“Gods second maister peece. The woman”. Medical terminology addressing women in Early Modern English.

The expansion of the medical science that took place in the Early Modern period (16th and 17th century) was accompanied and promoted by the proliferation of medical writing materials, enhanced, in turn, by two synergic factors. On the one hand, the spread of the printing press that facilitated the divulgation of the medical prose until then restricted to high learned contexts; and on the other the increasing demand of vernacular texts whose principal sources were Latin or French treatises (Pahta 2001; Siraisi 1990; Siraisi 2007). The vernacularization of medical writing entailed for its part the introduction into English of an important amount of morpho-syntactic, lexical and discursive elements from the continental languages, particularly the aforementioned Latin and French (Taavitsainen et al. 2011, 24; Gotti 2001). Furthermore, these texts were largely still based on the classical medicine and supported by a scholastic though-style. This knowledge clashed with the emergence of the empiric paradigm fostered by new discoveries in the fields of anatomy and physiology. In this context, some authors and practitioners began to modify the classical perspective by slightly introducing a modern approach. Thus, while the humoral theory still served to explain the physiological changes of the body, the Galenic one-sex model started to be questioned (Churchill 2005, 3). Along this line, a pioneering treatise devoted to the diseases of women was written by the French physician Jean Liébault at the end of the 16th century, and anonymously translated into English during the following century by hand. This valuable manuscript belonging to the Hunterian Collection and housed at the Glasgow University Library is the object of this study. The volume contains the English version of the compendium of the three books written by Liébault, amounting about nine hundred pages and more than two hundred fifty thousand words. The prose includes theoretical and practical information exclusively dedicated to the diseases and conditions affecting women. Therefore, according to Taavitsainen and Pahta it can be classified as a specialized theoretical treatise (2011). This unique text offers an excellent material to investigate the medical terminology associated with women precisely at the moment of that radical changes in the scientific world. Although much has been researched on the topic of early medical writing (Taavitsainen and Pahta 2011; Moskowich 2008; Norri 2004; Pahta and Nevanlinna 1997; Gotti 2001;Taavitsainen 2012; Calle-Martín and Romero-Barranco 2015, to cite but a few), the lexical and discursive treatment that women have received in those texts remains hitherto unaddressed. Thus, this study aims at analysing the linguistic features that were employed in a medical academic text purposely centred on women, with two main objectives: first, to identify specific words or constructions related to women, considering their lexical, semantic and discourse features, and secondly; to analyse whether these constructions were directly adopted from the French source, or instead adapted to the vernacular language.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

SentiTur: Building Linguistic Resources for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis in the Tourism Sector

The use of linguistic resources beyond the scope of language studies, i.e. commercial purposes, has become commonplace since the availability of massive amounts of data and the development of tools to process them. An interesting focus on these materials is provided by Sentiment Analysis (SA) tools and methodologies, which attempt to identify the polarity or semantic orientation of a text, i.e., its positive, negative, or neutral value. Two main approaches have been made in this sense, one based on complex machine-learning algorithms and the other relying principally on lexical knowledge (Taboada et al., 2011). Lingmotif is an example of lexicon-based SA tool offering polarity classification and other related metrics, together with an analysis of the target segments evaluated (Moreno-Ortiz, 2017). Sentiment has been shown to be domain-specific to a large extent (Choi & Cardie, 2008) and it is therefore necessary to study and describe how sentiment is expressed not only in general language, but also in specialized domains. The availability of annotated, domain-specific corpora could greatly enhance the capacity of SA tools. Furthermore, the demand for a more fine-grained approach requires the identification of specific domain terminology, allowing the recognition of target terms associated with the polarity (Liu, 2012). Most available SA corpora are annotated at the document level, which allows systems to be trained to return the overall orientation of the text. However, more detail is necessary: what aspects exactly are being praised or criticized? This type SA is known as Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), and attempts to extract more fined-grained knowledge. ABSA has attracted the attention of recent SemEval shared-tasks (Pontiki et al., 2015)

Synchronic Analysis of the Progressive Aspect in Three Varieties of Asian Englishes

The purpose of this study is to analyse the frequency of use of the progressive aspect in three varieties of Asian Englishes, namely Hong Kong, India and Singapore, considering British English as a point of departure. The use of the progressive will be researched in comparable corpora (International Corpus of English) considering its distribution in the English verbal paradigm and subject person, both in the written and spoken components. Main results indicate that IndE has the highest frequency of the progressive, and Hong Kong English the lowest, when non-native varieties are compared. In all cases, the progressive is more frequent in the spoken than in the written section, and it preferably occurs in the present simple tense. English varieties present significant differences regarding the distribution of the progressive by tense and subject person. Several factors are discussed as possible reasons for such variation

