The present study offers strong evidence that the World Wide Web is a unique domain of use that can be categorized as a banalised context based on certain defining criteria. Italian Internet Terminology is worthy of investigation because of its unprecedented extent and rich context of use. The goal of chapter one is to make a case for the utility of a corpus-based study, explain the primary theoretical underpinnings of the study, which I base on the concept of central meaning linked to the compositionality of elements, and give important historical and sociological motivations for such a study . In chapter two, I explain how term are selected and discarded, how my corpus is created, and how it proves suitable and representative of this lexical domain. In the third chapter, I elucidate the classificatory system I employ which allows me to view the lexical items in grammatical context. To gain a better understanding of the conceptual system of the terms studied, I introduce another important analytical framework: qualia structures. In chapter four, the analysis of the morphosyntactic and semantic character of the terminology allows for greater insight into the processes and pattering of denomination of Internet terminology. To conclude this study, I show that Italian Internet terminology is a banalised language governed by a systematic set of morpho-syntactic rules in which Italian selects, uses, and lexicalizes terms based on core units of meaning.

The present study offers strong evidence that the World Wide Web is a unique domain of use that can be categorized as a banalised context based on certain defining criteria. Italian Internet Terminology is worthy of investigation because of its unprecedented extent and rich context of use. The goal of chapter one is to make a case for the utility of a corpus-based study, explain the primary theoretical underpinnings of the study, which I base on the concept of central meaning linked to the compositionality of elements, and give important historical and sociological motivations for such a study . In chapter two, I explain how term are selected and discarded, how my corpus is created, and how it proves suitable and representative of this lexical domain. In the third chapter, I elucidate the classificatory system I employ which allows me to view the lexical items in grammatical context. To gain a better understanding of the conceptual system of the terms studied, I introduce another important analytical framework: qualia structures. In chapter four, the analysis of the morphosyntactic and semantic character of the terminology allows for greater insight into the processes and pattering of denomination of Internet terminology. To conclude this study, I show that Italian Internet terminology is a banalised language governed by a systematic set of morpho-syntactic rules in which Italian selects, uses, and lexicalizes terms based on core units of meaning.

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<p>Abstract</p><p>The aim of this essay is to establish whether or not the word foxy can serve to illustrate gender differences and gender stereotypes in English. The analysis is conducted by using one American English corpus and one British English corpus in order to make a comparison of the two English varieties. Apart from the comparative study, foxy is examined and categorized according to gender and a number of features to help answering the research questions which are:</p><p>• What difference in meaning, if any, does the word foxy carry when used for males, females and inanimate things?</p><p>• Can the word foxy serve to illustrate gender stereotypes in English?</p><p>• Are there any differences regarding how foxy is used in American English compared to British English?</p><p>Throughout the essay previous studies are presented, terms and tools that have been used are defined and argued for. One of the conclusions drawn in this study is that there is a significant difference in meaning when foxy is used in American English compared to British English. There are, however, also differences concerning the use of foxy when referring to males, females and inanimate things.</p><p>Keywords: Collocation, corpus studies, foxy, gender, language, linguistics, semantic prosody, stereotypes.</p>

One of the distinctive features of Japanese is the presence of discourse particles. The only way to truly resolve what these particles mean and how they are used is to examine them in use and to study the entire system of many particles. In order to add to the attempt to do this by providing more data for the study of particles, this exploratory study examines a large corpus of naturally occurring telephone conversations in the online CallFriend Japanese corpus and conversations taken from the Japanese TV drama "HERO." This analysis of both naturally occurring and scripted data will lead to further understanding both of actual patterns of particle use by real speakers and the language ideology that informs the usage of language created for a specific purpose. The results suggest that using this method of analysis shows a great deal not only about how particles are used in discourse strategies and in showing a speaker's affective commitment to the conversation but about the semantics involved in their use.

Abstract The aim of this essay is to establish whether or not the word foxy can serve to illustrate gender differences and gender stereotypes in English. The analysis is conducted by using one American English corpus and one British English corpus in order to make a comparison of the two English varieties. Apart from the comparative study, foxy is examined and categorized according to gender and a number of features to help answering the research questions which are: • What difference in meaning, if any, does the word foxy carry when used for males, females and inanimate things? • Can the word foxy serve to illustrate gender stereotypes in English? • Are there any differences regarding how foxy is used in American English compared to British English? Throughout the essay previous studies are presented, terms and tools that have been used are defined and argued for. One of the conclusions drawn in this study is that there is a significant difference in meaning when foxy is used in American English compared to British English. There are, however, also differences concerning the use of foxy when referring to males, females and inanimate things. Keywords: Collocation, corpus studies, foxy, gender, language, linguistics, semantic prosody, stereotypes.

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This essay examines how the sense of the word parent has developed and possibly changed during the 19th and 20th centuries. The hypothesis is that father was the most common meaning in the early 1800s and that by the end of the 20th century it had changed into having a more general sense, denoting all caregivers of a child. The research has been performed as a corpus study, looking at and analyzing corpus data in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) from three different decades – the 1820s, the 1900s, and the 1990s. The word parent was analyzed in 100 samples from each of the three decades by studying the expanded contexts of the word in COHA, and categorizing the perceived meaning into one of seven definitions. The results show that father was the most common sense in the 1820s, while origin was the most frequent meaning in the 1900s. Last but not least, in the samples from the 1990s, either as sense had the highest frequency. Occurrences are analyzed both by decade and by source type. The results indicate that one should be mindful about making assumptions about meaning based only on knowledge of the sense as used in current discourse. Any text should be read and understood in context while taking historical circumstances into account. The definition of parent has changed, both in dictionaries and in the public mind, and there are signals that changes in the legal definition of parent are also to be expected.

This study investigates the use of emoticons and abbreviations in a mode of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), blogs written by Swedish individuals in English. The aim of the study is to find out whether the emoticons and abbreviations used in these blogs are tailor-made by Swedish users or if they are the same as those found on the rest of the Internet. Another question asked by the study concerns if the use of emoticons and abbreviations differs depending on the gender and age group of the blogger. The method used is mainly concordance searches in a corpus, using the concordance program AntConc to find particular features of CMC. The data used for the study is a corpus of one hundred thousand words from blogs all over the Internet on a wide range of topics written by males and females of different age groups. The results of the investigation indicate that no local variations of abbreviations and emoticons exist within Swedish blogs written in English. While emoticons were used more frequently by males than their female counterparts, abbreviations were used mostly by female bloggers. It also appeared that bloggers aged thirty or younger use emoticons and abbreviations most frequently, suggesting that their use was influenced quite significantly by the age of the blogger. The conclusion drawn from this is that if any eventual local Swedish variations of emoticons and abbreviations, they exist in Swedish blogs and not English ones, as those discovered in this study do not deviate from what already exist in blogs written by native speakers of English.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the possible differences in the way American and Swedish journalists writing in English use maximizers, i.e. intensifying adverbs. In order to fulfill the purpose, information about how maximizers are used in two different sub-corpora, namely SWENC (The Swedish-English Corpus) and TIME (Time Corpus of American English) is collected. The data in SWENC has been collected from various websites where the crucial criterion was that the authors of the articles must have Swedish as their first language. The data from TIME has been collected from Time Magazine’s online corpora which is freely available on the Internet. The results show that there are some differences in the way Swedes and Americans use maximizers. The number of tokens for each maximizer does not differ to a great extent between the two corpora. However, there are larger deviances in the use of collocations and semantic prosody. The conclusion drawn from this is that there are indeed some differences in how American and Swedish journalists writing in English use maximizers, although they are not very many.