Search

Construction Grammar (CxG) is an innovative approach to language that has become increasingly popular in the Anglosphere over the last 30 years. In CxG, the basic units of linguistic analysis are constructions: arbitrary and conventional form-meaning pairings, reminiscent of Saussure's linguistic sign, but applied to levels of linguistic analysis beyond the lexicon. A large body of research has provided ample evidence in support of CxG. However, the theory remains unknown to many colleagues outside the Anglosphere. In this paper, I highlight a particularly interesting strand of CxG that is referred to as 'usage-based', an approach that assumes constructions are learned based on input frequency, that is, through repeated exposure to and use of a linguistic structure (hence usage-based). The main aim of this paper is thus to demonstrate how corpus data can be analyzed to find evidence for 'entrenchment' of linguistic structures and thus, the existence of constructions. I will illustrate this procedure by applying so-called covarying-collexeme analyses to data from the Slovak National Corpus (SNC) and the Slovak Web 2011 corpus from which I extracted 785 tokens of the so-called Comparative Correlative (CC) construction (e.g. Čím viac čítam, tým viac rozumiem). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an interdisciplinary analysis of discourses on refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, and migrants (RASIM) in mainstream and alternative media in the Czech Republic. Using techniques from corpus linguistics (CL) and natural language processing (NLP) and drawing on insights from media sociology, we demonstrate the value of an interdisciplinary approach for conducting robust research that can inform policymakers and media practitioners. Our analysis of nearly one million documents from January 2015 to February 2023 reveals distinctive terms and phrases used by alternative media, highlighting the growing divergence between the mainstream and alternative media discourse and its intensity over different periods. These findings have implications for understanding the mobilization of anti-systemic groups, particularly those on the far right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learner corpora with error annotation can serve as a source of data for automated question generation (QG) for language testing. In case of multiple choice gapfill lexical questions, this process involves two steps. The first step is to extract sentences with lexical corrections from the learner corpus. The second step, which is the focus of this paper, is to generate distractors for the retrieved questions. The presented approach (called DisSelector) is based on supervised learning on specially annotated learner corpus data. For each sentence a list of distractor candidates was retrieved. Then, each candidate was manually labelled as a plausible or implausible distractor. The derived set of examples was additionally filtered by a set of lexical and grammatical rules and then split into training and testing subsets in 4:1 ratio. Several classification models, including classical machine learning algorithms and gradient boosting implementations, were trained on the data. Word and sentence vectors from language models together with corpus word frequencies were used as input features for the classifiers. The highest F1-score (0.72) was attained by a XGBoost model. Various configurations of DisSelector showed improvements over the unsupervised baseline in both automatic and expert evaluation. DisSelector was integrated into an opensource language testing platform LangExBank as a microservice with a REST API. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study explores the possibilities of using computer and corpus tools in the interpretation of texts of the genre of book of notes and extracts; these are documents consisting of extracts and modified excerpts from contemporary press and literature, records of the author's own thoughts, etc. Samuel Ferjenčík's manuscript is a Germanlanguage document by a Slovak author intended for private use; cited or adapted passages are usually given without any reference to the source. The paper introduces the problems of automatic identification of the source base, which relate to the application of OCR and content similarity detection tools. It discusses the results of text matching, which revealed several manipulations of source texts, especially substitutions, indicating attitudes and priority problems in the author's thought-world. It further interprets the results of the use of the Sketch Engine corpus manager tools by which the frequency of occurrence of key terms and their collocability were investigated, paying special attention to substituted words. The paper is an example of the application of computer and corpus-linguistics methods to the interpretation of literary texts, which is represented by a number of current studies in the field of digital humanities. The proposed approaches are applicable to research on other books of notes and extracts, topical in the context of research trends related to egodocuments, as well as to textual research on monu ments of other genres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the process of lemmatization of the upcoming Czech diachronic corpus of the second half of the 19th century, DIA1900. The article describes different approaches to the corpus lemmatization of synchronic written, spoken and diachronic corpora within the Czech National Corpus project, including single- and multilevel lemmatization