Throughout the history of society, women have fought hard to have equal rights in relation to men in all aspects of life. This demand for equality goes on until today and even thoughfeminists around the world have made progress in relations to right to vote, to hold politicaloffices and equal salary there are still advances to be made. The world of sports is nodifferent. In fact, one of the recent achievements of the feminist movement has been to point out that sport is a strong cultural sphere where male dominance still stands solid. This study is based on a corpus linguistics analysis of British newspaper articles from the Wimbledon tennis Grand Slam tournament. Texts from both men’s and women’s tournaments from 2007 to 2017 were selected randomly from UK tabloids and broadsheets. This investigation tries to identify whether male and female players are still represented differently in sports media and furthermore attempts to categorise and classify which linguistic features writers employ. In addition, the relation between power, gender and language is analysed to perform a qualitative analysis of the texts and the reasons why these linguistic techniques were used.

History, discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics show the green movement (humankind's response to issues affecting the environment) to have proliferated both ecological ideologies and the linguistic tools to discuss them, (R. J. Alexander, 2002; Bang, Døør, Steffensen, & Nash, 2007; Carvalho, 2007; Mahlberg, 2007; Wang, 2009) showing the development of green or environmental language in the lexicon. The topic has also left its mark on the market, and green market research has shown effects of messages on perceptions of green brands (Phau & Ong, 2007) and profiles of m (J. A. Roberts, 1996). However , surprisingly little research has been done on how these terms are used, whether some words are more green than others, nor how effective these terms are in persuading consumers to buy green. Thus, the goal of this study is to identify the use of green terms, what consumers see as green terms and how they perceive products advertised using green language. Experiment one examined the development of environmental terms using Google Book's NGram Viewer (Google, 2011) and the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) (M. Davies, 2010) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Davies, 2008). Results revealed changes in the use of several green terms over time, including the creation of several following the 1960s, as well as increased collocation with other terms associated with the environmental movement. Experiment two examined green terms for levels of perceived greenness. Different levels of greenness for several words were identified, with words like environmentally friendly rating positively and industrial rating negatively. Experiment three examines the effects of a word's level of greenness on participants' perceptions of automobile, personal care, and cleaning products' attractiveness, effectiveness, buyability, and environmental friendliness. . Green words were shown to have a significant effect on participants' values of attractiveness and buyability for personal care and cleaning products, effectiveness for cleaning products, and environmental friendliness for both aforementioned products. Significant differences between automobile types were also found. Implications include an affirmation of the link between world view and language, the use of large corpora to view semantic shift, and application of the data in green marketing.

ESL grammar books have lists of present and past participial adjectives based on author intuition rather than actual word frequency. In these textbooks, the –ing and –ed participial adjectives derived from transitive verbs of state and emotion are presented in pairs such as interesting/interested, boring/bored, or surprising/surprised. This present study used the Corpus of Contemporary American English http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ (COCA) to investigate the overall frequency of participial adjectives in use as well as their frequency within certain varieties of contexts. The results have shown that among most frequently used participial adjectives there are not only the participial adjectives derived from transitive verbs of psychological state, such as interesting/interested, but also the participial adjectives derived from transitive verbs of action with their intransitive equivalents, such as increasing/increased. The data also revealed that many participial adjectives lack corresponding counterparts and thus cannot be presented in –ing/-ed or -en pairs (e. g., existing, ongoing, concerned, supposed). Finally, a majority of the differences between participial adjectives, including the differences between present (-ing) and past (-ed or -en) participial adjectives, are reflected in their collocations. This study suggests that a new approach of teaching participial adjectives along with their collocations in relation to their frequencies in particular contexts can help second language learners develop awareness of how and when these participial adjectives should be used to convey an individual’s intended meaning in a native-like manner

This essay examines the ways that the underlying meaning of the keywords queer and gay had changed between, and during, the periods of 1989-1991, 1999-2001 and 2009-2011 within the medium of written American English as collected by the Corpus of Historical American English across multiple written genres. The examination of the two chosen keywords was conducted by sorting the list-results of respective COHA queries into each period, and then conducted by a systematic sorting of the query results into one out of four categories depending on how the keywords were primed, framed and used. These categories are pejorative, sexuality, identity and lastly if the word was used in its historical context of meaning either something odd and/or strange in the case of queer, or to imply happiness in the case of gay. The essay concludes that over these 30 years, there is a clear indication that there has been a shift, moving from pejoratives and firmly cementing gay and queer as terms used by and to be attributed within the LGBTQ+ community.

