Corpus Stylistics - HumBox

1、Outline:Background and introduction to current workMethodology in Corpus StylisticsApplications of Corpus Stylistics ReferencesCorpus StylisticsCorpus StylisticsBackground: What is Corpus Stylistics? The statistical study of style, i.e. study of the relative frequency of elements in a text Augustus

2、de Morgan, 1851: disputes about the authenticity of some of the writings of St Paul settled by the measurement of the length of the words used in the various Epistles T.C. Mendenhall, 1887: analysis of several authors frequency distributions of word-length Corpus: a body or collection of linguistic

3、data for use in research Since the early 1960s: interest in computer corpora or machine readable corpora Statements about the relative frequency of various linguistic items in a corpus have become very accurateCorpus Stylistics Some uses of statistical analysis of style through corpora: Education, e

4、.g. EFL textbook writing Establishment of authorship, e.g. of unascribed manuscripts Interpretive stylistics, e.g. study of the writers ideology and point of view Corpus StylisticsMethodology Simple things may characterise different styles average sentence length average word length type:token ratio

5、 (vocabulary richness) number of types = number of different words number of tokens = total number of words vocabulary growth (homogeneity of text) number of new types in 1st, 2nd, , nth 1000 words in rich varied text, number will climb steadily Especially when used comparativelyCorpus StylisticsCor

6、pus StylisticsMethodology (contd) More complex analyses can give a more interesting picture specific syntactic structures degree of modification in NPs types of verbs (e.g. verbs of persuasion, speech verbs, action verbs, descriptive verbs) distribution of pronouns (1st/2nd/3rd person) etc (anything

7、 you can think of!) Quite sophisticated mathematical techniques can give an overall picture e.g. factor analysis: identifies from a (big) range of variables which ones best identify/characterise differences Corpus StylisticsMethodology (contd)Multidimensional analysis Collect a huge range of measure

8、s of a wide variety some simple word counts syntactic features classes and subclasses of N, V, Adj, Avd Factor analysis choose a range of features to measure, see which ones are correlated150 features in allCorpus StylisticsMethodology (contd) Example: work based on corpora trying to quantify and ch

9、aracterise genre and register differences Work pioneered by Douglas Biber* Biber used statistical measures to identify stylistic factors that co-occurred, and could therefore be definitional of text types and genres E.g. conjuncts like therefore, nevertheless and use of passive together indicate mor

10、e formal style*D. Biber, S. Conrad & R. Reppen, Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use, Ch 5: the study of discourse characteristicsCorpus StylisticsMethodology (contd) Corpora useful not only for counting frequencies of features, but also: Concordancing Lists occurrences o

11、f word in context Identify syntactic use of word Identify range of meanings Identify relative frequency of different uses/meanings Collocation What words occur together? Compare distribution of close synonymsCorpus StylisticsMethodology (contd)Vocabulary in context“Concordance, also known as KWIC li

12、st (key word in context) Allows us to see the (immediate) environment in which a word appearsListings can be customised to show what you want more clearly, e.g.sorted according to next or previous wordshowing more or less contextCorpus StylisticsMethodology (contd)CollocationTerm coined by J R Firth

13、 (1957) to characterise (part of) his theory of meaning“You shall judge a word by the company it keeps“The occurrence of two or more words within a short space of each other in a text (Sinclair 1991)“The relationship a lexical item has with items that appear with greater than random probability in i

14、ts (textual) context (Hoey 1991)Style and CorporaMethodology (contd)Collocation, text type and style example: Distinguish between general and more usual collocations vs. technical and more personal ones e.g. in a general corpus time collocates with save, spend, waste, fritter away, but in a corpus o

15、f sports reports time collocates with half, full, extra, injury, first, second, third, Style and CorporaApplicationsStylometry An attempt to capture the essence of the style of a particular author by reference to a variety of quantitative criteria, usually lexical, called discriminators. Study of fr

16、equently occurring features:word/sentence length; choice and frequency of words; vocabulary richness) The ideal situation for authorship studies is when there are large amounts of undisputed text, or few contenders for the authorship of the disputed text(s). Style and CorporaApplications (contd)Auth

17、or attributionEstablishing the author of an unascribed manuscript: Build corpora A - works definitely by author A B - works definitely by author B C - works of disputed authorship, but probably written by A or B Then select discriminants and associated measures When the technique has been shown to d

18、iscriminate effectively between A and B, then try it on C(M. Oakes: Computational Stylometry, in Handbook of Corpus Linguistics)Style and CorporaApplications (contd)Language LearningFrequency - in particular, word frequency - had a role in language learning in the days before electronic corpora exis

19、ted. The corpus revolution made available frequency information about language use in a totally unprecedented way Frequency dictionaries and frequency-based grammatical information are becoming more and more available and new sources of frequency information from the Web are being tapped Various kin

20、ds of knowledge found in present-day language textbooks (grammatical, collocational, semantic) are getting to be frequency-based. In general, corpora represent real usage of languageIn addition, more frequent can equal “more important“ in many aspects of language learningStyle and CorporaApplications (contd)Interpretive stylistics Programmes like WordSmith Tools and other Windows-based applications allow researchers to derive a list of keywords (words which occur