Marchand (1969) claims that abbreviations and acronyms, which are also known as ‘initialisms’, are used to create “names of new scientific discoveries, trade-names, names of organizations, new foundations or offices, but occasionally, and chiefly in American English, personal and geographical names are also coined in this way” (Marchand, 1969: 452). However, initialisms that originate from netspeak, such as ‘LOL’, are different from the initialisms Marchand (1969) describes. These initialisms are not names of organizations or scientific discoveries; rather, they describe everyday things or phases. This kind of initialism is a new phenomenon that seemingly did not exist before the Internet, and the aim of this essay is thus to examine whether Internet has given us increased opportunities for this type of word formation. A corpus of informal English was created for this study and ten initialisms were extracted from that corpus. These initialisms were then examined in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The data from the COCA showed that people do form and use this kind of initialism, albeit they do it very infrequently. Furthermore, the corpus data showed that these items are used in all different genres that exist in the COCA, except for academic writing. The data found in this study indicates that people seem create a new kind of initialism, and that people therefore have new opportunities to use this kind of word formation. However, the data is too sparse to draw any definite conclusions from it.

The aim of this study is to examine how the word manly was used during the 19thcentury. Using the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) it looks atcollocates, the spread across registers and semantic meaning, in order to gain a betterunderstanding of the word and its usage. Due to this term’s connotations with gender,the findings will finally be discussed in relation to Gender Performativity andMasculinity Theory.

This corpus based diploma thesis takes stock of Finnish epistemic modal verbs voida, saattaa, taitaa and mahtaa and surveys their translational counterparts as they can be found in the parallel corpus InterCorp. The aim of the thesis is to find out what tendencies there can be found in the translation of the modals in question. In the theoretical part, there is, firstly, a description of both modality and modal verbs in Finnish and Czech, secondly, of the differences between the approaches to modality in both languages and, thirdly, of the features of translated language. In the analytical part, the translations are sorted out into categories based on the particular modal specifiers. The description of the different modal specifier categories follows.

This thesis deals with the analysis of the epistemic modality of selected French adverbs in -ment. After a theoretical introduction of basic terms and characterizations of the epistemic modality and the principal means of its expression, it focuses on the very epistemic adverbs. At first, for the purpose of the following research, we specify the syntactically and semantically homogenous group of epistemic adverbs in -ment, defining it by dictionaries and constituent works. Afterwards, this group is analyzed quantitatively - on the French corpora Frantext, L'Est républicain and frWac - as well as qualitatively - on the parallel corpus InterCorp - with an emphasis on the post-verbal position of the adverb in the sentence, on the certainty degree and the Czech translation equivalents. The final part of the study is constituted by a reversed analysis of acquired Czech equivalents. Key words: French, epistemic modality, modal specificators, modal adverb, corpus linguistics.

La parution d’un certain nombre de travaux menés sur les « conjonctions de subordination », Deulofeu (1999a) sur que, Benzitoun (2006a) à propos de quand, Corminboeuf (2009) pour si, Debaisieux (2006) concernant parce que, quoique, puisque et bien que, etc., a permis de rendre justice à la pluralité des fonctionnements syntaxiques des structures ainsi introduites en faisant valoir le fait qu’elles ne peuvent être constamment ramenées à une relation de dépendance grammaticale. C’est dans cette même lignée que s’inscrit ce travail qui a pour objectif de recenser, sur la base de corpus de français parlé et écrit, les différents fonctionnements syntaxiques de la conjonction alors que en français contemporain. Il apparait que les séquences ainsi introduites relèvent de cinq principaux emplois, dont un seul est à considérer comme véritablement « subordonné ». Nous associerons par ailleurs un ou plusieurs effets de sens à chacun de ces emplois. / A number of recent studies dealing about the syntactic properties of French subordinating conjunctions such as que (which, who, that) (Deulofeu, 1999a), quand (when) (Benzitoun, 2006a), si (if) (Corminboeuf, 2009) or parce que, quoique, puisque and bien que (because, since, although) (Debaisieux, 2006) have brought an increased awareness of the various grammatical behaviors of such forms, which definitely cannot be reduced to a simple relation of syntactic dependency. Using this approach, the present dissertation will attempt to offer a precise account of the conjunction alors que (whereas) as it is used in spoken and written contemporary French. It will be demonstrated that the constructions introduced by alors que can be classified into five main syntactic types, only one of them presenting a truly “subordinating” effect. In addition to analyzing their specific syntactic structure, our different types will be described according to their particular semantic value.

