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This paper investigates what are known as “double” or "multiple negatives” in legal texts drafted in three European languages: Castilian Spanish, British English and the varieties of Italian used in both Italian and Swiss Courts. For the purpose of our study, corpora of Court judgments and control corpora comprising newspaper articles were compiled for all three of the languages under scrutiny. The data obtained from the survey show that the English and Spanish texts make a more frequent use of negatives in general and of multiple negatives in particular in court judgments than in newspaper articles. In contrast, the Italian corpus seems to behave differently: negative items are more numerous in newspapers than in Italian and Swiss court judgments, even though the frequency of “non” before nouns, adjectives, adverbs and negative prefixes is greater in the legal texts. However, it should be stressed that, regardless of the language, constructs involving more items classified as negatives from a strictly morphological viewpoint never add up to a significant share of the subcorpora. Furthermore, our study stresses the difficulties emerging in the very definition of “multiple negatives”, with the ensuing problems in the identification of semantically equivalent affirmative constructs. Finally, it should be noted that this research has only considered double and multiple negatives that are made explicit through the use of morphological markers, while the combination of those markers with lexical items having a negative meaning has been overlooked.

Social Semiotic Stylistics and the corpus: How do-able is an automated analysis of verbal art? Corpora have been extensively applied in all areas of linguistic research, including that of ‘figurative’ language (Charteris-Black 2004; Deignan 2005; Luporini 2013a) and to literature itself (e.g., Taylor Torsello and Turci 2007; Toolan 2009). Yet ‘high’ level studies of text in all registers, addressing semantics/context, have been shown to resist automation (Miller et al., to appear). And, when dealing with a framework for ‘verbal art’ (Hasan 1985 [1989]; 2007) that is so scrupulous in its precepts, categories and its very definition of the object of inquiry, the question of the extent to which automated corpus techniques can be effectively deployed must be tackled. Though corpus assisted studies should ideally be part of the ongoing development of a rigorous Social Semiotic Stylistics (SSS), the proposal is not unproblematic. This chapter explores the problem, firstly by probing the implications of SSS’s essential theses, which we thoroughly endorse (cf. Miller 2010), in particular its conviction that literature is “[…] created by languaging in a particular way” (Hasan 2007: 16, original emphasis). This specialness of verbal art is what led Hasan to devising a unique model of ‘double articulation’ with both a semiotic system of language and a higher order semiotic system of verbal art, the level at which the first order meanings are enriched in order to express the literature text’s Theme (1985 [1989]). We argue that, while corpus tools may assist analysis at the lower level semiotic system of language itself, and even potentially help identify motivated patterns to be further examined, verbal art’s higher order semiosis requires traditional qualitative manual analysis of a logogenetic nature. The second part of the chapter summarises the results of a corpus-assisted reading of J.M Coetzee’s 1986 novel Foe (Luporini 2013b), a rewriting of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (Widdowson 2006 ), with a view to illustrating what software such as WordSmith Tools (Scott 2008) can/cannot tell us about: a) its thematic richness, and b) the complex cultural context in which it was produced and which it, in turn, symbolically reproduces: Apartheid South Africa. Cited References Charteris-Black, J. (2004). Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Deignan, A. (2005). Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hasan, R. (1985 [1989]). Language, Linguistics and Verbal Art. Geelong, Vic.: Deakin University Press; Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hasan, R. (2007). “Private pleasure, public discourse: reflections on engaging with literature”, in Miller, D.R. and Turci, M. (eds.), pp. 13-40. Luporini, A. (2013a). Metaphor in Times of Crisis: Metaphorical Representations of the Global Crisis in The Financial Times and Il Sole 24 Ore 2008. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Pisa. Luporini, A. (2013b). “Inside ‘the home of Friday’: Linguistic representations of frustrated communication in a corpus-assisted study of J.M. Coetzee's Foe”, in Di Michele, L. (ed.), Regenerating Community, Territory, Voices. Memory and Vision. Proceedings of the XXV AIA Conference, L'Aquila, September 15-16-17, 2011. Volume II. Naples: Liguori Editore, pp. 186-198. Miller, D.R., Bayley, P., Bevitori, C., Fusari, S. and Luporini, A. (to appear, online). ‘Ticklish trawling’: The limits of corpus assisted meaning analysis – a colloquium in four parts. Extended abstract of the colloquium presented at the 24th European Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference and Workshop, Coventry, 1-3 July, 2013. Miller, D.R. and Turci, M. (eds.) (2007). Language and Verbal Art Revisited. Linguistic Approaches to the Study of Literature. London: Equinox. Scott, M. (2008). WordSmith Tools version 5. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software. Taylor Torsello, C. (2007) “Projection in literary and in non-literary texts”, in Miller, D.R. and Turci M., pp. 115-148. Toolan M. (2009) Narrative Progression in the Short Story, a corpus stylistic approach. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Turci M. (2007) “The meaning of ‘dark*’ in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”, in in Miller, D.R. and Turci, M. (eds.), pp. 97-114. Widdowson, P. (2006). “’Writing back’: contemporary re-visionary fiction”. Textual Practice 20 (3), pp. 491-507.

Evaluation plays an important role in understanding speakers or writers’ attitude towards an event or their feelings about entities and propositions (Hunston and Thompson 2000). Bednarek (2006) argues that evaluation pervades human behaviour and is linked to our beliefs. She also points out the importance of evaluation in actual discourse as it is impossible for any human being not to judge or be completely objective on a particular event. Given the nature of evaluation to be linked to our beliefs, it can be argued that there is a close relationship between evaluation and metaphor as metaphor analysis ‘‘is often, then, an exploration of the inner subjectivity of speakers – what it is that is unique to their perception of the world – and forms the basis for their response to particular situations and particular ideas’’ (Charteris-Black 2004: 11). Against this background, the present paper starts from the findings of a research project on conceptual metaphor analysis in the British press related to the Lisbon Treaty debate and focuses on the evaluative lexis that has often been found to collocate or co-occur with the linguistic expressions of the conceptual conflict and movement metaphors analysed. The evaluative adjectives we are particularly interested in are bullying, desperate, reluctant, arrogant, frightening, surprised, insistent. The evaluative verbs that we intend to explore are admit, blast, praise. However, all the other evaluative terms that might come up to light and have a significant role in the analysis of the event will be taken into account. The aim of this paper is to explore, through the methodology of Corpus Linguistics, how the British press uses the evaluative resources to construe the event of ratification and to what extent it presents a similar description or attributes similar roles to the European leaders and uses both metaphors and evaluation to create a coherent text and image of the ratification issue.

The study investigated the situated linguistic interactions of the users of the Samsung and Apple Facebook pages, with a focus on the attitudinal/affectual values they displayed towards these brands and their products, in a comparative perspective. Following Corpus Linguistics (CL) methodology, two corpora were created, named AppleCorpus (7337 tokens) and SamsungCorpus (5216 tokens), consisting in the wall posts on Apple Inc. and Samsung Mobile pages collected over a period of four days. These corpora were scrutinized both in a CL quantitative perspective and in a qualitative perspective by using the resources of the Appraisal Framework (AF) for discourse analysis to better identifying these social network users’ stance and attitudinal positioning. The findings of this pilot study showed that Samsung’s users display a more positive attitude toward the brand than Apple’s users. Results are discussed in the text.

The grammatical gender variants of German substantivs. A case study using the examples of Biskuit, Keks, Marzipan and Nougat corroborated by corpus. This thesis focuses on the newest trends in development of morphological system of German nouns. The author analyses four substantivs Biskuit, Keks, Marzipan and Nougat on the basis of DeReKo. The attention is drawn to the regional and semantic distribution of this variants. Furthermore, the thesis deals with etymology of the loan words. The results of the corpus analysis are compared with data in certain dictionaries. The theoretical part relates to the methods of corpus linguistic and stress out the advantages of work with the corpus. The practical part includes the analysis of above mentioned substantivs.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-27T11:55:45Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2013Bitstream added on 2015-04-27T12:08:46Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 ISSN1806-9142-2013-19-19-161-180.pdf: 589702 bytes, checksum: 46917224d4b7504529882e106428d149 (MD5) O Brasil foi um dos países que mais se destacou na lista das nações que mais publicam artigos em revistas científicas. De 2007 a 2008, a produção científica brasileira passou da 15ª para 13ª colocação no ranking mundial de artigos publicados em revistas científicas. No entanto, 60% dos artigos publicados pelos brasileiros estão em português, o que faz com que o trabalho brasileiro receba pouca atenção internacional. O objetivo desta pesquisa é construir e analisar um corpus paralelo composto por um livro de Sensoriamento Remoto em Inglês e sua tradução para o Português, a fim de criar um glossário dos termos mais recorrentes na literatura de Sensoriamento Remoto. A consecução destes objetivos será fundamentada no arcabouço teórico-metodológico dos Estudos da Tradução Baseados em Corpus (BAKER, 1993, 1995, 1996; CAMARGO, 2005), Linguística de Corpus (BERBER SARDINHA, 2004) e princípios de Terminologia (BARROS, 2004; KRIEGER & FINATTO, 2004). Será utilizado o programa Wordsmith Tools e suas ferramentas. Além do corpus paralelo, também construiremos dois corpora comparáveis compostos por artigos publicados em revistas brasileiras e internacionais da área. Os primeiros resultados mostram que os tradutores fizeram uso de uma maior variação de vocabulário em suas traduções, o que pode ser uma maneira de tornar o texto mais claro para o leitor. Para a análise das entradas do glossário, os profissionais do Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais - INPE, serão consultados e suas opiniões agregadas a esta pesquisa para dar consistência à produção do glossário bilíngue proposto. Brazil was one of the countries that stood out in the list of nations that publishes more articles in scientific journals. From 2007 to 2008, the Brazilian scientific production has moved from 15th to 13rd place in the world ranking published articles in professional journals. However, 60% of articles published by the Brazilians are in Portuguese, which makes the Brazilian work have little international attention. The purpose of this research is to build and analyze a parallel corpus composed of a book of Remote Sensing and its translation in the direction English into Portuguese in order to create a glossary of most recurrent terms in the literature of Remote Sensing. The achievement of these goals will take for theoretical and methodological foundation the Corpus-Based Translation Studies (BAKER, 1993, 1995, 1996; CAMARGO, 2005), Corpus Linguistics (BERBER SARDINHA, 2004) and principles of Terminology (BARROS, 2004; KRIEGER & FINATTO, 2004). It will also use Wordsmith Tools program and its tools. Besides the parallel corpus, we will also build two comparable corpora respectively from articles published in Brazilian and international journals in the area. The first results show that the translators made use of greater variation of vocabulary in their translations, which can be a way to make the text more clear to the reader. For the analysis of glossary entries, professionals from the National Institute for Space Research - INPE, will be consulted and their views aggregated to this research to give consistency to the production of the proposed bilingual glossary. Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho, Departamento de Letras Modernas, Instituto de Biociências Letras e Ciências Exatas de São José do Rio Preto, São José do Rio Preto, Rua Cristóvão Colombo, 2265, Jardim Nazareth, CEP 15054000, SP, Brasil Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho, Departamento de Letras Modernas, Instituto de Biociências Letras e Ciências Exatas de São José do Rio Preto, São José do Rio Preto, Rua Cristóvão Colombo, 2265, Jardim Nazareth, CEP 15054000, SP, Brasil

This article illustrates the results of the third stage of a research project on the generic structure and linguistic traits of courts judgments written in Italian. Four corpora in electronic format have been compiled, including texts by the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Italian Court of Cassation, the Swiss Federal Court and the Appeal Court of Canton Ticino. Statistical software was used to assess differences in terms of lexical richness, lexical density and readability and to calculate verb tense frequencies and distribution patterns. The shortcomings of automatic quantitative analysis may be redressed through qualitative surveys and, in addition to highlighting differences in the Italian written in Italy, Switzerland and the EU institutions, data can provide insights and suggestions for more effective drafting techniques.

The paper stems from the preliminary results of a PhD thesis concentrating on phraseology in Spanish, Italian and English judicial texts. From a methodological point of view, the research relies on COSPE, a multilingual (ES-IT-EN), comparable corpus of criminal judgments delivered by the Supreme Courts and appellate courts of Spain, Italy and England and Wales. The focus of the paper is on complex prepositions (locuciones prepositivas, locuzioni preposizionali) which play a pivotal role in legal texts in general and particularly in criminal judgments.

This article provides an overview of key terms in text linguistics according to different theoretical models, from cognitive approaches to the systemic-functional model and genre analysis. Basic notions such as text type, pragmatic function, register, language variation, speech act, discourse community etc. are illustrated and the pros and cons of different theories are compared in order to develop an approach suitable for distinguishing and classifying the broad range of text types produced by EU institutions. This taxonomy and the principles upon which it is based are used as a reference grid to select comparable genres produced in Italy, Spain and the UK. In line with the selection method, text corpora have been compiled to conduct comparative studies designed to assess the differences between the varieties of Italian, Spanish and English written at EU level and their counterparts at national level.

Con lo sviluppo della teoria della metafora concettuale (CMT), la visione tradizionale della metafora come puro elemento ornamentale del discorso è stata definitivamente superata a favore di un generale riconoscimento della sua funzione cognitiva. All’interno di questo quadro teorico, un filone di ricerca particolarmente produttivo si concentra sullo studio della metafora in prospettiva interculturale. Tale prospettiva viene qui applicata all’ambito specifico del linguaggio della stampa economico-finanziaria in inglese e in italiano, attraverso due corpora di articoli estratti dai quotidiani Il Sole 24 Ore e The Financial Times (anno 2008). L’analisi si concentra sulle metafore basate sul dominio concettuale del tempo atmosferico usate in riferimento alla crisi finanziaria globale: vengono messe a confronto la loro frequenza e le aree concettuali selezionate per il mapping nelle due lingue; vengono inoltre considerate possibili implicazioni dal punto di vista della concettualizzazione della crisi a livello culturale.

Moving from Labbé’s proposal envisaging the use of intertextual distance to measure the similarity (and dissimilarity) of texts, this paper proposes a new calculation procedure based on repeated observations of intertextual distance between pairs of equal-sized text chunks. The implementation of this procedure on a large corpus including 160 Italian novels provides information on the values produced by measuring intertextual distance in (both lemmatized and non-lemmatized) literary texts written in Italian. Moreover, in order to show the improvement achieved through this iterative procedure compared to the original version, distance values are assessed in terms of their ability to recognize the author of a novel as the factor responsible for text pairing

White House Press Briefings, daily meetings with the press held by the White House Press Secretary, are the main information conduit for the White House (Kumar 2007). They are considered a “political chess game” where the Press Secretary and the press face a “wrestling match” (Partington 2006: 16). Our analysis is carried out on a corpus comprising all the Press Briefings across three presidencies from Clinton to Obama. The additional mark-up includes information about individual speakers and their role, allowing us to compare different discourse strategies adopted by the participants in the briefings at different points in time. This leads us to determine the extent of the differences in the patterns found as well as the nature of the variation from one participant to the next one. Starting from a phraseological perspective (Granger and Meunier 2008), our analysis will focus on avoidance strategies enacted by the podium with the main purpose of preserving face and yet “doing the job” (Partington 2003: 80). We will show how the cluster ‘I don’t know’ can be exploited by various podiums, mainly in accordance with strategic communication choices made by the US administrations, highlighting differences in the podium’s attitude towards the press.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-27T11:55:55Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2013Bitstream added on 2015-04-27T12:08:23Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 ISSN2236-2592-2013-03-07-61-80.pdf: 248020 bytes, checksum: 1ba381c6a3d35af88fa043880ccc001d (MD5) O principal objetivo deste trabalho é investigar o comportamento linguístico-social (o habitus) de um tradutor diante dos limites culturais na tradução, analisando, para isso, o uso de traços de explicitação no processo tradutório para o inglês de brasileirismos terminológicos desenvolvidos por Darcy Ribeiro. Para tanto, nos valemos de um corpus paralelo composto pela obra O povo brasileiro (1995) e pela respectiva tradução, realizada por Rabassa. A metodologia utilizada foi dos Estudos da Tradução Baseados em Corpus (BAKER, 1993, 1995, 1996, 2000; CAMARGO, 2005, 2007), da Linguística de Corpus (BERBER SARDINHA, 2004) e da Terminologia (BARROS, 2004). No tocante à análise dos dados, adotamos a Sociologia da Tradução (SIMEONI, 1998, 2007; GOUANVIC, 1995, 1999), além do conceito de habitus, proposto pelo sociólogo Pierre Bourdieu (1980). Acreditamos que, como aponta Baker (1996), a explicitação é uma tendência ou uma conduta do tradutor, o qual explicita, no texto traduzido, trechos que se apresentam implícitos no texto original. Notamos que essa disposição pode ser encontrada na tradução do texto de Ribeiro, evidenciando possíveis dificuldades de conceituar o universo brasileiro em língua inglesa. The main purpose of this article is to investigate the social and linguistic behaviors (the habitus) of a translator in face of cultural barriers in translation, analyzing the use of explicitation aspects in the translational process into English of the terminological Brazilianisms developed by Darcy Ribeiro. With this aim, we used a parallel corpus composed by the work O povo brasileiro (1995) and by its respective translation, performed by Rabassa. The methodology used is that of Corpus-Based Translation Studies (BAKER, 1993, 1995, 1996, 2000; CAMARGO, 2005, 2007), Corpus Linguistics (BERBER SARDINHA, 2004) and Terminology (BARROS, 2004). For data analysis, we adopted Sociology of Translation theories (SIMEONI, 1998, 2007; GOUANVIC, 1995, 1999), as well as the habitus conception, proposed by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1980). We believe that, as pointed by Baker`s theories (1996), explicitation is a translator`s tendency or procedure, which explains, in the translated text, parts of the original text that have been left implicit by the author. Results show that this action may be found in Ribeiro’s translated texts, indicating the difficult of conceptualizing the Brazilian universe in English. Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho, Departamento de Letras Modernas, Instituto de Biociências Letras e Ciências Exatas de São José do Rio Preto, São José do Rio Preto, Rua Cristóvão Colombo, 2265, Jardim Nazareth, CEP 15054000, SP, Brasil Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho, Departamento de Letras Modernas, Instituto de Biociências Letras e Ciências Exatas de São José do Rio Preto

Il saggio presenta le caratteristiche di CorIT (Corpus di Interpretazione Televisiva) e si sofferma su alcuni concetti chiave per la classificazione degli items, discutendoli alla luce delle più recenti teorie linguistiche.

The present study investigates the role of sources in a multilingual corpus of TV news bulletins from both public and commercial channels in France, Italy, Poland and in the UK. The corpus is composed of the French, Italian, Polish and UK first wave TV partitions of the much larger IntUne Corpus. It gives special regard to the role of Legitimated Persons (LPs) and Vox Populi (VOXs) in the construction of the news bulletin, believing that the study of these voices can shed light on the representation of European countries and EU institutions in TV news programmes

Il saggio approfondisce gli aspetti inerenti all'applicazione della Corpus Linguistics alla traduzione e all'interpretazione, mettendo in luce potenzialità e limiti.

News programmes have a very specific structure (Hartley 1982) and they usually contain “accessed voices” such as legitimated persons (LPs) – experts and public figures – together with ordinary people (VOXs). These voices play different roles in the reports (Montgomery 2007) mutually affecting the news reception by the audience. The study of “accessed voices” in TV news reports can shed light on the perception of EU institutions by citizens, since they still regard TV as the most important source of information (Eurobarometer 55 2001). Our belief is that the role of LPs and VOXs differently affects the audience consumption and re-interpretation of news stories. LPs are authoritative sources (Montgomery 2007), but they convey a message which may be regarded as distant from the layperson, while VOXs are recognised as “one of us” and may lead to a more direct identification. The present study investigates the role of LPs and VOXs in British, Italian and Polish TV news reports through the analysis of a comparable multilingual corpus consisting of transcripts of TV news programmes (both public and commercial channels). All news stories included in the corpus have been divided into items related to ‘EU affairs’ and ‘European countries’ on the one hand, and ‘other’(both domestic news and international non-European stories) on the other. We will focus on the role of attribution, mainly drawing on the Appraisal System (Martin & White 2005), in utterances by LPs and VOXs, and the rhetorical effects deriving from such positioning. In order to carry out the comparison, the corpus will be queried exploiting the XML annotation which allows for detailed comparisons between countries and voices. A quantitative analysis will make it possible to compare different uses of sources in TV news programmes when news items deal with the EU and European Countries vis-à-vis other topics in order to describe the way different forms of attribution are used when Europe related topics are dealt with, providing insights on the representation of Europe in TV news programmes in the three Countries. The quantitative analysis will be complemented with a more qualitative one of a news item available in all TV news programmes which will help shed light on the differences in attitude towards Europe across the three countries and between state/commercial broadcasters.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-27T11:55:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2012Bitstream added on 2015-04-27T12:09:09Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 ISSN1984-2406-2012-07-01-192-214.pdf: 280764 bytes, checksum: 58f2b0c58ec54235ae90c3f257ec07fb (MD5) Este artigo tem por objetivo apresentar traços de explicitação na tradução para o inglês de termos e expressões antropológicos extraídos de duas obras de Darcy Ribeiro. A metodologia utilizada fundamenta-se nos Estudos da Tradução Baseados em Corpus (BAKER, 1993, 1995; CAMARGO, 2005, 2007), na Linguística de Corpus (BERBER SARDINHA, 2004) e na Terminologia (BARROS, 2004). Para Baker (1996) a explicitação é a tendência de explicar, no texto traduzido, trechos que se apresentam implícitos no texto fonte. Notamos que essa tendência pode ser encontrada na tradução dos textos de Ribeiro, evidenciando as dificuldades de conceituar o universo brasileiro em língua inglesa. The main purpose of this article is to investigate the aspects of explicitation in English translation of terms and expressions in two of Darcy Ribeiro’s anthropological works. The methodology used is that of Corpus-Based Translation Studies (BAKER, 1993, 1995, CAMARGO, 2005, 2007), Corpus Linguistics (BERBER SARDINHA, 2004) and Terminology (BARROS, 2004). According to Baker (1996), explicitation is the tendency to explain, in the translated text, parts of the original text that had been left implicit. Results show that these tendencies may be found in Ribeiro’s translated texts, indicating the difficulty of conceptualizing the Brazilian universe in English. Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho, Departamento de Letras Modernas, Instituto de Biociências Letras e Ciências Exatas de São José do Rio Preto, São José do Rio Preto, Rua Cristóvão Colombo, 2265, Jardim Nazareth, CEP 15054000, SP, Brasil Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho, Departamento de Letras Modernas, Instituto de Biociências Letras e Ciências Exatas de São José do Rio Preto, São José do Rio Preto, Rua Cristóvão Colombo, 2265, Jardim Nazareth, CEP 15054000, SP, Brasil

Language as an abstract system of signs has its two realizations: oral and written. A child utters syllables first, then words, phrases and then sentences. The process of voice articulation, together with one of the phases in language learning, is finished by the age of 6. In this phase a child whose language development is proper is capable to compose a sentence consisting of five, six or seven words (Pavličević-Franić, 2005). Vocabulary of a seven-year-old contains around 10 000 words (Pavličević- Franić, Gazdić- Alerić, 2010). Institutional learning of the Croatian language as a mother tongue starts in the kindergarten and it happens through different communicational language games. However, when starting school (at the age of 6 or 7), a child starts to learn language systematically. Since the Croatian language, as a Slavic language, is morphologically rich, language learning often presents a real problem to children. They are afraid of learning language and they don't like it (Pavličević- Franić, Aladrović, 2009). This fact shows the necessity to change language teaching, especially in primary school which according to Croatian educational system lasts eight years. Those changes require the usage of communicative- functional approach in language teaching (Miljević- Riđički and others, 2004). Croatian National Educational Corpus has over a hundred million basic words (www.hnk.ffzg.hr, June 2010). A base of Croatian child language, which includes a period till the age of six, was created within a CHILDES base. But, the corpus of Croatian child language during primary school is not registered in the mentioned bases, so the purpose of this research is to analyze the corpus of child language from the age of seven to twelve, the period when children are in the concrete operational stage (Piaget, 1969). The corpus has around 1500 written works collected while doing a research in 30 primary schools in all the regions of Croatia, and it contains around 30 000 words. The corpus will be coded and afterwards analyzed on morphological, syntactical and lexical level. The research will also try to answer the question of how to use the corpus while learning the mother tongue in primary school and help children to start loving their language and to learn it happily.

Topic of this bachelor's thesis was to observe Czech translations of Italian originals of legislative texts of European Union in field? Verification of diplomas and qualifications in European Union?. The first part defines the linguistic concepts, terms and collocations, it delimits the conception of the corpus and of the corpus linguistic. The second part introduces the source of European Law and chosen legislative texts, describes their adjustment and subsequent work with ParaConc application. The third part deals with the specific terms, hierarchy and grammar structure of the collocations. The forth part considers the correctness of the Czech translations proceeded from Italian terminology of European Law. Summary follows then. In the appendix there is an Italian-Czech vocabulary of the explored terms and collocations.

When the study of meaning became a linguistic discipline, the main interest of semanticists was in the technical level of language and the major focus was represented by the single word. A different view of the relationship between language and meaning was provided by Malinowski (1923) at the beginning of the 20th century. The meaning of language was interpreted in terms of context of culture and context of situation. Malinowski’s theories influenced linguists such as Firth (1957) and Halliday (1985) and language became to be considered meaningful only if considered within the language events in which it is used. For this reason, language started to be analysed only in authentic contexts: the focus of interest is not the single word any more but the meaningful relations words enter into with the other words around them (Sinclair 1991; 1996). The main theme in this book is meaning: how meaning originates and how meaningful communication can be established in texts.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-27T11:55:34Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2012Bitstream added on 2015-04-27T12:09:07Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 ISSN0104-639X-2012-19-14-42.pdf: 223295 bytes, checksum: 582e7197248ed7567d9bf3edea9bbe3f (MD5) Neste estudo, foram selecionados os termos simples e as expressões fixas e semifixas mais frequentes da subárea de Antropologia da Civilização em português e seus correspondentes em inglês, extraídos de duas obras de autoria do antropólogo Darcy Ribeiro e das respectivas traduções para o inglês. A metodologia utilizada fundamentou-se nos Estudos da Tradução Baseados em Corpus (BAKER 1993, 1995, 1996; CAMARGO 2005, 2007), na Linguística de Corpus (BERBER SARDINHA 2000, 2004; TOGNINI-BONELLI 2001) e na Terminologia (BARROS 2004; KRIEGER&FINATTO 2004). Notouse que ocorrem semelhanças e diferenças de uso entre os termos dos subcorpora de estudo de textos, fonte e meta e dos corpora comparáveis em português e em inglês. Esses dados apontariam que os termos e as expressões não apresentam univocidade dentro dessa linguagem de especialidade, devido às diferenças de conceituação de um mesmo referente pelos especialistas da área. The main purpose of this article is to investigate the most frequent simple terms as well as fixed and semi-fixed expressions in Social Anthropology of Civilization subarea in Portuguese and their corresponding terms in English, found in two works written by the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro. The methodology used is that of Corpus-Based Translation Studies (BAKER, 1995, 1996, 1997; CAMARGO, 2005, 2007), Corpus Linguistics (BERBER SARDINHA, 2004) and Terminology (BARROS, 2004; KRIEGER &FINATTO, 2004). Results show that there are similarities and differences among the use of the terms in the main subcorpora composed of source and target texts and in the comparable corpora in Portuguese and in English. This data indicate that terms and expressions are not univocal in the anthropological language due to the differences in the conceptualization of the same referents by different specialists in the area. Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho, Departamento de Letras Modernas, Instituto de Biociências Letras e Ciências Exatas de São José do Rio Preto, São José do Rio Preto, Rua Cristóvão Colombo, 2265, Jardim Nazareth, CEP 15054000, SP, Brasil Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho, Departamento de Letras Modernas, Instituto de Biociências Letras e Ciências Exatas de São José do Rio Preto, São José do Rio Preto, Rua Cristóvão Colombo, 2265, Jardim Nazareth, CEP 15054000, SP, Brasil