and available tools used to link the variants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the issue of fragmented and/or ambiguously interpreted texts within the corpora of Old East Slavic vernacular writing. One of these corpora, the corpus of the Old East Slavic birchbark letters, is already available, the other, comprising the texts of Old East Slavic inscriptions, is under preparation. Due to the fragmentary state of many birchbark and epigraphy texts, their lemmatization and grammatical tagging may be uncertain and multiple interpretations may coexist. Some lemmas survive only in fragments which are nevertheless relevant for the study of lexicon. The grammatical status of many fragments may be firmly established despite lacking lexical information. However the relevant data on these fragments is not available in the word indices and corpora that take into consideration only best-preserved word forms. In the paper, the representation and annotation of such word forms within the Old East Slavic vernacular corpora is presented, and relative frequencies of such phenomena within the birchbark letter corpus are shown, with some case studies showing the relevance of the annotation of fragmented forms. The existing approaches, namely for the classical epigraphy within the EpiDoc standard and in the Hittite syntactic treebanks, are also briefly presented and compared to the solution found within the Old East Slavic vernacular corpora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the language-specific morphosyntactic annotation of InterCorp, a large multilingual parallel corpus, has been replaced by the language-uniform morphosyntactic and syntactic annotation following the guidelines of the Universal Dependencies project. Because the corpus is used predominantly by human users via a token-based concordancer, the CONLL-U format produced by the UDP ipe parser has been extended by attributes such as lemma of the token's syntactic head or morphosyntactic categories of the content verb's auxiliary. We conclude that despite some theoretical and practical issues, the new annotation is a promising solution to the issue of mutually incompatible tagsets within a single corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to present the new CapekDraCor corpus and the DraCor project with its research-oriented concept of a programmable corpora focused on quantitative analyses within the framework of computational literary studies. This digital platform extends the possibilities of large-scale drama analysis with a focus on the dramatic character(s). The basic operationalisation is the interaction within a dramatic configuration, i.e., the scenic co-presence of two speakers, from which network data are automatically extracted, both global networks of interactions of dramas and data characterising individual actors, i.e., literary characters. The paper demonstrates the CapekDraCor corpus, a new contribution to the extensive DraCor database, and presents the way the data are processed with respect to their specific multi-layered structure. The corpus contains all the plays written by Karel and Josef Čapek and the data are processed in a standardized format based on XML and general TEI guidelines for processing drama with a defined basic drama tagset. CapekDraCor also uses the newly created EZdrama format for data processing, which works as an intermediate step from.txt to.xml file as a lightweight YAML-like markup language. A file in this format can be automatically converted into a DraCor-ready XML file with a TEI header. The advantage of the programmable corpora concept is the possibility to use suitably structured data for drama research outside the DraCor platform and with other methods or tools for textual analysis. Simultaneously, this approach moves the researcher from the technical requirements of the analysis to operationalised computational analysis based on research questions and pre-prepared and flexible tools. DraCor is a unique open infrastructure (both in terms of data and tools) for the analysis of European drama, currently comprising 15 corpora in 10 different languages with a total of about 3,000 plays from a wide range of periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with complex cases of determining the attribute verbtag, which contains the values of morphosyntactic categories of analytic verb forms. The latest corpora of contemporary written Czech from the SYN series are tagged with this attribute. In this paper, we focus on cases where it is difficult to identify values of verbtag categories. These include, e.g. the identification of the auxiliary verb být 'to be', recognition of the mood and tense of coordinated participles, or determining the number in compound forms in which the individual parts have a different morphological number. Some of the problems are of a theoretical nature, since it is not clear what the correct solution should be. Here we have arbitrarily opted for one option that was offered. Other problems are due to imperfections in the algorithms we use for annotation. The solution here is to improve these algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ORAL and ORTOFON, general corpora of the spoken Czech language, capture authentic and prototypical informal spoken language. DIALEKT, a specialized corpus, represents traditional regional dialects of the Czech language. Since the corpora's goals and the nature of the captured language data differ, different data collection methods were required. It concerns not only the choice of speakers, but the whole communication situation. Samples chosen from these three corpora are included in the Mapka application and reflect the distinct character of the corpora. The ORAL and ORTOFON samples show general spoken language in various informal situations and capture a wide range of speakers. The DIALEKT samples represent traditional regional dialects spoken by chosen types of speakers in a semiformal situation of guided interview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses error rates in the congruent attribute in texts written by students learning Slovak as a foreign language. The material, which was qualitatively analysed, comes from the pilot version of the learner corpus errkorp-pilot. The paper defines the most common types of errors in the congruent attribute and interprets the causes of their origin. The most common errors include the wrong congruence with the grammatical gender and with the case of the defining noun. Errors are usually caused by the following factors: transfer from the L1 language, excessive generalization of the rule in the target language, or insufficient knowledge of the grammatical rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a comparative lexical analysis of the most frequent noun lemmas in Slovak judicial decisions. The data was taken from the large corpus of decisions provided by the Ministry of Justice of the Slovak Republic, and compared with lemmas from four other corpora. The style of administrative, legal and other highly formalized texts has been receiving attention in recent years, although research into the style of Slovak judicial decisions remains rather sparse, which could partially stem from their idiosyncratic nature. The paper's aim is thus to focus on the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of noun lemmas found specifically in the style of judicial decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a pilot study for a research project on epistemic modality and/or evidentiality markers in Czech. The study focuses on the expression určitě. Although, this marker is typically considered to signal high certainty, the dictionary of standard Czech (Slovník spisovné češtiny, SSČ) also offers an alternative meaning of probability, indicating a lower degree of certainty. We use parallel data from the InterCorp v15 corpus to determine whether the probability meaning can be identified unequivocally in real language data and whether it correlates with specific translation equivalents, linguistic features, or lexical context. Based on our findings, we propose an alternative method for distinguishing between different shades of meaning based on the communicative functions of the utterances, and we draw conclusions regarding the relevance of individual grammatical and lexical clues in context for future annotations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates and compares the inventory of adverbs derived from adjectival present participles in the Polish, Slovak and Czech languages. The particularity of these adverbs is that they do not occur in every language, even if it concerns closely related languages. While in Polish and Slovak this type of adverbs is represented by hundreds of lemmas, in Czech it is almost not represented. The comparative analysis is carried out on the data retrieved from the comparable web corpora Aranea. The sets of adverbs extracted from the comparable corpora of the languages examined are analysed by the following criteria: the total number of the adverb lemmas in the corpus, their relative frequency (ipm), morphemic structure features, collocability preferences. The similarities and differences between the adverb sets are established. According to the corpus data, the adverbs derived from adjectival present participles are more widely used in Polish than in Slovak, and in Czech they are a rare phenomenon represented by a limited number of lemmas with a negligible frequency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the application of standard keyword extraction methods from corpus linguistics for the study of old Polish language. The unfolding analysis is based on writings included in the Electronic Corpus of 17th- and 18th-century Polish Texts. The aim of this analysis is to select keywords from over two million tokens derived from texts tagged as religion in the corpus and compare them with the reference corpus containing over nine million tokens, while verifying the applicability of the log-likelihood method for the analysis of old Polish language and developing a part of the research model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the possibility of creating a paremiological optimum for students of Czech as a foreign language. The selection of proverbs should reflect the frequency, familiarity with and use of proverbs. The study focuses on the most frequent proverbs in written Czech, using contemporary idiomatically annotated corpora. On this basis, our own minimum was created. The paper compares the results with previous studies on the paremiological minima of Czech (Schindler 1993 and Čermák 2003) and shows the intersection of all three minima. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a corpus linguistic perspective on two adjectival suffixes -al and -ell in the German language. Its attention is focused on the distributional frequency of the derived adjectives, the semantic motivation and contextual occurrence through the lens of retried adjective + noun collocations. On top of that, the paper attempts to determine the superiority of such derived adjectives in the specialised vocabulary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When describing the Russian dative case, an observation often made in passing is that its assignment to certain types of arguments is ambiguous, particularly in constructions with a predicative infinitive. Thus far, no studies have put this problem into focus nor described the range of structures to which it applies. I approach this problem with corpus-driven methods. The present study shows that the predicate order and the referential prominence hierarchy can be used as explanatory variables in the modelling of the semanticsyntactic role assignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last decades have seen an exponential growth of corpus sizes. This development has been driven by a desire to investigate rare syntactic phenomena, but issues remain: Corpora are by definition finite samples, but language is by definition infinite, leading to the negative data problem ('absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'). One solution is corroborating corpus data with elicited introspection data that is obtained in a reliable, valid, and objective way. I present a case study to show how this can be done using the Magnitude Estimation Test (MET) method (Hoffmann 2013). Analyzing elicited data from 37 L1 English speakers, I show that introspective data can complement corpus data and lead to interesting new findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study deals with appellativization of proper names, using as its base selected personal names (surnames). Looking at opinion journalism texts in the Czech National Corpus, corpus SYN, version 11, we investigate aspects of word-formation within appellativization of personal names Masaryk, Beneš, Hitler, Stalin – including frequencies of parts of speech and word-formation types (derivation, composition) with respect to their productivity and word-formation potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to the process taking place in the Middle Polish period, which led to the transformation of nominative, singular, feminine forms of three adjectives (można 'possible', niemożna 'impossible' and niepodobna 'impossible') into verbal lexemes (the so-called predicatives). In this respect, the predicative uses of these forms in the texts collected in the Electronic Corpus of 17th- and 18th-century Polish Texts (up to 1772) were investigated. The progressive verbification of adjectival forms was considered to be indicated by three changes in the constructions where these forms played the role of a predicate: supersession of connections with feminine verb forms by connections with neuter forms, limiting the connections with verbs to the auxiliary verb być 'to be', and disappearance of connections with the personal form of the verb być in the present tense. The research results show that both forms acquired the two most important features characteristic for predicatives during the 17th century. The third of the analysed properties characterizes the form można/niemożna from the second half of the 19th century, and the process of its acquisition by the form niepodobna has not ended yet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the construction of the corpus of Slovak legislative documents. By analyzing several statistical values of the source metadata and documents, we efficiently improve corpus quality. We describe the methods used to clean up small variations in metadata, length based discrimination of document and examine the effectiveness of several strategies of deduplication. The corpus is a part of a comparable corpus of legislative documents of seven languages, created in the Multilingual Resources for CEF.AT in the Legal Domain (MARCELL) project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to contribute to the body of research on the formulaicity of academic written English by adopting a text-internal perspective on the use of lexical bundles across four main rhetorical sections (i.e. Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion) of research articles in public health. The corpus linguistic approach was adopted to explore a section-coded corpus of 200 research papers published in high impact journals with the aim of identifying salient shared and section-specific 4-word bundles, calculating their respective frequencies as well as classifying them structurally and functionally. The results show that the Method is the most formulaic section, containing the greatest number of bundles, including those most frequent and section-specific ones. The sections also differ in the extent to which they exploit the distinct structural and functional categories of shared bundles to fulfill their individual communicative needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language corpora usually contain, in addition to their own texts, various types of annotations. The most common one is a morphological annotation, which consists in assigning a lemma and a morphological tag to each wordform. For morphological tagging, morphological dictionaries are traditionally used. Our paper presents a new version of the so-called "Prague" morphological dictionary MorfFlex used for tagging many Czech corpora (particularly Prague Dependency Treebanks, corpora published by the Institute of the Czech National Corpus in Prague or large Czech web corpora of the Aranea series). Three basic principles were used to update the dictionary: the Golden Rule of Morphology, the Principle of Paradigm Unity, and the Principle of Paradigm