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<p>  </p> <p>This study addresses a critical gap in the existing literature by investigating the manifestation of impoliteness through the use of emojis within the online Vietnamese community on social media. The research is guided by three central questions: (1) How do Vietnamese Facebook users use emojis in their posts and comments? (2) How do Vietnamese Facebook users perceive impolite behaviors in cyberspace? and (3). What strategies do Vietnamese speakers employ to express impoliteness with emojis on social media? Quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed on a corpus of posts and comments on a Facebook showbiz confession page. Results show that facial emojis, particularly those forming homogeneous sequences, are preferred, with laughter-related emojis prominently featured. Additionally, emotive particles, together with expletives, frequently co-occur with emojis, compensating for absent extralinguistic cues in computer-mediated communication. By administering checks using dictionaries, mutual information scores, collocation visualizations, and cosine similarity, a nuanced understanding of impoliteness in CMC was achieved. Religious influences, particularly from Buddhism, were found to play a significant role in shaping Vietnamese impoliteness perception, exemplified by terms such as <em>vô duyên</em> and <em>sân si</em>. A coding scheme informed by findings from the second research question on a sample of 100 first posts and comments in the main corpus was used. The study further substantiates the hypothesis that Vietnamese speakers predominantly employ implicational impoliteness strategies, particularly through multimodal mismatches facilitated by emojis. Conventionalized formulas featuring emojis were infrequent, suggesting a preference for more dynamic and context-specific impoliteness expressions. This research contributes to the refinement of impoliteness theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as providing a foundation for further studies in online discourse and natural language processing. </p>

The current study investigated the language behaviour of older adults before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Linguistic complexity (LC)—a measure of lexical and morpho-syntactic richness—is an index of both cognitive functioning and creativity. The increased physical and social isolation during the pandemic yielded reports of heightened levels of creativity as well as cognitive decline, bringing forth two counter-directed predictions: (1) given the threat to cognitive functioning posed by the pandemic, LC may steadily decrease following the onset of the pandemic, or; (2) consistent with the creativity boost reported during lockdowns, LC may be greater after the onset of the pandemic. This work analyzed the syntactic and lexical complexity of texts from the CoSoWELL corpus (v1.0), a collection of personal narratives written by 1028 mature adults (55+) collected at five test sessions spanning before (t1) and after (t2-t5) the beginning of the pandemic. Two lexical variables (type-token ratio; noun-verb ratio) and six syntactic variables (two syntactic variants of type-token ratio; embeddedness; D-ratio; longest dependency path; mean length utterance) were used to calculate LC. All measures saw statistically significant gains from t1 to t2, and further increased across subsequent test sessions. These findings confirmed the second hypothesis and, I argue, support a pandemic-related boost to creativity. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / The COVID-19 pandemic has been isolating, and isolation is a mixed bag: being alone promotes self-reflection and overthinking, and doing too much is linked to stress and mental illness. However, more time spent in solitude is also linked to greater creativity. Creativity means more new ideas, which come through as longer, more detailed sentences, with less repetition. This research looked at stories by older adults about their lives, written before and during the pandemic. Surprisingly, the language in the stories became more descriptive and diverse over time—meaning people were being more creative after COVID-19 hit. In the wake of this lonely storm, one silver lining has emerged: whether in spite of or because of this pandemic, creativity is flourishing.