The paper deals with the issue of ‘translation equivalence’, understood as the semantic, pragmatic and cultural relationship between the source text and the target text, as studied by means of the tools of corpus linguistics. Two comparable Web corpora were built by downloading the pages of British and Italian hotel websites and saving them in text format. The aim is twofold: to present a new perspective on Web corpora and to discover translation equivalents through a corpus-driven approach. Following Tognini Bonelli (2001), the methodology combines frequency and collocational information. Designed for connected discourse, it is also tentatively adopted for paratext. The analysis focuses on hotel as link label in paratext, more precisely in the main navigation bar, and on has/have as main verb in connected discourse.

L'articolo esamina alcune delle questioni rilevanti alla codifica e al marcamento elettronici dei testi arabi e propone nuovi strumenti e soluzioni per la linguistica araba di corpus The article reviews some of the issues relevant to the electronic encoding and tagging of Arabic texts and proposes new tools and solutions for Arabic corpus linguistics

"In this paper we present the first results of a corpus-based analysis of narrative. in Spanish and English youth language. The study focuses on conversational. narrative, i.e. on natural occurring narratives that emerge in young people’s. everyday interactions. Our analysis is based on two Bergen Corpora of teenage. informal conversation: the Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT), and. the Madrid subcorpus of the Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente (COLAm).. In this paper we direct our analysis to some specific aspects of youth narrative:. namely story openers and closers, and quotation strategies. The analysis highlights. remarkable similarities in narrative construction in the two linguistic communities. and illustrates how the study of both youth language and conversational narrative. can benefit from the use of comparable corpora."

The present paper focuses on the way Europe is construed in a corpus of British and Italian TV news programmes. We focused of TV news programmes rather than on print media since, according to a Eurobarometer report (Eurobarometer 55, 2001), 67% of EU citizens use television as primary source for information about the EU. News programmes were collected and orthographically transcribed from TG1 and TG5 in Italy at 20h00, and BBC1 at 18h00 and ITV1 at 18h30 in the UK from 12 February to 6 April 2007, as part of the IntUne project. Starting from previous studies focusing on the structure of TV news bulletins (Haarman and Lombardo 2009), a specific XML annotation was added to the texts in order to encode metadata relative to source, date, the structure of news stories and speaker information in order to make use of contextual information in the interpretation of linguistic data available through the corpus. The use of comparable corpora provides the means to carry out an analysis of media texts, building models bottom up from data rather than starting from a hypothesis, while still being able to look at the contexts of culture, the environment in which the text was produced, and the context of situation, the immediate environment of the language in use. This enables the researcher to generalise from the data whilst keeping in mind the dangers of making broad assumptions from a single textual context. Bearing these methodological premises in mind we analysed all the occurrences of Europe/Europa in the two subcorpora, highlighting how the term is highly polysemous shifting from a geographical space to a political, historical, and cultural unit. The analysis makes it possible to compare the differing perceptions of Europe reflected in British and Italian TV news programmes.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-27T11:55:43Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2011Bitstream added on 2015-04-27T12:08:53Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 ISSN1519-5392-2011-11-01-105-135.pdf: 463744 bytes, checksum: cc9fe66307f58463f9808e4f83748e73 (MD5) Este estudo discute as traduções em língua inglesa de obras das subáreas de Ciência Política e Economia Política originalmente escritas em português pelos teóricos Fernando Henrique Cardoso & Enzo Falleto; e Antonio Carlos Bresser-Pereira. Para tanto, fundamentamo-nos nos Estudos da Tradução Baseados em Corpus (Baker, 1993, 1995, 1996, 2000; Camargo, 2005, 2007), na Linguística de Corpus (Berber Sardinha, 2004; Tognini-Bonelli, 2001) e, em parte, na Terminologia (Barros, 2004; Krieger & Finatto, 2004). Para compor os corpora comparáveis em português e em inglês, foram utilizados artigos de revistas brasileiras e revistas estrangeiras das subáreas referidas. Também apresentamos uma amostra de quatro glossários bilíngues com os termos destas subáreas em seus cotextos. This study discusses translations in English concerning the areas of Political Science and Political Economy, written by Fernando Henrique Cardoso & Enzo Falleto; and Antonio Carlos Bresser-Pereira. Our research project draws on CorpusBased Translation Studies (BAKER, 1993, 1995, 1996, 2000; CAMARGO, 2005, 2007), Corpus Linguistics (BERBER SARDINHA, 2004; TOGNINI-BONELLI, 2001) and on some concepts of Terminology (BARROS, 2004; KRIEGER & FINATTO, 2004). For compiling the comparable corpora in Portuguese and in English, we selected articles from Brazilian journals and from international journals of Political Science and Political Economy. We also present four samples of bilingual glossaries with the terms of these subareas in their cotexts. Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho, Departamento de Letras Modernas, Instituto de Biociências Letras e Ciências Exatas de São José do Rio Preto, São José do Rio Preto, Rua Cristóvão Colombo, 2265, Jardim Nazareth, CEP 15054000, SP, Brasil Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho, Departamento de Letras Modernas, Instituto de Biociências Letras e Ciências Exatas de São José do Rio Preto, São José do Rio Preto, Rua Cristóvão Colombo, 2265, Jardim Nazareth, CEP 15054000, SP, Brasil

