's date, title, and body. A statistical analysis of the corpus was conducted, and case studies showing its potential and possible applications will be presented.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Persuading consumers: The use of conditional constructions in British hotel websites

Hotel websites display textual and non-textual strategies with the aim of turning online visitors into customers. This article focuses on two related textual aspects: how consumers are discursively construed and how conditional constructions are used in order to persuade and convince consumers of the adequacy of the hotel. The framework adopted for the analysis combines Stern's notion of 'implied consumer' with a corpus-driven approach. The corpus data comprises 114 British hotel websites and totals half a million words. This is a subcorpus of COMETVAL, a database compiled at the University of València. The results reveal the importance of a number of words that address consumers directly or indirectly. These words intertwine with others to form patterns that help establish a bond between hoteliers and their clients. Further exploration of the corpus confirmed that some conditional sequences such as if you and should you are used by advertisers to speculate about the needs and wishes of consumers that the hotel can fulfil for them. The analysis suggests that conditional structures are a distinctive discursive characteristic strongly associated with the dialogic nature of the discourse hotel websites

Words, Corpus and Back to Words : From Language to Discourse

El present volum reuneix recerca en lèxic en diverses llengües i en diverses manifestacions, tant a nivell de la paraula com més enllà d'aquesta, i des de diverses perspectives, que inclouen no solament aquelles que versen sobre com s'estructura el vocabulari a nivell intern, sinó també aquelles que estudien el paper que les unitats i les relacions lèxiques exerceixen en l'organització d'altres nivells lingüístics, en particular en l'organització del discurs. Aquests temes es tracten des de diverses perspectives que inclouen no solament els desenvolupaments de la lingüística teòrica i descriptiva en diverses disciplines, particularment en lexicologia, fraseologia, formació de paraules i anàlisis del discurs, però també en disciplines aplicades tals com la traducció, l'ensenyament de llengües, Inglés per a finalitats específiques i l'anàlisi crítica del discurs. Un dels criteris per a la compilació del present volum ha sigut la diversitat lingüística. En total, el volum conté recerca sobre sis llengües: anglès, alemany, espanyol, francès, portuguès i italià. Sense ser exhaustiva, considerem que la varietat de contribucions presentades ofereix una visió sobre el vigor de la recerca actual de corpus sobre fenòmens relacionats amb el lèxic. Certament, no és possible arreplegar en un volum tota la varietat de temes, enfocaments i mètodes en aquesta àrea de recerca. No obstant açò, oferim una cuidada selecció d'estudis que representen una varietat d'avanços interessants que pot ser representativa dels avanços significatius que estan esdevenint en aquest camp

Learning from learners: a non-standard direct approach to the teaching of writing skills in EFL in a university context

Corpora have been used in English as a foreign language materials for decades, and native corpora have been present in the classroom by means of direct approaches such as Data-Driven Learning (Johns, T., and P. King 1991. 'Should you be Persuaded'- Two Samples of Data-Driven Learning Materials. In Classroom Concordancing,1-16. Birmingham University. English Language Research Journal 4.). However, the suitability of using learners' output in classroom tasks remains controversial. This paper describes a pilot study in the application of a non-standard direct approach where Spanish university students are invited to reflect on their production. In the experiment, carried out in several sessions during the course, the students were exposed to a selection of erroneous sentences from their compositions. Prior to the classroom activity, the teacher contrasted the learners' sentences with correct versions produced by native English speakers. A relevant part of the methodology consisted in getting learners collectively involved in finding the errors and suggesting improvements. After that, solutions were discussed through the analysis of the alternative sentences provided by the native students. The results show that students are willing to accept this methodology as a supplement to textbooks' proposals. We claim that authentic and highly specific learner data obtained from a reliable ad hoc learner corpus and direct exposure to these data through controlled activities may cover certain learners' needs not found in textbooks

