The purpose of this study is to investigate the usage and frequencies of amplifiers in the English language and whether there are differences in usage, collocations and in gender. The material used is the Swedish-English Corpus (SWENC), a collection of Swedish native speaking journalists writing in English, and the Corpus of American Soaps (SOAP), a collection of American soap opera scripts. The size of the two corpora is quite different and therefore the number of tokens varies largely, but by using normalization, the frequencies have been compared. The results show differences in frequency and collocations between the different corpora and the conclusion drawn from this study is that there in fact are some amplifier differences when it comes to gender and collocations.   KEYWORDS: adverbs, amplifiers, collocations, corpus-studies, gendered language, linguistics, normalization

Popular music is ever-present and widely available in students’ lives and the value of it as a factor in the language learning process has been a part of the pedagogical literature for many years. One of the often-discussed benefits is the potential for vocabulary learning through songs; however, few researchers have examined whether songs are a suitable source of input for vocabulary learning for English language learners. To address this need, this corpus-driven study investigated the vocabulary demands of popular English songs. A comprehensive corpus of popular English song lyrics was created for this study. Songs for the corpus were selected according to their impact and influence on culture. A song’s impact on culture was determined by its ranking from experts in the music industries in the United States and the United Kingdom and by its popularity based on radio airplay, sales data, and streaming data in the United States and sales and streaming data in the United Kingdom. The corpus contained 2,175 songs and 678,309 tokens. The total listening time was 135 hours and 22 minutes. The lyrics in the corpus were analyzed to determine the vocabulary size necessary to reach 95% and 98% coverage of the words in songs. The songs in the corpus were divided into two varieties of English—American and British, six decades—1950s to 2000s, and four genres—Urban Roots, Formative Rock, Progressive Rock, and Mainstream Listening. An analysis was first completed over the whole corpus and then over the songs from each variety of English, decade, and genre. This study also examined the potential to incidentally learn vocabulary from listening to songs and whether songs are more similar to spoken or written discourse. The results showed that knowledge of the most frequent 2,000 word families, proper nouns, and marginal words provided 96.05% coverage, and knowledge of the most frequent 5,000 word families, proper nouns, and marginal words provided 98% coverage of songs. Both American and British songs reached 95% coverage at the 2,000 word frequency level. However, the British songs reached 98% coverage at the 5,000 word frequency level, while the American songs reached 98% coverage at the 6,000 word frequency level. A vocabulary of the most frequent 2,000 word families, proper nouns, and marginal words was sufficient to reach 95% coverage in all six decades. However, the vocabulary size needed to reach 98% coverage in the six decades ranged from the most frequent 4,000 to 8,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words. A vocabulary of the most frequent 2,000 word families, proper nouns, and marginal words was adequate to reach 95% coverage in all four genre categories. However, the vocabulary size necessary to reach 98% coverage in the different genres ranged from the most frequent 5,000 to 6,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words. The results indicated that there would be a relatively low number of meetings of the same low-frequency word families if learners listened to a small or large number of popular songs. However, there would be a relatively high number of encounters of the same mid-frequency and high-frequency word families if learners listened to a large number of popular songs. This result suggests that there is a greater potential for incidental vocabulary learning of mid-frequency and high-frequency vocabulary through songs. Lastly, in terms of vocabulary, songs are more similar to unscripted spoken discourse than written discourse. Overall, the findings indicate that songs have the potential to be an appropriate source of input for English language learners and might be beneficial for incidental vocabulary learning, especially when listening to a large number of songs. This study provides insights into the kinds of vocabulary used in popular songs and suggests implications for teaching and learning with songs. / Language Arts

This small study concerns occurrences of metaphor, metonymy and conceptual metaphor in the Old English poem Beowulf. The first 224 lines of Beowulf were searched for non-literal passages. Thefound passages were sorted into the groups conventionalized metaphor, metonymy and innovativemetaphor. The conceptual metaphors were in turn sorted into target domains and source domains and grouped within the domains. These were then compared to Modern English and Modern Swedish metaphors and conceptual metaphors with the help of dictionaries and corpus studies. Beowulf was also looked at as a small corpus. Words which were suspected to be used inmetaphorical senses were searched for in the full text and the results were examined and comparedwith modern language usage. It was found evident that Old English and Modern English, as well as Modern Swedish, have many conceptual metaphors in common both when in comes to experiential metaphors and culturally grounded metaphors.

