We performed quantitative analysis on transcriptions of 784 interviews with Holocaust survivors. The interviews were collected by the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, and the first 15 minutes of each interview had been transcribed using automatic speech recognition. The survivors were an aging population as the interviews were conducted around fifty years after the end of the Holocaust. We used statistical methods and algorithms to analyze the data including keyness analysis, topic modeling, and emotionality analysis. We used the Contemporary Corpus of American English (COCA) as a comparative corpus for these analyses. Overall, we found that survivors prioritized themes of the Holocaust and their families in the interviews. Specific words and themes reoccurred across the corpus demonstrating a collective and consistent memory of trauma. Our emotionality analyses revealed that survivors used slightly more positive language and fewer words relating to anger, disgust, and fear than the speakers in our comparative corpus. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / For this thesis, we analyzed 784 transcribed interviews with Holocaust survivors. The interviews were conducted by the Shoah Foundation and took place from 1994-2000; around 50 years after the end of World War II. We compared the language in the interviews to the spoken component of a large corpus (collection of texts) called The Contemporary Corpus of American English (COCA). In our analyses, we found the words that are most representative of the survivors' language across the corpus. We also found topics that were discussed most frequently in the interviews. Words and topics relating to family, Judaism, and experiences of the Holocaust were the most common. We also analyzed the emotionality of the survivors' language and found that overall, they used slightly more positive words than the words in COCA. They also used fewer words associated with the emotions anger, fear, and disgust.

This thesis deals with french V-N compounds (casse-noisettes) and their occurences in frWac corpus. The first aim of this work is to describe composition and french compounds, particularly the V-N compounds. The second aim is to verify their occurences in frWac corpus and to characterize their semantic and morphosyntactic properties. This work is divided in two parts: the theoretical and the practical one. The first one deals with the process of composition and compounds in general with special attention to characteristics of VN compounds. In the second part, the corpus analysis will be proceeded, the quantitative and the qualitative ones. The subject of research are the VN compounds, we will focus especially on their morphological, syntactic and semantic properties.

The aim of this thesis is the identification and evaluation lexical expression of causal and consequential relations in the present-day French. After a theoretical introduction in which the most important terms necessary for this work will be presented, we will focus on the Czech conception of discourse relations. Based on this conception, a list of French lexical expressions of cause and consequence will be assembled. These expressions will be then searched in two corpora ? frWac and Frantext. In the practical part of this piece of writing, the given lexical expressions will be analysed with respect to their structure, position and use in a sentence and in the text. The frequency of their occurrence in both corpora will be also taken in account.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the inchoative constructions in the French and Czech languages. These constructions have never been analysed on the parallel corpus. For this reason, the author has decided to examine this theme based on the data of the parallel corpus InterCorp. The first part represents a general introduction to the theme, particularly to the aspect theory in both languages. The second part is divided in to two chapters. The first one focuses on the constructions which expresses the inchoative aspect in French, particurarly periphrastic and light verbs. The second one covers inchoative constructions in Czech. The third research part of this thesis focuses on the detailed analysis of the selected verbs. The analysis is based on the criteria resulting from the theoretical part. In conclusion, there is a summary of the research as well as the possibilities for more researches dealing with this theme.

The present thesis examines the stylization of spoken language in literature from the translation point of view, namely in translation from French into Czech. As a prerequisite for dealing with the use of spoken language in translation, the use of spoken language in contemporary Czech literature is examined. Ten works of contemporary Czech literature are analysed via corpus linguistics methods, using the corpora of written language of the Czech National Corpus, with the view of describing the principal phonological, morphological, lexical and syntactic procedures used in Czech literary texts to evoke spoken language. In the second part of the thesis, six works of French literature containing features of spoken language are analysed, together with their translations into Czech. The paper also summarises the main features of spoken Czech and spoken French.

<p>This essay reviews vocabulary samples from three different textbooks, which are readers for the basic course in English at an upper secondary school in Sweden. The aim of the study is to determine whether the word samples from the readers’ word lists consist mostly of high- or low frequency words and if the words denote any particular semantic fields. Moreover, the possible use of word frequencies in second language acquisition is also examined. The method used in ascertaining the quality of the words is comparing the word samples to the BNC (the British National Corpus) and analysing how frequently they occur in written and spoken modern English. The results are based on the findings from the analysis made in this study and also compared to current research in the fields of linguistics and language acquisition. The results exhibit both overrepresentation- and absence of words in particular semantic fields. For instance, words from the semantic field concerning ‘food and cooking’ were found to be somewhat predominant. The findings also include support for the use of word frequencies in language acquisition, especially in terms of how words are translated from English into Swedish in the textbooks’ wordlists. The only Swedish synonym given was in some cases item of the least frequent usage in modern English, according to the BNC. <strong> </strong></p><h1> </h1><h1> </h1><p> </p>

This essay reviews vocabulary samples from three different textbooks, which are readers for the basic course in English at an upper secondary school in Sweden. The aim of the study is to determine whether the word samples from the readers’ word lists consist mostly of high- or low frequency words and if the words denote any particular semantic fields. Moreover, the possible use of word frequencies in second language acquisition is also examined. The method used in ascertaining the quality of the words is comparing the word samples to the BNC (the British National Corpus) and analysing how frequently they occur in written and spoken modern English. The results are based on the findings from the analysis made in this study and also compared to current research in the fields of linguistics and language acquisition. The results exhibit both overrepresentation- and absence of words in particular semantic fields. For instance, words from the semantic field concerning ‘food and cooking’ were found to be somewhat predominant. The findings also include support for the use of word frequencies in language acquisition, especially in terms of how words are translated from English into Swedish in the textbooks’ wordlists. The only Swedish synonym given was in some cases item of the least frequent usage in modern English, according to the BNC.