The expression of sentiment in user reviews of hotels

The linguistic expression of sentiment, understood as the polarity of an opinion, is known to be domain-specific to a certain extent (Aue & Gamon, 2005; Choi et al., 2009). Even though many words and expressions convey the same evaluation across domains (e.g., “excellent”, “terrible”), many others acquire a more precise semantic orientation within a specific domain. For example, features such as size or location (and the lexical expressions that are used to express them) may or may not convey semantic orientation depending on the topic. In Sentiment Analysis (SA), it is critical that domain-specific expressions of sentiment be accounted for (Tan et al., 2007) if the system is to be useful to those who wish to explore the polarity of texts belonging in that domain. The software tool Lingmotif (Moreno-Ortiz, 2016) will be used to explore a corpus of hotel reviews in the English language. Lingmotif is a lexicon-based, linguistically-motivated, user-friendly, GUI-enabled, multi-platform, Sentiment Analysis desktop application. Lingmotif can perform SA on any type of input texts, regardless of size and topic. The analysis is based on the identification of sentiment-laden words and phrases contained in the application's rich core lexicons, and employs context rules to account for sentiment shifters. It offers easy-to-interpret visual representations of quantitative data (text polarity, sentiment intensity, sentiment profile), as well as a detailed, qualitative analysis of the text in terms of its sentiment. Lingmotif can also take user-provided plugin lexicons in order to account for domain-specific sentiment expression. In this paper, we describe our procedure to identify domain-specific lexical cues for the domain of user reviews of Spanish hotels. We made use of a recently compiled corpus of reviews from the online travel agency booking site booking.com. This corpus was analyzed entirely with Lingmotif using only its core (i.e., general-language lexicon), and then manually analyzed the results to find errors and omissions produced by the lack of specialized language cues. We then encoded the identified lexical cues as a Lingmotif plugin lexicon and reran the analysis with it. This methodology allowed us, first, to obtain a very concrete description of the expression of sentiment in this domain, and, from a practical perspective, to precisely measure to what extent this expression is domain-dependent.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

La construcción discursiva del turismo en la prensa española (verano de 2017)

El turismo y la turismofobia se convirtieron en asuntos particularmente noticiables durante el verano de 2017 en la prensa nacional española. Este artículo describe la representación discursiva del turismo en noticias de prensa. Las noticias periodísticas han sido analizadas desde distintos ángulos, tanto por profesionales de la comunicación como por analistas del discurso. Metodológicamente, hemos aplicado la Lingüística de Corpus, adoptando principios del Estudio del Discurso Asistido por Corpus (EDAC), introducido por Partington, el cual ha sido aplicado, entre otros, por analistas críticos del discurso en el estudio del lenguaje de la prensa (véase Baker et al. 2008; Baker et al. 2013). El análisis se complementa a nivel cualitativo aplicando el paradigma de Análisis Discursivo de Valores Noticiosos (ADVN) desarrollado por Bednarek & Caple en varias contribuciones sobre la prensa inglesa. Nuestra hipótesis es que los valores noticiosos no son eventos fuera de noticia, y tampoco son neutrales, como han señalado numerosos autores; sino que los redactores de la noticia los presentan como tales en la construcción discursiva de la misma. El análisis que hemos efectuado revela que los diarios digitales con mayor número de seguidores en España ponen de manifiesto su preferencia por ciertos valores tales como notoriedad o cercanía, junto a énfasis en los valores de impacto, magnitud y negatividad. Discursivamente, el turismo y el turista se construyen como sector económico amenazado. The discursive representation of tourism in press news is the objective of this contribution. Tourism and tourismphobia became particularly newsworthy during the summer of 2017 in the Spanish national press. The news stories have been analysed from different angles, both by communication professionals and discourse analysts. Our intention is to apply the paradigm of Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA) introduced and applied by Bednarek & Caple in a number of contributions that deal with news stories in the English press. Methodologically, we will apply Corpus Linguistics, adopting the principles of Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADs), introduced by Partington (2006), which has been applied, among other researchers, by critical discourse analysts in the study of the language of the press (see Baker et al., 2008; Baker et al., 2013). Our hypothesis is that news values are not simply news events, nor are they neutral, as many authors have pointed out. These news values exist as such in the discursive construction of the news by journalists. The analysis we have conducted reveals that the digital newspapers with the largest number of followers in Spain show preference for certain news values such as eliteness or proximity, together with an emphasis on impact, magnitude and negativity. Discursively, tourism and tourists are basically constructed as a threatened economic sector