A diachronic study of the conative alternation construction in english

The conative alternation is a subtype of transitivity alternation in which there is a transitive variant and an intransitive one represented with an at-construction. From a syntactic point of view, it occurs with transitive verbs and is therefore referred to as a case of preposition insertion (the preposition at is inserted before the direct object). From a semantic perspective, it can be described as a “detransitivizing” construction, since there is a contrast between conative uses of transitive verbs and their transitive counterparts (Perek 2015: 90). Accordingly, the argument can be direct (subject, direct object or indirect object) or oblique. (1) a. Kim cut the pie. b. Kim cut at the pie (drunkenly) (Beavers 2006: 6). The patient (“the pie”) can have two realizations: as the direct object (1a) or as an oblique signalled by the preposition at (1b). Here we find a semantic contrast: in the transitive variant the patient is known to have been affected in some way, whereas in the one with the at-construction this is not necessarily the case; thus, the action denoted by the verb may or may not have been completed and the alternation may convey “a reduced a degree of effectiveness” (Riemer 2010: 354), as seen in example (2b) below, which implies that the action was not completely successful: (2) a. The zombies slashed my face. b. The zombies slashed at my face. Although the construction has been studied before (van der Leek [1996], Broccias [2001, 2003], Beavers [2010], Perek and Lemmens [2010], Guerrero-Medina [2011], Perek [2015]), it remains scarcely investigated from a diachronic point of view. Therefore, our main objective is to research on the origin and development of the conative construction in English by looking at its occurrence in several historical corpora. For the purpose, we have first made a comprehensive list of verbs which allow the construction and then selected the verbs under study. A collostructional analysis, which “investigates which lexemes are strongly attracted or repelled by a particular slot in the construction (i.e. occur more frequently or less frequently than expected)” (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003: 214), has been carried out as it can help to establish which verbs favour the construction over others in the different corpora. Some of our preliminary results show that the construction was already present in Old English and that in most instances the subject is agentive or animate.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Analysing coercion in stative progressives in the Indian variety of the International Corpus of English (ICE).

Coercion is defined as “a semantic transformation that involves shifting of one type to another” (Pustejovsky, 1991), being a prototypical case the change from state to activity represented by the use of the progressive aspect with stative verbs. The occurrence of this type of construction is well reported in non-native Englishes, particularly in the Asian and African varieties (Schilk & Hammel, 2014; Van Rooy, 2014; Collins, 2008; Mesthrie, 2008). Basilectal transfer has been generally proposed as an explanation for this phenomenon, as several Asian and African vernacular substrates do not distinguish the different imperfective situations, namely habitual or progressive cases, and therefore L2 English speakers unconsciously tend to use the progressive in all imperfective situations (Makalela, 2004; Sharma, 2009). However, Ziegeler (2015) has recently pointed to the necessity of more theoretical-based studies on “contact-varieties of English”. In the light of this need, this paper analyses the use of the progressive with stative verbs in Indian English under the coercion perspective. Data have been obtained from the Indian component of the International Corpus of English (IND-ICE), the spoken domain in particular. The focus is on the most frequent stative verbs in the progressive, have and know. An initial conclusion shows that the coercion mechanism could be a plausible explanation for the frequent use of some stative verbs with the progressive construction, especially for the expression of temporariness.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Synchronic analysis of the progressive aspect in three varieties of Asian Englishes.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the frequency of use of the progressive aspect in three varieties of Asian Englishes, namely Hong Kong, India and Singapore, considering British English as a point of departure. The use of the progressive will be researched in comparable corpora (International Corpus of English) considering its distribution in the English verbal paradigm and subject person, both in the written and spoken components. Main results indicate that IndE has the highest frequency of the progressive, and Hong Kong English the lowest, when non-native varieties are compared. In all cases, the progressive is more frequent in the spoken than in the written section, and it preferably occurs in the present simple tense. English varieties present significant differences regarding the distribution of the progressive by tense and subject person. Several factors are discussed as possible reasons for such variation

The origin and development of the conative alternation in english

The conative alternation (“conative” from Latin conor/conari, “to try or attempt”) is a particular type of verb alternation (or argument structure alternation) which modifies the interpretation of the verb towards suggesting “an attempted action without specifying whether the action was actually carried out” (Levin 1993, 42). Contrariwise, the transitive variant indicates the completion of the action. This verb alternation is mainly represented with an at-construction, as in the following examples: (i) John hit the door vs. (ii) John hit at the door, where the former entails that the door was actually hit, while the latter does not necessarily imply that the action of the verb was completed. The conative construction also conveys a reduced degree of effectiveness (Riemer 2010, 354). Hence, (ii) above predicates that the event of hitting took place irrespective of success. The set of verbs that allow the conative alternation is restricted to some semantic fields, e.g. verbs of contact by impact (hit, kick) and verbs of cutting (cut, slash), among others (Levin 1993, 41), being the unmarked variant the predominant in terms of frequency. Although the study of this type of alternation has received some attention (van der Leek [1996], Broccias [2003], Beavers [2010], and Perek and Lemmens [2010]), the question of its origin has not been addressed and further investigation is therefore needed, particularly from a diachronic point of view. All this considered, the present study aims to explore the origin and development of the conative construction in English by looking at its occurrence in several diachronic and syncronic corpora. Furthermore, an attempt will be made to establish whether the construction accomodates to a particular collocation pattern (at subject or object level).Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech