During 2019, it became increasingly popular for countries to declare a climate emergency – often on demand of their citizens. As such, the term ‘climate emergency’ had a significant increase in usage and got dubbed the Word of the Year 2019. In an effort to investigate discourses around ‘climate emergency’, I used a combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis with framing theory, as used in ecolinguistics, and compared with ‘climate change’; the UK parliamentary climate emergency declaration was used as the point of comparison. I compiled a corpus of almost 100,000 words (consisting of news articles) for each term in the time period Jan-Aug 2019 (four months before and after the declaration). The results showed that there were three overlapping frames (politics, problem, threat) – as well as three unique frames for ‘climate change’ (war, cause, predicament). There were no differences in what frames occurred before and after the climate emergency declaration, but there were differences in the words included in the frames – both in terms of frequency and what words were used.

Title: Authorship Attribution of Poetic Texts Author: Mgr. Petr Plecháč, Ph.D. Department: Institute of Czech National Corpus Supervisor: doc. Mgr. Václav Cvrček, Ph.D. ABSTRACT Contemporary stylometry offers a number of methods for authorship recognition of po- etic texts based on a variety of textual features (e.g. word frequencies, frequencies of character n-grams). However, it seems that one important aspect of these texts has been rather left aside - this aspect is versification. The thesis uses four corpora of poetic texts (Czech, German, Spanish, and English) in order to analyze to what extent versification features - such as frequencies of rhythmic patterns or frequencies of various types of rhymes - may be used as an indicator of authorship. We show that (1) versification-based models significantly outperform the random baseline, (2) in some cases versification- based models even outperform the traditionally used lexical models, (3) in most of the cases combination of both types of models outperforms the given models alone. Versifi- cation features are consequently employed for the purpose of attribution of two texts of doubted authorship: (1) the versified play The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eigth which was originally published under the name of William Shakespeare, but where...

This paper investigates the dominant metaphors in corpora constructed of British online news publications. It uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis, consisting of corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, and agenda setting theory. The corpus, broken down into several sub-corpora, was investigated using collocate and KWIK tools in order to shed light on possible conceptual metaphors in the disease domain. The results showed that there were three major conceptual metaphor mappings; DISEASE IS A POSSESSION, PEOPLE ARE CONTAINERS and CONTROL IS UP. These metaphors in turn emphasised the individual’s culpability in the spreading of the disease and that the government’s preferred response was containing the disease. The most salient attributes in the disease discourse related to the severity of the disease or the government’s defensive response to the virus. In sum, the results provide discursive framings of COVID-19 disease in the British news and show how the conventional metaphor mappings function might affect the public opinion.

The objective of this thesis is to analyze the variation between two competing structures--on the one hand, a transitive verb that takes a finite nominal clause as its complement, and on the other hand, a transitive verb that takes an infinitive as its complement. This thesis seeks to address three questions: (1) Which semantic categories are more likely to use coreferential nominal clauses as complements? (2) How do coreferential finite nominal clauses compare with coreferential infinitive complements, in terms of frequency of usage? And (3) do the corpora show any variation among different countries? The corpora CREA and Web/Dialects were used to determine the frequency of usage between these two structures with four different semantic categories of verbs used in the main clause: assertive, dubitative, evaluative, and volitive. The U.S., Spain, Argentina, and Mexico were also used to compare the results by country. The findings show that when the main verb is assertive the use of a subordinate clause is favored, while main clauses with dubitative showed mixed results between the corpora, although Web/Dialects showed that dubitatives favor an infinitive complement. The evaluative verbs lamentar and odiar did not produce any coreferential results with direct object nominal clauses. Volitive verbs never accepted the use of a coreferential finite. The Web/Dialects results indicate that Spain and the U.S were more likely than Argentina and Mexico to use the finite construction after a main clause with a dubitative phrase, while still favoring the infinitive complement.