Uniqueness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vector models based on word embeddings are an indispensable part of advanced Natural Language Processing research and language analysis. We describe several Chinese language (Pǔtōnghuà) word embeddings, the differences from "western" language models caused by specific orthographic and linguistic features of the written Chinese language, and introduce a publicly available web interface for querying the vector models, aimed at linguistically or pedagogically oriented users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corpus linguistics is one of the most dynamic and rapidly developing areas of modern linguistics. It affects all areas of linguistics, including methodology of teaching foreign languages, translation and other linguistic disciplines. Corpus linguistics has had a direct impact on teaching foreign languages. However, in general, it remains a marginal method in teaching. Analysis of publications on the subject allows us to conclude that very few studies are long-term and aimed at working with schoolchildren. This article proposes a model for the development of sustainable interest among high school students in online corpora as sources of linguistic information, including the initiation stage in the form of project work in mini-groups to study well-known sayings with the consequent stage aiming at completing tasks supplementing the main textbook on a regular basis. The organization of project work addressing the corps of 11th grade students of the Natural Science Lyceum at Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University is described. The paper outlines further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The explosion of the Web leads to the production of large amounts of texts and inevitably influences their quality. Errors that tend to occur more often can distort results, especially when texts are used for scientific purposes, in language teaching or learning. Hence, there is a need to examine the existing corpora based on web texts and to clean up the data, which may contain such "noisy" fragments. In our study, we deal with the problem of errors and analyze the Aranea Russicum Maximum corpus. Among such errors, we can name, above all, encoding errors, incorrect font types, as well as segments written in other languages. These phenomena result in incorrect morphological analysis and lemmatization, frequency distortion, as well as the fact that lexical units cannot be found and therefore displayed to corpus users. The paper focuses on the errors, describes their types and outlines possible ways to eliminate them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ORFÉO platform (Tools and Research on Written and Oral French) has been making available to users since 2018 a Study Corpus for sampled Contemporary French as well as operating tools. Although this resource is intended for an audience of researchers and students in the fields of linguistics and automatic language processing, we endeavor in this article to report on the didactic potential that it offers within the framework of a Licensing Syntax course treating "subordination" and intended for Czech and Slovak students at levels B1 to C1 in French. We propose a didactic sequence composed of four activities and pursuing three objectives: consolidation of the mastery of the basic functions of dont («which») from a corpus of friendly conversations; the use of simple query interface tools and the introduction of certain principles of corpus sociolinguistics. The corpus-based approach, by confronting learners with authentic contextualized data, helps to redefine the teaching-learning priorities of a language by giving primacy not to respect for grammatical norms but to genre norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the framework of a didactic proposal, this article proposes to present a preliminary step to the specialized translation French-Greek. It will attempt to highlight the benefits of autonomous learning through the consultation of a corpus of specialized parallel texts established by the EU institutions. The use of concordancers will provide solutions to students wishing to study the variability of terminology and specialized vocabulary at monolingual and bilingual levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arrival of WaC corpora, including Aranea family corpora, with its "close-to-spoken language" writings from different non-formal web pages brought the new options to researchers of sociolects, mainly to those who were previously obliged to observe youth collectives in its spontaneous discourses with its consequent time-consuming transcripts. Non-spontaneous spoken language from rap songs or youth film dialogues also help researchers to describe the level of societal diffusion of some typical features of youth slang. In this paper, we focus on demonstration of these crossed approaches in order to describe three types of verbs, used in a successful comedy about Parisian peri-urban post-adolescents Les Kaïra (2012), representing different types of substandard lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this contribution is to show, through a preliminary analysis of a corpus sample composed of the first five kabyle novels (1963-1990), the contribution of lexicometry as a new method based on statistics, in the treatment of large corpora and the establishment of databases. The aim is to describe all the phases intrinsic to the preliminary processing of a corpus (transcription, tagging and lemmatization) before submitting them to the