Review: Lexicography; Linguistic Theories; Text/Corpus Ling: Hanks (2013)

Review of Patrick Hanks (2013) Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations (MIT Press

Reassessing the Canon: “fixed” phrases in general reference corpora

This paper sets forth the argument for revisiting fixed phrases in the light of the knowledge that their fixedness is not necessarily something to be taken for granted. It focuses on the location and analysis of variant forms in general reference corpora. Existing phraseological structures, including collocational frameworks, idiom schemas and semi-prepackaged phrases, are introduced by way of background before a procedure for retrieving non-canonical forms of fixed expressions in general reference corpora is presented. Some implications relating to the study of variant forms are presented, along with suggestions for future research directions

Corpus Analysis of Gobbledygook

In July 2013, the British Civil Service issued a new style guide for is online documents, Government Digital Service Content Principles. This guide included a list of 37 words and expressions that were to be avoided by policy document authors. In this contribution I discuss how these term are used in policy documents (in a corpus of all policy documents published on www.gov.uk in 2013), and attempt to connect this with (i) the choice of expressions listed, (ii) the definitions provided next to many of them, suggesting what their \u2018proper\u2019 meaning is, i.e. how they should be used, and (iii) if those explicitly listed as metaphors \u201cto be avoided\u201d are in fact metaphorical

\u201cAlways avoid metaphors\u201d. The civil service style guide and public perceptions of non-literal language.

It seems as if phrasal vocabulary is more easily identifiable as metaphorical (by non-specialists) than apparently stand-alone lexical items. This study investigates this notion further, using a specially-collected corpus of all the civil servant policy documents published online in the year 201

Using Wmatrix to classify open response survey data in the social sciences: observations and recommendations

We report here on our use of Wmatrix (Rayson 2009) and the USAS tagger (Rayson et al. 2004) as an alternative to more commonly used content analysis methods for sorting and coding open response survey data in the social sciences

Metaphorical Keyness in Specialised Corpora

What is more important in text: the topical content, or the manner in which topical content is presented? While statistically-generated key words tell us about a text’s content, the inter-relation between these words and the message of the text can be difficult to ascertain. One method of doing so is to observe the inter-relation of key words with evaluative language: in this case, metaphor. Metaphors are notoriously difficult to locate in corpora, but this paper sets out a method for their semi-automatic identification, and demonstrates how their interaction with keywords is both systematic and pervasive. Studying the interaction of key words and metaphors brings to light attitudes which lurk beneath the surface of text

Negotiating narrative: dialogic dynamics of Known, Unknown and Believed in \u201cHarry Potter and the Deathly Hallows\u201d

Within the framework of KUB Theory (Bongelli and Zuczkowski 2008, Zuczkowski et al. 2011), information communicated verbally can ultimately be reduced to one of three categories: what the speaker knows (Known), what the speaker does not know (Unknown) and what the speaker believes (Believed). Dialogic communication can be considered as an exchange of information originating in one of these categories and directed towards another. The present study investigates the interaction of Known, Unknown and Believed information in the dialogues found in Chapter 10 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It demonstrates how these three categories of information can contribute to a reading of the plot and its progression, and also how aspects of the protagonists\u2019 characters emerge through the language they use in their dialogic communication

Effects of antiplatelet therapy on stroke risk by brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases: subgroup analyses of the RESTART randomised, open-label trial

Background Findings from the RESTART trial suggest that starting antiplatelet therapy might reduce the risk of recurrent symptomatic intracerebral haemorrhage compared with avoiding antiplatelet therapy. Brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases (such as cerebral microbleeds) are associated with greater risks of recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage. We did subgroup analyses of the RESTART trial to explore whether these brain imaging features modify the effects of antiplatelet therapy

Genetic risk and a primary role for cell-mediated immune mechanisms in multiple sclerosis.

Multiple sclerosis is a common disease of the central nervous system in which the interplay between inflammatory and neurodegenerative processes typically results in intermittent neurological disturbance followed by progressive accumulation of disability. Epidemiological studies have shown that genetic factors are primarily responsible for the substantially increased frequency of the disease seen in the relatives of affected individuals, and systematic attempts to identify linkage in multiplex families have confirmed that variation within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) exerts the greatest individual effect on risk. Modestly powered genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have enabled more than 20 additional risk loci to be identified and have shown that multiple variants exerting modest individual effects have a key role in disease susceptibility. Most of the genetic architecture underlying susceptibility to the disease remains to be defined and is anticipated to require the analysis of sample sizes that are beyond the numbers currently available to individual research groups. In a collaborative GWAS involving 9,772 cases of European descent collected by 23 research groups working in 15 different countries, we have replicated almost all of the previously suggested associations and identified at least a further 29 novel susceptibility loci. Within the MHC we have refined the identity of the HLA-DRB1 risk alleles and confirmed that variation in the HLA-A gene underlies the independent protective effect attributable to the class I region. Immunologically relevant genes are significantly overrepresented among those mapping close to the identified loci and particularly implicate T-helper-cell differentiation in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis

Prevalence and architecture of de novo mutations in developmental disorders.

The genomes of individuals with severe, undiagnosed developmental disorders are enriched in damaging de novo mutations (DNMs) in developmentally important genes. Here we have sequenced the exomes of 4,293 families containing individuals with developmental disorders, and meta-analysed these data with data from another 3,287 individuals with similar disorders. We show that the most important factors influencing the diagnostic yield of DNMs are the sex of the affected individual, the relatedness of their parents, whether close relatives are affected and the parental ages. We identified 94 genes enriched in damaging DNMs, including 14 that previously lacked compelling evidence of involvement in developmental disorders. We have also characterized the phenotypic diversity among these disorders. We estimate that 42% of our cohort carry pathogenic DNMs in coding sequences; approximately half of these DNMs disrupt gene function and the remainder result in altered protein function. We estimate that developmental disorders caused by DNMs have an average prevalence of 1 in 213 to 1 in 448 births, depending on parental age. Given current global demographics, this equates to almost 400,000 children born per year