Introducing a corpus of conversational stories. Construction and annotation of the Narrative Corpus

Although widely seen as critical both in terms of its frequency and its social significance as a prime means of encoding and perpetuating moral stance and configuring self and identity, conversational narrative has received little attention in corpus linguistics. In this paper we describe the construction and annotation of a corpus that is intended to advance the linguistic theory of this fundamental mode of everyday social interaction: the Narrative Corpus (NC). The NC contains narratives extracted from the demographically-sampled sub-corpus of the British National Corpus (BNC) (XML version). It includes more than 500 narratives, socially balanced in terms of participant sex, age, and social class. We describe the extraction techniques, selection criteria, and sampling methods used in constructing the NC. Further, we describe four levels of annotation implemented in the corpus: speaker (social information on speakers), text (text Ids, title, type of story, type of embedding etc.), textual components (pre-/post-narrative talk, narrative, and narrative-initial/final utterances), and utterance (participation roles, quotatives and reporting modes). A brief rationale is given for each level of annotation, and possible avenues of research facilitated by the annotation are sketched out

Second Language Learner Knowledge of Verb–Argument Constructions: Effects of Language Transfer and Typology

This article examines second language (L2) learner knowledge of English verb–argument constructions (VACs), for example, the ‘V against n’ construction. It investigates to what extent constructions underpin L2 learners' linguistic competence, how VAC mental representations in native speakers and learners differ, and whether there are observable effects of the learners' first language. Native speakers of English and advanced learners of 3 different first language backgrounds (Czech, German, Spanish) were asked to generate the first verb that came to mind to fill the gap in 20 sparse VAC frames like “she ____ against the….” The comparison of learner and native speaker verb responses highlights crosslinguistic transfer effects as well as effects of language typology that impact verb semantics (cf. Talmy, 1985). Our findings suggest that learners whose L1 is, like English, satellite‐framed (here Czech and German) produce more target‐like verbs than learners whose L1 is verb‐framed (here Spanish).Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109566/1/modl12149.pd

Usage‐Based Language: Investigating the Latent Structures That Underpin Acquisition

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/96768/1/j.1467-9922.2012.00736.x.pd

Big data in the new media environment

Bentley et al. argue for the social scientific contextualization of “big data” by proposing a four-quadrant model. We suggest extensions of the east–west (i.e., socially motivated versus independently motivated) decision-making dimension in light of findings from social psychology and neuroscience. We outline a method that leverages linguistic tools to connect insights across fields that address the individuals underlying big-data media streams

A fresh view of the structure of hard news stories

Using a corpus of newspaper articles divided into two categories based on textual position: TISC (text-initial sentences) and NTISC (all other sentences), the collocates and local patterns of a text-initial key word, fresh, are analyzed. Patterns of fresh + CONTROVERSY NOUN (row, controversy, blow, embarrassment) are particularly distinctive in first sentences including the elements FACE/SPARK ABOUT TIME AFTER, e.g. faced fresh embarrassment over… yesterday when… Using corpus annotation the extent and variation of this pattern is revealed and related to discourse functions, drawing in particular on White';s (1997) characterisation of hard news articles and the notion of the NUCLEUS to describe text beginnings

Effects of self-transcendence on neural responses to persuasive messages and health behavior change

Self-transcendence refers to a shift in mindset from focusing on self-interests to the well-being of others. We offer an integrative neural model of self-transcendence in the context of persuasive messaging by examining the mechanisms of self-transcendence in promoting receptivity to health messages and behavior change. Specifically, we posited that focusing on values and activities that transcend the self can allow people to see that their self-worth is not tied to a specific behavior in question, and in turn become more receptive to subsequent, otherwise threatening health information. To test whether inducing self-transcendent mindsets before message delivery would help overcome defensiveness and increase receptivity, we used two priming tasks, affirmation and compassion, to elicit a transcendent mindset among 220 sedentary adults. As preregistered, those who completed a self-transcendence task before health message exposure, compared with controls, showed greater increases in objectively logged levels of physical activity throughout the following month. In the brain, self-transcendence tasks up-regulated activity in a region of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, chosen for its role in positive valuation and reward processing. During subsequent health message exposure, self-transcendence priming was associated with increased activity in subregions of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, implicated in self-related processing and positive valuation, which predicted later decreases in sedentary behavior. The present findings suggest that having a positive self-transcendent mindset can increase behavior change, in part by increasing neural receptivity to health messaging

KWICgrouper: designing a tool for corpus-driven concordance analysis

The corpus-driven analysis of concordance data often results in the identification of groups of lines in which repeated patterns around the node item establish membership in a particular function meaning group (Mahlberg 2005). This paper explains the KWICgrouper, a concept designed to support this kind of concordance analysis. Groups are defined by sets of patterns that can be matched against the lines in a concordance. The central elements of the KWICgrouper are described in objectoriented terms and an experimental implementation described