various stages of its exploitation. Thus, in our corpus, we have opted to deal with the theme of identity induced by the five works by highlighting both the overused vocabulary and the singularity of each work in relation to the corpus as a whole. But before moving on to the quantitative analysis of the vocabulary, a work of data preparation is necessary. We intend to focus on the orthographic choices to be adopted by removing all ambiguities, the marking out and the lemmatization of the corpus. In order to do this, we have resorted to Lexico5 computer tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims at tracing a reallocation process of a grammatical feature alongside the dialect-standard axis with the aid of corpus linguistics methods; more precisely with an integrative application of quantitative and qualitative approaches. The phenomenon under investigation is articles without the definiteness marker d- in German, usually ascribed to the Bavarian dialect area. Analyses show, however, that this apparently dialectal feature diffuses to other communication settings closer to the intended standard language use. This process is accompanied by a refunctionalisation of reduced article forms, indicating the relevance of language-internal relations for reallocation of grammatical features. The methodical approach should be easily applicable to other variants and – as many European languages show a diaglossic repertoire – relevant to other languages as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper follows the tradition of research in legal linguistics and into formulaic language, specifically into lexical bundles. The aim of the paper is to describe lexical bundles in samples from the corpus of Slovak judicial decisions OD-JUSTICE by means of quantitative characteristics of the identified bundles and by their comparison with bundles found in two other specialized corpora: the corpus of Slovak legal regulations and the corpus of annual reports by Slovak public institutions. For the identification of bundles, the concept of the h-point was used. Identified bundles are described with respect to their maximal, minimal, average, median and mode values, distributions and ratios. The aim of the paper is to outline an interpretation of these bundle characteristics with regard to communicative function(s) of compared document genres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper introduces a new section separated from journalistic texts in Czech corpora, namely interviews. This genre is highly specific; from among the texts that can be found in newspapers and magazines, it is probably the closest to spoken language. In two case studies, we present the possible application of the interviews subcorpus in linguistic research. The first one deals with the role of paralinguistic behaviour, especially laughter in written interviews vs. spoken dialogues. The second one investigates the specifics of the demonstrative ten in the function of a nominal attribute, again in both written and spoken data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a bird's eye view of how positive or negative sentiments in the news press about countries and nationality nouns seem to reflect the country's general income groups. The study focuses on the four income groups classified by the World Bank and their co-occurrence with positively and negatively classified adjectives from the Subjectivity Lexicon for Czech. A search in the journalistic subcorpus of the SYN series, release 8 of the Czech National Corpus, results in a time line covering three decades. Previous research on subjectivity has either focused on other parts of the Subjectivity Lexicon or on fewer adjectives from other languages. In this article, it is argued that the income groups are treated in descending order, i.e., the higher the income, the more positive the sentiment. Even when the most influential groups in the top and bottom are removed, the result holds. Discourse concerning global war and peace, and the security of different nations, is also detected as a result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on a linguistic image of mother in German languages. It seeks to grasp it through a typical context of the German word Mutter ʻmotherʼ. The research is based on results of distributional and thematic analyses of these words. These analyses are used as a base for reconstructing prototypical characteristics of "mother" and the related concepts used by speakers of German. The paper develops these findings into compiling the most frequent collocations and other (mostly contextual) information gathered by the use of corpus tools. The paper concludes with an outline of unconscious axiological processes used in evaluating the image of mother on the good/bad axis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work-in-progress paper presents a specialized language corpus UcebKo built from textbooks of Czech for foreigners. The corpus integrates three subcorpora (UcebKo-A2, UcebKo-B1, and UcebKo-B2) which allow research of Czech as a second/foreign language at chosen language levels (A2, B1, and B2). In this case, the research is focused on word-formation, where the first results, i.e., mapping of derived words denoting persons, illustrate the approach and methodology used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary essay is an interesting unit for language analyses, as its stylistic means often exceed the boundaries of the genre of an artistic essay. The article presents a new corpus of Czech literary essays covering approximately fifty years from 1890 to 1940. Along with the characterisation of the corpus and its annotation, the paper focuses on the TxM corpus tool: In the second part of the study, we use selected texts to conduct an analysis of seven various authors through multidimensional cluster analysis, factorial correspondence analysis and a specificity score. The main parameter of the analyses was usage of parts of speech in texts by individual authors. At present, the Corpus of Czech Essays contains 40 essayist titles written by 15 authors covering various topics (music, visual arts, theatre, literature, etc.