Many teachers, test designers, textbook writers, and instructional designers turn to books written by usage experts to determine what is correct standard written American English. Unfortunately, though, experts often disagree about what is correct and what is incorrect, and this disagreement can create problems with validity when people create and assess instruction about usage. One way to discover the rules of standard English usage is to describe what writers actually do in printed, edited English. Researchers can access large collections of standard English through digital text archives, which can be searched electronically. The text archives for this study were taken from EBSCO and ProQuest digital libraries and divided into three different registers: (a) newspapers, (b) magazines, and (c) scholarly journals. This study examines 30 representative items of controversial usage; such as "a lot" or "alot," "between you and I" or "between you and me," "had proved" or "had proven"; to determine the actual occurrence in these three registers of standard written American English. The results list the percentage of use in each register, as well as the total averaged percentage of use in all three registers. Items showing 90% to 100% usage in the total averaged percentages are considered standard English, but items showing 90% to 95% usage are borderline cases that should be monitored for future use. If a variant form is used more than 10% of the time, then it should be considered a possible alternative usage in dictionaries, in text books, and in tests. This study shows the results of using corpus linguistics to answer questions about usage in standard American English.

Dictionaries and, to a lesser extent, usage guides provide writers, editors, and users of American English information on how to use the language appropriately. Dictionaries, in particular, hold authority over correct usage of words. However, historically, usage guides and dictionaries were created using the knowledge of a small group of people. Lexicographers like Noah Webster set out to prescribe a proper way of using American English. To make these judgments, they often relied on a combination of study and idiosyncratic intuitions. A similar process took place in creating usage guides. Though these manuals profess to explain how the language is used by American English speakers-or rather by the selected group of speakers deemed "standard" by usage guide editors and lexicographers-ultimately the manuals can only express the perspectives of the editors and lexicographers on this language. Historically, the views of these editors and lexicographers were the best tools available to assess language, but now computer-based corpora allow for studying larger swaths of language usage. This study examines how much dictionaries and usage guides agree with real-world usage found in corpus data. Using the Corpus of Historical American English, a set of dictionaries and usage guides published throughout the last two hundred years were analyzed to see how much agreement they had with corpus data in noting the addition of denominal verbs (i.e., verbs formed by the conversion of nouns as in 'They taped together the box.') in American English usage. It was found that the majority of the time dictionaries noted new denominal verbs before corpus data reflected accepted usage of these verbs. However, about a quarter of the time dictionaries noted new denominal verbs concurrently with the corpus data. These results suggest that dictionaries-and the subjective opinions of the lexicographers that created them-are more aligned with real-world usage than would be expected. Because of sparse listings, results for usage guide agreement was inconclusive.

Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) states that individuals adapt to each other’s communicative behaviors. This adaptation is called “convergence.” In this work we explore the convergence of writing styles of users of the online music distribution plat- form SoundCloud.com. In order to evaluate our system we created a corpus of over 38,000 comments retrieved from SoundCloud in April 2014. The corpus represents comments from 8 distinct musical genres: Classical, Electronic, Hip Hop, Jazz, Country, Metal, Folk, and World. Our corpus contains: short comments, frequent misspellings, little sentence struc- ture, hashtags, emoticons, and URLs. We adapt techniques used by researchers analyzing other short web-text corpora in order to deal with these problems. We use a supervised machine learning approach to classify the genre of comments in our corpus. We examine the effects of different feature sets and supervised machine learning algorithms on classification accuracy. In total we ran 180 experiments in which we varied: number of genres, feature set composition, and machine learning algorithm. In experiments with all 8 genres we achieve up to 40% accuracy using either a Naive Bayes classifier or C4.5 based classifier with a feature set consisting of 1262 token unigrams and bigrams. This represents a 3 time improvement over chance levels.