Diccionario Multilingüe de Turismo

Este recurso lexicográfico ha sido elaborado por el Grupo de investigación COMETVAL (Corpus Multilingüe de Turismo de la Universitat de València) http://www.uv.es/cometval/wikibase/cas/index.wiki). COMETVAL se crea en 2009 y desde entonces ha contado con ayudas de diversos organismos (Universitat de València, la Agencia Valenciana de Turismo y, en la actualidad, el Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad). Pertenecen a dicho grupo un importante número de investigadores de diferentes departamentos y universidades españolas (Universitat de València, Universitat Politècnica de València, Universidad Católica de Valencia San Vicente Mártir, Universitat Jaume I de Castellón y Universidad de Almería). Entre las tareas realizadas por COMETVAL destaca la creación de una amplia base de datos de discurso turístico procedente básicamente de sitios web en español, francés e inglés. Entre sus cometidos se encuentra el análisis del discurso turístico desde vertientes teóricas y aplicadas. La faceta aplicada se materializa en la elaboración del presente diccionario multilingüe en línea, cuyas características se exponen a continuación.Diccionario elaborado en el marco del Proyecto de investigación concedido por el Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad. Referencia FFI2011-24712, Análisis léxico y discursivo de corpus paralelos y comparables (español, inglés y francés) de páginas electrónicas de promoción turística. 2011-2014.Humanidade

Role of age and comorbidities in mortality of patients with infective endocarditis

[Purpose]: The aim of this study was to analyse the characteristics of patients with IE in three groups of age and to assess the ability of age and the Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI) to predict mortality. [Methods]: Prospective cohort study of all patients with IE included in the GAMES Spanish database between 2008 and 2015.Patients were stratified into three age groups:<65 years,65 to 80 years,and ≥ 80 years.The area under the receiver-operating characteristic (AUROC) curve was calculated to quantify the diagnostic accuracy of the CCI to predict mortality risk. [Results]: A total of 3120 patients with IE (1327 < 65 years;1291 65-80 years;502 ≥ 80 years) were enrolled.Fever and heart failure were the most common presentations of IE, with no differences among age groups.Patients ≥80 years who underwent surgery were significantly lower compared with other age groups (14.3%,65 years; 20.5%,65-79 years; 31.3%,≥80 years). In-hospital mortality was lower in the <65-year group (20.3%,<65 years;30.1%,65-79 years;34.7%,≥80 years;p < 0.001) as well as 1-year mortality (3.2%, <65 years; 5.5%, 65-80 years;7.6%,≥80 years; p = 0.003).Independent predictors of mortality were age ≥ 80 years (hazard ratio [HR]:2.78;95% confidence interval [CI]:2.32–3.34), CCI ≥ 3 (HR:1.62; 95% CI:1.39–1.88),and non-performed surgery (HR:1.64;95% CI:11.16–1.58).When the three age groups were compared,the AUROC curve for CCI was significantly larger for patients aged <65 years(p < 0.001) for both in-hospital and 1-year mortality. [Conclusion]: There were no differences in the clinical presentation of IE between the groups. Age ≥ 80 years, high comorbidity (measured by CCI),and non-performance of surgery were independent predictors of mortality in patients with IE.CCI could help to identify those patients with IE and surgical indication who present a lower risk of in-hospital and 1-year mortality after surgery, especially in the <65-year group