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article tackles the problems of linguistic annotation in the Chinese texts presented in the Ruzhcorp – Russian-Chinese Parallel Corpus of RNC, and the ways to solve them. Particular attention is paid to the processing of Russian loanwords. On the one hand, we present the theoretical comparison of the widespread standards of Chinese text processing. On the other hand, we describe our experiments in three fields: word segmentation, grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, and PoS-tagging, on the specific corpus data that contains many transliterations and loanwords. As a result, we propose the preprocessing pipeline of the Chinese texts, that will be implemented in Ruzhcorp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by earlier work on typological profiling of English by Benedikt Szmrecsányi and Bernd Kortmann ([1], [2], [3]), this paper investigates typological profiles of English, Spanish, German, and Slovak, applying Szmrecsányi and Kortmann's methodology of calculating the SYNTHETICITY INDEx and the ANALYTICITY INDEx based on 1,000-word corpus samples. The results show that Szmrecsányi and Kortmann's methodology is replicable, and confirm claims in the literature about degrees of analyticity and syntheticity of these languages. Instead of a simple analytic-synthetic continuum, Szmrecsányi and Kortmann's "typological space" [3] is used to visualize results, showing that languages can be both synthetic and analytic to varying degrees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ORATOR v2 is a new 1.5M word corpus of Czech monologues, delivered to a live audience in semi-formal to formal settings. It was designed to chart the space of naturally occurring monologues which can be obtained for corpus processing. As such, it aims for diversity but does not attempt any balancing of subcategories, recognizing that some types of data are inherently easier to obtain in high volume than others. The transcription guidelines and annotation tools employed are the same as other recent spoken corpora published by the CNC, which facilitates interesting comparisons between various types of spoken Czech. The present paper sketches out three case studies, comparing ORATOR to the informal conversations of ORTOFON v2 in terms of the frequencies of demonstratives and hesitations, as well as lexical richness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new interactive map-based web application named Mapka was published by the Institute of the Czech National Corpus in 2020. It aims to serve linguists, as well as schools and the general public, and it features various functions described in this paper. Mapka was designed as a supplement to the CNC spoken corpora, starting with the DIALEKT corpus (more to come in the future). Its main function is to display various types of territorial division (primarily in terms of dialect, but also administrative) and networks of localities associated with the corpus. The main dialect regions are provided with overviews of their typical dialectal features and two samples of dialectal discourse – one slightly historical and one contemporary. The application offers the possibility of searching for municipalities, plotting the points on the map and creating a custom map. The paper concludes with future prospects concerning an enhanced and improved version of the application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a synchronic and diachronic computer corpus of Makarska littoral dialects. This corpus was created as part of the project to explore the ikavian neoštokavian dialects of the narrow coastal area in Croatian region of Dalmatia around the town of Makarska. The dialectological characteristics of the dialects studied are briefly presented first, followed by presentation of the digital system. The system is logically organized in first part as a corpus of literary texts created from 1729 to 1803 and digitally processed, and in the second part from the materials collected through dialectological questionnaires prepared and methodologically adapted as part of the creation of the Croatian Linguistic Atlas. Methods of collecting linguistic data, method of input into the digital form and methods and possibilities of data processing will be explained. Based on the input and search strategies within the system, the examples will prove the origin of the dialects of the Makarska littoral to be that of the ikavian neoštokavian dialect described in the dialectological literature. This computer-based principle of work is a novelty in Croatian dialectology which has not been digitally processed so far and offers a basis for future dialectological research. This platform can be used in order to shorten the time of data processing and to analyse them more systematically and more efficiently. So far, there has been no such digital repository for any Croatian speech. This project represents a thorough synchronic