Does semantic tagging identify cultural change in British and American English?

Potts, Amanda; Baker, Paul

doi:10.1075/ijcl.17.3.01pot

Cited by 42 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The three semantic tags with the highest negative log likelihood values in the MELC-US vs. MELC-UK comparison appear in Table . INSERT TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE The underuse of Z6: NEGATIVE in MELC-US is due to the overuse of items such as not, n't and no in MELC-UK. This difference is not, however, limited to our data, as other studies have found that British English is generally characterised by a greater use of words expressing negativity and uncertainty than American English (Leech and Fallon, 1992;Potts and Baker, 2012).…”

Section: Insert Table 1 About Herecontrasting

confidence: 44%

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Healthcare professionals' online use of violence metaphors for care at the end of life in the US: a corpus-based comparison with the UK

Potts¹,

Semino²

2017

Corpora

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The use of Violence metaphors in healthcare has long been criticised as detrimental to patients. Recent work Semino et al., 2015) has combined qualitative analysis with corpus-based quantitative methods to analyse the frequency and variety of Violence metaphors in the language of UK-based patients, family carers, and healthcare professionals talking about cancer and/or end-of-life care. A new, 250,324-word corpus of US health professionals' online discourse has been collected to add a contrastive, crosscultural element to the study of metaphors in end-of-life care. In this work, we move towards a replicable method for comparing frequency and type of Violence metaphors in UK and US contexts by making use of both search-and-recall and key semantic tag analysis in the corpus query tool Wmatrix. First, we discuss the most overused and underused semantic domains in the US corpus as compared with the pre-existing UK corpus of online healthcare professional discourse. Second, we show that there are no notable frequency differences in the occurrence of Violence metaphors in the two corpora, but we point out some differences in the topics that these metaphors are used to discuss. Third, we introduce a novel framework for analysing agency in Violence metaphors and apply it to the US corpus. This reveals the variety of relationships, concerns and challenges that these metaphors can express. Throughout, we relate our findings to the different US and UK cultural and institutional contexts, and reflect on the methodological implications of our approach for corpus-based metaphor analysis.

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Section: Insert Table 1 About Herecontrasting

confidence: 44%

“…an American tendency to talk about the military, weaponry and technology, contrasted to a British focus on time and modality; see Potts and Baker, 2012). Nor has the analysis revealed dramatic contrasts reflecting differences in healthcare systems.…”

Section: Rasing the Profile Of The Typical Cancer Victim (Melc-uk)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Healthcare professionals' online use of violence metaphors for care at the end of life in the US: a corpus-based comparison with the UK

Potts¹,

Semino²

2017

Corpora

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“…For the purpose of this study, phrasal verbs were defined as any two-part verbs consisting of a lexical verb followed (continuously or discontinuously) by an adverbial particle, which "behaves to some extent either lexically or syntactically as a single verb" (Quirk et al 1985(Quirk et al : 1150. However, the concordances automatically generated by WordSmith Tools included not only phrasal verbs but also verb + particle free combinations and verb + prepositional phrases since many particles function as both adverbs and prepositions.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Overuse or underuse

Chen

2013

IJCL

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This study explores Chinese university students' use of phrasal verbs in comparison with their American and British counterparts by utilizing a corpus of learner English and four native novice corpora of two English varieties and two genres (argumentative and academic writing). The results show that it is difficult to state whether the Chinese learners of English over-or underuse phrasal verbs in writing because a more striking difference emerges between the British and American students. American students tend to use many more phrasal verbs in both genres than British students and they also use a greater variety of phrasal verbs. Notwithstanding the differences, both American and British students tend to use fewer phrasal verbs in academic writing than in argumentative writing. The learners do not show a fundamental difference from the British students regarding overall frequencies of phrasal verbs; however, the learner-native writer gap does exist between the Chinese and American students.

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“…The nearest neighbour classifier (e.g. Manning et al 2008), for example, requires a set of known samples (prototypes) from particular classes from which it builds a set of features (e.g. words for text classification).…”

Section: Text Prototype Selection Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

ProtAnt

Anthony

Baker

2015

IJCL

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Corpus-based researchers and traditional qualitative researchers, such as those interested in critical discourse analysis, are often required to select prototypical texts for close reading that include the language features of interest that are present in a much larger corpus. Traditional approaches to this selection procedure have been largely ad hoc. In this paper, we offer a more principled way of selecting texts for close reading based on a ranking of texts in terms of the number of keywords they contain. To facilitate this analysis, we have developed a multiplatform, freeware software tool calledProtAntthat analyses the texts, generates a ranked list of keywords based on statistical significance and effect size, and then orders the texts by the number of keywords in them. We describe various experiments that demonstrate theProtAntanalysis is effective not only at identifying prototypical texts, but also identifying outlier texts that may need to be removed from a target corpus.

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Does semantic tagging identify cultural change in British and American English?

Cited by 42 publications

References 12 publications

Healthcare professionals' online use of violence metaphors for care at the end of life in the US: a corpus-based comparison with the UK

Healthcare professionals' online use of violence metaphors for care at the end of life in the US: a corpus-based comparison with the UK

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