The habitual aspect has been a feature of Irish English for centuries. How it has evolved may have had a lot to do with contact between Standard English and the Celtic language, Irish, spoken in Ireland. As time passes does the impact which these two languages have had on each other weaken? How has a major feature of Irish English, the habitual aspect, fared in the digital world? This essay executes some digital detective work and finds that habitual markers do be always there…

Climate change must be considered one of the most critical issues of the coming decades that poten- tially poses foundational threats to human societies. Aviation has relatively little impact on green- house gas emissions globally, but this picture changes when focusing on emissions of rich industrial states. While being one of the foundations of the modern globalised world, present aviation growth trajectories are untenable. In this thesis, I investigated (a) how discourses about climate change are mediated, amplified and constructed by traditional mass media in Germany and (b) which de- bate configurations lead to political and civil society action on the issue. In particular, I highlighted the underlying ideological currents that influence how journalists discuss issues. This study uses a corpus-assisted approach to critical discourse studies, where statistical insights from large amounts of data are combined with a closer reading of text extracts. It is unique in its methodological breadth and the focus on a non-English-speaking country. The analysis is also angled differently compared to many previous studies insofar as I capture climate in relation to a different topic and not as the main issue. I reproduce previous findings of two periods of intense reporting on the issue with a period of disinterest in between and show that attitudes and ideologies of both the progressive and conservative media outlets have changed considerably over time. This change created a novel debate constellation that proved to be surprisingly robust in the woes of the coronavirus pandemic. Discus- sions moved from a dichotomy between effective climate and economic policy towards a narrative of economic transformation towards innovative industries and technologies. Meanwhile, there was also an increased focus on social consequences and questions of efficacy. The results expand on many of the earlier framing analyses and yield additional insight into effectively drafting and communicating climate policy to appeal to both progressive and conservative target groups. Creating climate poli- cies that are attractive to various strata in the population is essential to avoid polarised debates and assuage climate denialism, tendencies that can already be observed in a variety of countries.

This study used a combination of historical and contemporary corpora to investigate semantic change within the contemporary American English slang words swag, flex, and swole. This study involved two parts. First, it analyzed each slang term’s earlier morphological form through collocate and contextual analysis within the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Second, it examined each slang term’s contemporary use in context within the News on the Web (NOW) corpus. After a comparison of the conclusions drawn from each analysis, it was found that the word swag underwent the process of semantic change known as amelioration and the words flex and swole experienced metaphorization.

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Cette thèse propose une étude quantitative de la variation de l'ordre des constituants en persan avec un intérêt particulier pour l'ordre relatif entre le COD et le COI étant donné son rôle crucial dans les analyses de la structure du SV. Afin de remédier à une lacune empirique dont souffre l’étude de la syntaxe du persan, notre premier objectif est d’évaluer, à partir de données empiriques robustes, l’hypothèse largement admise selon laquelle il existe un ordre relatif canonique dichotomique entre les compléments verbaux, dépendant du marquage différentiel de l'objet (MDO). Notre second objectif, relatif à la linguistique générale et à la typologie, est de contribuer aux débats controversés sur les préférences translinguistiques de l'ordre des mots en étudiant, dans une langue SOV à structure mixte, les effets des facteurs tels que le poids (ou la longueur relative). Les résultats de nos études de corpus et de nos expériences montrent l’inadéquation du critère MDO pour expliquer l’ordre relatif entre le COD et le COI. Cette conclusion nous conduit à réfuter également l’hypothèse de la position syntaxique double de l’objet au profit d’une structure plate pour le SV. De plus, nos données révèlent une préférence « long-avant-court » subordonnée aux facteurs contribuant à la saillance, tels que la définitude, l'animéité et le rôle grammatical. Nous arguons que cette préférence échappe, en partie ou totalement, aux modèles du traitement se fondant sur la distance entre la tête et ses dépendants, alors qu’elle est compatible avec l'hypothèse selon laquelle dans les langues SOV l'accessibilité conceptuelle des constituants longs favorise leur production plus en amont dans la phrase. / This thesis proposes a quantitative study of word order variations in Persian, focusing on the relative order between the direct object (DO) and the indirect object (IO). The latter plays a crucial role in the theoretical analyses of the VP, which in the absence of quantitative studies lack solid empirical underpinning. My first goal is to contribute to the study of Persian syntax by providing reliable data in order to evaluate the prevailing hypothesis according to which there exists a dual canonical relative order between the two objects triggered by the Differential Object marking (DOM). My second goal is to contribute to the ongoing debates on word order preferences in general linguistics and typology by bringing in data on an SOV language with mixed head-direction. To this end, I study the effect of factors such as grammatical weight (or relative length), which are claimed to influence the linear order across languages. First, the results of our corpus and experimental studies show that the DOM account of the relative order between the DO and the IO is flawed. Based on this conclusion, I also reject the two object positions hypothesis and plead for a flat structure view of the VP. Second, our data reveal a “long-before-short” preference, which is shown to depend on the effect of salience-enhancing factors such as definiteness, animacy and the grammatical role. I argue that while this preference is, either totally or partially, incompatible with the predictions of processing-oriented dependency-based models, it can be accounted for by production models assuming that the greater conceptual accessibility of longer constituents favors their early position in SOV languages.

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