and diachronic study of one rounded language area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Text readability metrics assess how much effort a reader must put into comprehending a given text. They are, e.g., used to choose appropriate readings for different student proficiency levels, or to make sure that crucial information is efficiently conveyed (e.g., in an emergency). Flesch Reading Ease is such a globally used formula that it is even integrated into the MS Word Processor. However, its constants are language-dependent. The original formula was created for English. So far it has been adapted to several European languages, Bangla, and Hindi. This paper describes the Czech adaptation, with the language-dependent constants optimized by a machine-learning algorithm working on parallel corpora of Czech and English, Russian, Italian, and French, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a preliminary study of three intensifiers (absolutně, naprosto, úplně) based on data from three different corpora, a written corpus SYN2020, a web corpus ONLINE-ARCHIVE, and a spoken corpus ORTOFON 1. Providing a parallel annotation of a random sample of each intensifier, we focus on their functions and meanings in context. We analyse their properties in order to define those features which are relevant to their word class assignment, and to prepare grounds for the future disambiguation tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of valency and valency dictionaries are inevitably and understandably based on the valency behavior of frequent verbs. This paper scrutinizes 154 low-frequency Czech verbs and argues that they demonstrate that Czech verbs are more malleable in their valency behavior than suggested by the literature. It is argued that this fits better within a constructionist approach to valency rather than a lexicalist one. Furthermore, the paper illustrates two alternations, previously unrecognized for Czech as semantic diatheses, namely the causative-inchoative alternation and the Agent-Means alternation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents work in progress on the compilation and automatic annotation of a dataset comprising examples of stative verbs in parallel Bulgarian-Russian corpora with the goal of facilitating the elaboration of a classification of stative verbs in the two languages based on their lexical and semantic properties. We extract stative verbs from the Bulgarian and the Russian WordNets with their assigned conceptual information (frames) from FrameNet. We then assign the set of probable Bulgarian and Russian stative verbs to the verb instances in a parallel Bulgarian-Russian corpus using WordNet correspondences to filter out unlikely stative candidates. Further, manual inspection will ensure high quality of the resource and its application for the purposes of semantic analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper attempts to identify the usage and productivity of five different international suffixes in Slovak by means of corpus evidence. The analysis focuses on real and potential productivity in a two-stage comparison: 1) tokens/lemmas occurring in a general balanced corpus vs general corpus of specialised and academic texts, 2) general corpus of specialised and academic texts vs specialised (sub)corpora of medical, legal, economic and religious texts. The aim of the analysis is to explore whether productivity varies across registers by means of statistical measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution focuses on the use and collocation analysis of basic notions linked to the field of onomastics, including those that are specialized (e.g., "proprium", "anthroponym", "toponym", "chrematonym", etc.) and the ones that are commonly used (e.g., "proper name/naming"). In the latter case, attention will be paid to whether these terms are connected to onomastic contexts. In general, the research analyses sources where the lemmata are used, including their typical surroundings. The goal of the paper is to show how the public perceives onomastics, whether it is familiar with its key terms. The analysis is based on the data of the Czech National Corpus, version 8, opinion-journalism texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to touch upon the complexity of LSP-related research and to sketch some of its important terminological and methodological issues. The paper also provides an overview of the history, themes, discussions, approaches and outputs in the contemporary LSP-research mainly in French and German speaking countries, but also including a selection of Czech and English authors. The contribution presents a variety of ways how the concept of LSP has been defined in linguistics in the last 50 years, as well as descriptive and modeling efforts with respect to the stratification of LSP. The paper pays special attention to the issue and concept of the so-called Basic Scientific Vocabulary, that is, its various names, definitions and research projects aimed at identifying such a vocabulary, or even, as is the case with German research tradition, a genuine sub-language. The paper concludes with a picture of some French, German and other LSP-related projects that have been launched in the last decades in the direction of corpus-based and -driven research. This tendency shows the importance of rich empirical material (corpora) not only as a foundation for further linguistic research in LSP, but also a basis for the lexicographical and terminographical research [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]