This paper deals with corpus linguistics. There are two applications under its scrutiny. Both of these applications are processing data from the corpus DeReKo via corpus-driven approach. It is a co-occurrence analysis and a Co-occurrence database. The aim of the work is to evaluate whether the results obtained by the co-occurrence analysis of the current scope of DeReKo are different from the results of the Co-occurrence database, which was created on a basis of a smaller scale corpus. In addition, this thesis offers illustrative examples of the use of both applications and the evaluation of their effectiveness, depending on the purpose of the research. The theoretical part of the thesis deals with the terminology of corpus linguistics and with the mentioned corpuses, which serve as a basis for the practical part of the thesis. The empirical part of the thesis consists of analyses of the randomly picked words (one from each word class) in both applications. The results confirm that the data obtained with Co-occurrence database and co-occurrence analysis are in many respects different and thus confirm the hypothesis that the corpus size plays a crucial role in the results. Both applications have their advantages and disadvantages. The paper offers a comprehensive overview and by doing so it...

As climate change becomes more destructive to our planet, some governments have taken action towards a more sustainable future. One being the UK, where a Climate Emergency was declared in 2019, which affects public corporations and news outlets. The aim of this thesis is to investigate how do news reports portray natural disasters from an eco-linguistic perspective. This qualitative study focuses on analysing data regarding the 2019-2020 wildfires in Australia through the linguistic choices made in the texts by incorporating a combination of corpus linguistics, eco-linguistics and media discourse. The corpus under investigation consists of 41,055 words collected from 4 different UK-based news outlets. In order to analyse the data, I chose three search words (fire, climate and animal) to further investigate by using both corpus- and eco-linguistics. The results showcase a consistent pattern within the selected search words: fire and climate are portrayed as threats whereas animals are portrayed as victims. Yet, the most remarkable finding is regarding climate, as it is viewed as a cause rather than an effect caused by human actions. This study is a step towards a better understanding of climate change in news reporting; providing an insight on what the discourse is lacking but should be included.

Research points at the textbook as the main source for mathematics development in the early school ages. The study enhances the concept of relational and instrumental understanding as means to address the teaching environment within textbooks. To investigate a part of the linguistic structure of this literature, this study reports on the main features that characterize the word class known as verbs due to their presence throughout a series of textbooks designed for the stages 1 to 3 in Sweden. The goal was to make common claims about frequency, tense and processes due to these verbs. By creating a specialized corpus, these verbs were catalogued and marked in comparison to two larger corpora and to GERS-levels. A process analysis was then done based on a systemic-functional linguistic tool. The results show a vast difference between the low- and the high frequency verbs. Analysis showed that present tense held the highest frequency by over 50%. Results also showed presence of the formal passive voice. Furthermore, the material processes were in a large majority in contrast to others present. Other indications of the analysis showed poor conditions for development of relational understanding in contrast to emphasis made in the national curriculum. Conclusions involve statements regarding textbook teaching methods not providing sufficient environments for language development. The characters of the verb corpus might place demands on students’ lexical knowledge and language proficiency level on forehand, which might induce a language-related knowledge barrier against the mathematical communication provided through the textbook.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)

Bearing in mind the big role media plays in shaping public opinion and the importance of understanding how ideologies can be conveyed to the public through language, this study uses qualitative analysis to investigate the discursive representation changes around the existence of the Taliban or what they call themselves now, the Islamic Emirate, in the Afghan media before and after the power shift. In specific, it illustrates how linguistic devices are used to transmit the discourse changes through the used language in the Afghani newspaper to legitimize or delegitimize having the Taliban in Afghanistan. The primary data of this study consists of articles published in English from a digitalized newspaper published in Afghanistan. This study uses Corpus Linguistics to organize the findings around the representation of the Taliban in the gathered data. Findings results were analyzed through CDA and Fairclough, the three-dimensional model, to reveal the alteration that occurred to the discourse, which can, in turn, show the way how language devices are used to circulate the Taliban’s various images among the recipients.