The purpose of this study is to examine what contemporary corpora can reveal about the use of the two adjectives evil and wicked. These two synonyms have been analysed using corpus linguistics in order to acquire results about the differences between them regarding frequency of use, as well as their collocating nouns. The results have also been analysed with a focus on gender perspectives. The study has a quantitative as well as a qualitative approach. The material investigated for this study consists of a corpus called The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The definitions of the two adjectives have also been searched within a few of the greater dictionaries. The findings reveal that the word evil is used to a greater extent by speakers and writers in different contexts in comparison to its synonym wicked. There are also significant differences between male and female nouns in adjective and noun collocations. The adjective evil is more frequently used to address male nouns, whereas its synonym wicked is more widely used as an attribute to female nouns. The differences are aligned with common gender stereotypes presented in previous studies and support the results regarding gender approaches in adjective and noun collocations.

This thesis explores the ideological role of metaphor in British governmental discourses on ¿social exclusion¿. A hybrid methodology, combining approaches from Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and cognitive theories of metaphor, is used to address how social exclusion and other metaphors are deployed to create an ideologically vested representation of society. The data consists of linguistic metaphors identified from a 400,000+ word machine-readable corpus of British governmental texts on social exclusion covering a ten year period (1997- 2007). From these surface level features of text, underlying systematic and conceptual metaphors are then inferred. The analysis reveals how the interrelation between social exclusion and a range of other metaphors creates a dichotomous representation of society in which social problems are discursively placed outside society, glossing inequalities within the included mainstream and placing the blame for exclusion on the cultural deficiencies of the excluded. The solution to the problem of exclusion is implicit within the logic of its conceptual structure and involves moving the excluded across the ¿boundary¿ to join the ¿insiders¿. The welfare state has a key role to play in this and is underpinned by a range of metaphors which anticipate movement on the part of the excluded away from a position of dependence on the state. This expectation of movement is itself metaphorically structured by the notion of a social contract in which the socially excluded have a responsibility to try and include themselves in society in return for the right of (temporary) state support. Key systematic metaphors are explained by reference to a discourse-historical view of ideological change in processes of political party transformation. / BISA and CSV

What explains the shape of Zauzou noun phrases? Zauzou (Trans-Himalayan, China) noun phrases exhibit considerable diversity in both the choice of the phrase's primary reference type, and the presence of classifiers, demonstratives, modifiers, and case marking. This investigation uses a large, previously existing Zauzou textual corpus. The corpus was annotated for variables hypothesized to predict the variation in noun phrase form. Syntactic variables investigated include word order, subordination, subordinate role, and a new variable called "loneliness." Participant semantic variables include thematic role, agency, and affectedness. Referential semantic variables include boundedness, number, and animacy. The information packaging variable investigated is accessibility. Statistical analysis of the corpus revealed that case marking was predicted using a variable called "loneliness." This is where a multivalent verb has only one argument that is explicitly referenced in the clause. Lonely noun phrases are more likely to be case marked. The role of loneliness in motivating case marking confirms that disambiguation can be an explanation for differential case marking. Animacy and accessibility are important predictors of noun phrase weight. Overall, high animacy and high accessibility correspond to reduced noun phrase weight. Agency and thematic role were also significant variables. The Zauzou data makes clear that speech act participants occupy a unique role in the animacy hierarchy. Speech act participants are often unexpectedly light upon first mention, being referred to with a pronoun or zero anaphor. They are often unexpectedly heavy while highly activated, remaining a pronoun instead of reducing to a zero anaphor. Zauzou, like Mandarin and Cantonese, allows classifiers to be used with a noun but without a numeral. In Mandarin, this construction is used only with new or generic noun phrases. In Cantonese, this construction can be used with noun phrases of any accessibility value. Zauzou occupies a unique intermediate position. In Zauzou, a noun with bare noun phrase can occur with new or old noun phrases, but rarely with active ones. This thesis provides evidence for the importance of text corpora. Using a corpus allowed for the simultaneous inclusion of many variables as well as the consideration of genre effects. In addition, the annotated corpus produced in this investigation is an important output; it is available in the supplemental materials accompanying this thesis.