Browsing by Subject "Corpus Linguistics"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    A longstanding duality : discursive construction of the EU vs the UK in the British broadsheets' news discourse of the Brexit Referendum.
    (Universidad de Murcia, Servicio de Publicaciones., 2024) Javadinejad, Arash
    The relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union has always been tumultuous and problematic, and European integration has always been a controversial topic in the UK’s contemporary politics. However, current research on the Brexit referendum's news discourse hardly addresses this topic directly. Therefore, this paper analyses the discursive construction of the UK versus the EU during the campaign coverage of the Brexit referendum in major British broadsheets. To do so, a corpus of four major British broadsheets along ideological lines (left-right) and Brexit stance (Leave-Remain) was analysed by applying a mixed method approach of Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (Discursive News Values Analysis along with some Corpus Linguistic tools and techniques). The way news values were adopted in the campaign coverage of the British broadsheets shows a certain continuation of historical discourses around the relationship of the entities. The results show that news values during the campaign coverage were adopted by the pro-leave outlets to construct a highly negative and elite-associated image of the EU in contrast to the UK, while the pro-remain broadsheets mostly focused on a limited, practical and economic argument in favour of the EU, maintaining and highlighting the importance of UK independence.
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    Automatic term recognition and legal language: a shorter path to the lexical profiling of legal texts?
    (John Benjamins B.V., 2023) Marín Pérez, María José; Filología Inglesa
    Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools offer language scholars a wide array of possibilities to examine, amongst other, the lexicon in any text collection. This research was designed as an attempt to try to measure the degree of precision of three of these methods (Chung 2003; Drouin 2003; Scott 2008a) through their implementation on two corpora of Spanish and British judicial decisions which revolve around the topic of immigration. In addition, the last section of this chapter explores the lexical inventories extracted by each method (the top 500 candidate terms (CTs) in each case) by grouping them into ad hoc thematic categories, the most numerous being, as was to be expected, legal terms, followed by territory, evaluative items, crime and family.
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    DDL learning in ESP teaching: an exploratory study on multi-word unit usage in business letters
    (University of Belgrade [University Publisher] Faculty of Economics, 2023-05-17) Marín Pérez, María José; Aguado Jiménez, María Pilar; Filología Inglesa
    The present research explores the potential benefits that corpus-based instruction might have on the acquisition and usage of multi-word units (MWUs) in business English. To that end, a data-driven learning (DDL) methodology was designed and implemented to teach such units to a group of 55 informants divided into an experimental and a control group. The experimental group was taught about the usage of MWUs in business letter writing through the exposure and management of an ad hoc corpus of such expressions, while the control group went through the traditional sessions designed to that purpose. The comparison between the pre- and post-test results suggests that the experimental group excelled the control one in the proportion of correct MWUs used in their letters (48.19% of the units retrieved against 20.15%, respectively). On a qualitative level, the variety of MWUs used by the former was also greater, covering a larger number of functional categories than the control group, where we found almost 3/4 of the expressions falling under one single category. Finally, non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test was also run on the data related to individual achievement, pointing at the statistical significance (p≤0.001 for both groups) of the differences found on a global level and supporting our perception on the benefits of corpus-based instruction.
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    Paving the road to hell: The Spanish word menas as a case study
    (Universidad de Murcia. Servicio de Publicaciones, ) Bordonaba Plou, David; Torices, José R.
    Menas is a term that has attracted a great deal of attention on the political scene in Spain at present. Although the term had a neutral usage originally, being an acronym for unaccompanied foreign minors, it has recently evolved into a term with clear negative connotations. This article explores what kind of term menas is today. Specifically, we will examine whether menas is a slur or an ESTI, an ethnic/social term used as an insult. First, we point out the most defining characteristics of both types of terms. Then, using analyses on linguistic corpora, we show that menas exhibits the most defining characteristics of ESTIs. We end by discussing the possible evolution of the term, pointing out that, although the term presents the features related to ESTIs, there are two possible scenarios. On the one hand, the term may retain its neutral uses and thus remain an ESTI. On the other hand, the neutral uses may disappear, and thus the term may become a slur.