Yes / We investigate claims about the frequency of "know" made by philosophers. Our investigation has several overlapping aims. First, we aim to show what is required to confirm or disconfirm philosophers' claims about the comparative frequency of different uses of philosophically interesting expressions. Second, we aim to show how using linguistic corpora as tools for investigating meaning is a productive methodology, in the sense that it yields discoveries about the use of language that philosophers would have overlooked if they remained in their "armchairs of an afternoon", to use J.L. Austin's phrase. Third, we discuss facts about the meaning of "know" that so far have been ignored in philosophy, with the aim of reorienting discussions of the relevance of ordinary language for philosophical theorizing. / Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant (RPG-2016-193)

affect, concreteness, corpus linguistics, cognitive science, cognitive linguistics, stereotype accuracy, national character stereotypes, semantic prosody / Increasing use of natural language corpora and methods from corpus and computational linguistics as a supplement to traditional modes of scholarship in the social sciences and humanities has been labeled the "text as data movement." Corpora afford greater scope in terms of sample sizes, time, geography, and subject populations, as well as the opportunity to ecologically validate theories by testing their predictions within behaviour which is not elicited by an experimenter. Herein, five projects are presented, each either exploiting or taking inspiration from natural language data to make novel contributions to a subject matter area in the psychological sciences, including social psychology and psycholinguistics. Additionally, each project incorporates notions of word meaning grounded in psycholinguistic and psychoevolutionary theory, either the affective or sensorimotor connotations of words. This thesis ends with a discussion of the necessity of taking both experimental and observational approaches, as well as the challenge of how to link natural language data to psychological constructs. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The internet and modern computers are changing how scientists study the mind. Instead of doing experiments within a laboratory, it is more and more common for cognitive scientists to observe patterns in online language use. These patterns in language use are then used to comment on how the mind works. Online language use is created by diverse people as they go about their lives. This is valuable for scientists studying the mind. Our experiments are often limited by how many people and which people do experiments. Sometimes, experiments can be misleading because people don't act in the real world like they do in a lab. This thesis has five studies, each using online language use to comment on some part of how the mind works. Also, each study involves how words make people feel, or whether a word refers to something you can see or touch. Studying real people as they communicate offers new perspectives on old ideas or unanswered questions.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T18:22:45Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Denise Delega Lucio.pdf: 5910043 bytes, checksum: e39fb054a13db1353de44dcdf6626c8b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-10-17 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This thesis aims to check the way how argumentative texts produced by English learners vary and, by means of this knowledge, suggest procedures for developing activities for English teaching material. The research resorts to the theoretical framework of Corpus Linguistics, Learner Corpus Linguistics, and Multidimensional Analysis. Our study corpora were the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), the Brazilian International Corpus of Learner English (BrICLE), and the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS). In the first phase of this research, we checked the way how variation in learner s essays was distributed along the dimensions of English variation proposed by Biber (1988). In the second phase, we identified the specific variation dimensions in leaner s essays, something which resulted in 4 dimensions of variation: dimension 1 literate writing versus narrativelike and oral-like writing; dimension 2 description-driven writing versus action-driven writing; dimension 3 writing focused on thought and report; and dimension 4 qualifying writing. In the third phase, we addressed the linguistic characteristics observed in the dimension literate writing versus narrative-like and oral-like writing to find contents for the teaching activities about variation in texts. In addition to the suggested activities, we present the procedures needed to use results from researches like this for producing language teaching materials / Esta tese tem por objetivo verificar o modo como textos argumentativos produzidos por alunos de inglês variam e, a partir desse conhecimento, sugerir procedimentos para o desenvolvimento de atividades para material didático de inglês. A pesquisa recorre ao arcabouço teórico da Linguística de Corpus, Linguística de Corpus de Aprendiz e Análise Multidimensional. Nossos corpora de estudo foram o International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), o Brazilian International Corpus of Learner English (BrICLE) e o Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS). Na primeira fase desta pesquisa, verificamos o modo como a variação nas redações de aprendizes se distribuía nas dimensões de variação do inglês propostas por Biber (1988). Na segunda fase, identificamos as dimensões de variação específicas nas redações de aprendizes, o que resultou em 4 dimensões de variação: dimensão 1 escrita letrada versus escrita narrativizada e oralizada; dimensão 2 escrita com foco na descrição versus escrita com foco no agir; dimensão 3 escrita com foco no pensamento e no relato; e dimensão 4 escrita qualificativa. Na terceira fase, partimos das características linguísticas observadas na dimensão escrita letrada versus escrita narrativizada e oralizada para encontrar conteúdos para as atividades didáticas sobre a variação em textos. Além das atividades sugeridas, apresentamos os procedimentos necessários para utilizar resultados de pesquisas como esta para a produção de materiais didáticos para ensino de línguas