This thesis investigates coreference and its resolution within the domain of health education. Coreference is the relationship between two linguistic expressions that refer to the same real-world entity, and resolution involves identifying this relationship among sets of referring expressions. The coreference resolution task is considered among the most difficult of problems in Artificial Intelligence; in some cases, resolution is impossible even for humans. For example, "she" in the sentence "Lynn called Jennifer while she was on vacation" is genuinely ambiguous: the vacationer could be either Lynn or Jennifer. <br/><br/> There are three primary motivations for this thesis. The first is that health education has never before been studied in this context. So far, the vast majority of coreference research has focused on news. Secondly, achieving domain-independent resolution is unlikely without understanding the extent to which coreference varies across different genres. Finally, coreference pervades language and is an essential part of coherent discourse. Its effective use is a key component of easy-to-understand health education materials, where readability is paramount. <br/><br/> No suitable corpus of health education materials existed, so our first step was to create one. The comprehensive analysis of this corpus, which required manual annotation of coreference, confirmed our hypothesis that the coreference used in health education differs substantially from that in previously studied domains. This analysis was then used to shape the design of a knowledge-lean algorithm for resolving coreference. This algorithm performed surprisingly well on this corpus, e.g., successfully resolving over 85% of all pronouns when evaluated on unseen data. <br/><br/> Despite the importance of coreferentially annotated corpora, only a handful are known to exist, likely because of the difficulty and cost of reliably annotating coreference. The paucity of genres represented in these existing annotated corpora creates an implicit bias in domain-independent coreference resolution. In an effort to address these issues, we plan to make our health education corpus available to the wider research community, hopefully encouraging a broader focus in the future.

This thesis investigates coreference and its resolution within the domain of health education. Coreference is the relationship between two linguistic expressions that refer to the same real-world entity, and resolution involves identifying this relationship among sets of referring expressions. The coreference resolution task is considered among the most difficult of problems in Artificial Intelligence; in some cases, resolution is impossible even for humans. For example, "she" in the sentence "Lynn called Jennifer while she was on vacation" is genuinely ambiguous: the vacationer could be either Lynn or Jennifer. <br/><br/> There are three primary motivations for this thesis. The first is that health education has never before been studied in this context. So far, the vast majority of coreference research has focused on news. Secondly, achieving domain-independent resolution is unlikely without understanding the extent to which coreference varies across different genres. Finally, coreference pervades language and is an essential part of coherent discourse. Its effective use is a key component of easy-to-understand health education materials, where readability is paramount. <br/><br/> No suitable corpus of health education materials existed, so our first step was to create one. The comprehensive analysis of this corpus, which required manual annotation of coreference, confirmed our hypothesis that the coreference used in health education differs substantially from that in previously studied domains. This analysis was then used to shape the design of a knowledge-lean algorithm for resolving coreference. This algorithm performed surprisingly well on this corpus, e.g., successfully resolving over 85% of all pronouns when evaluated on unseen data. <br/><br/> Despite the importance of coreferentially annotated corpora, only a handful are known to exist, likely because of the difficulty and cost of reliably annotating coreference. The paucity of genres represented in these existing annotated corpora creates an implicit bias in domain-independent coreference resolution. In an effort to address these issues, we plan to make our health education corpus available to the wider research community, hopefully encouraging a broader focus in the future.

Recently, network theory has been used to analyze the formal syntactic and semantic properties of written texts to explain the development of language (Solé et al. 2005). While foundational, this approach neglects the social and cultural pressures affecting language in interaction, a central focus of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology (Hymes 1974, Goffman 1981, Gumperz 1982, Goodwin 2006). The influential work of M.M. Bakhtin (1981) frames speech as an emergent social process inflected by shifting patterns of negotiated meanings. As Hill (1986) observed "the enormous impact of Bakhtin's work, already felt with earthquake strength in literary studies...[is] now beginning to appear with equal force in the anthropology of language" (1986: 89).The aim of this research is to test the conjecture that by expanding the frame of language network analysis to include the social context of speech, the emergent properties of heteroglossia predicted by Bakhtin will be clarified. This analysis builds on prior research on language in interaction, drawing from sociolinguistic analysis (Sacks et al. 1974, Atkinson & Heritage 1984), word frequency (Nelson et al. 1998, Mendoza-Denton 2003), and network analysis (Bearman & Stovel 2000, de Nooy et al. 2005, Solé et al. 2005, Mehler 2010).According to Bakhtin, heteroglossia emerges as speakers "appropriate the words of others and populate them with one's own intention" (1981:428). This multi-sited doctoral research investigates the speech of butchers through participant observation, work place interactions and interviews, with a focus on references to blood. Some of the semantic features that become affixed to blood are due to historical and popular culture understandings of this signifier, while other salient features derive from subject positionality and community of practice (Lave & Wenger 1991). This work provides a snapshot of all of these processes at work in the speech of an occupational community of American butchers. The results of this analysis show that including the social context has significant effects on the conceptualization of both semantic and social networks, in comparison with networks derived exclusively from written texts.