Advertising is a versatile and dynamic genre incorporating a constellation of subgenres, most of which are short messages subject to spatial or temporal restriction. One of them is the classified ad, a form of small, local advertising that, like other forms of written communication, has found its way on to the Web. The article, which investigates online classified ads offering properties for sale, is based on a qualitative and quantitative analysis of a small corpus of texts downloaded from UK-based websites. It explores their main textual, discursive and linguistic features by combining corpus linguistics methodology with discourse analysis and genre analysis approaches. The study first outlines the evolution of the genre from print to the Web; then, it profiles the general features and structure of online classified ads, discusses variation across the texts in the corpus, and identifies the linguistic features by analysing frequencies and collocations of function words, verbs, nouns, adjectives, abbreviations and acronyms. The analysis also sheds some light on the phraseology of classified property advertising.

International audience; French, like most Romance languages, displays both prenominal and postnominal placement of at-tributive adjectives. The fact that choice in position is not random led many linguists (Abeillé and Godard (1999); Forsgren (1978); Wilmet (1981)) to propose constraints based on different dimensions of language (syntax, semantics, phonology, morphology, pragmatics...), but most of them are only trends and it is very difficult to draw a general picture of the phenomenon. We thus proposed in a previous work (Anonymous (tted)) a prediction model built on data from the French Treebank corpus (FTB) (Abeillé et al. (2003)), along the lines of Bresnan et al. (2007), based on most of the proposed constraints, to test the contribution weight of each of them and the impact of their interaction. Even if results were encouraging, several facts were outlined: first, if introspection leads to the conclusion that most adjectives alternate, usage shows much more fixity: less than 10% of the adjectives in our data are actually in both positions. This suggests that locutors' mental representations for every item are in fact much stronger for a given position compared to its counterpart. Second, some contrainsts dont have a significant effect in our model. Yet, a qualitative exam showed that they are greatly correlated to a position for specific adjectives. For instance, différent 'different', which appears equally in both positions, displays for each position a pattern linked to the nature of the determiner, whereas the type of determiner is not relevant at a more general level. More precisely, we observe a strong cooccurrence of a definite determiner with différent in anteposition and a similar pattern between the indefinite determiner and the postposed adjective. This indicates that some constraints are relevant, but only for specific adjectives. Like (Bybee and Mcclelland (2005); Goldberg (2006); Croft (2001)) we believe that locutors' knowledge is based on much more specific information on the item, but also on the context in which it appears: formal characteristics of a particular sequence, frequency of use, distributionality... This work focuses on a qualitative study, on another corpus (ER (2010) 147,934,722 tokens), of the adjectives identified as displaying this alternation in the FTB, the aim being to better understand their functioning, and to propose a model that will better handle actual usage in the FTB. Our methodology is inspired by Gries and Stefanowitsch (2004): we search which lexical elements occur in a particular pattern and identify their attraction strength to the construction by means of a statistical analysis. Results show different types of behaviour on a continuum going from very fixed general patterns to more alternation. The first class of adjectives is very close to the fixed position adjectives: they massively prefer a given position, except in a few cases of idiomatic/collocational sequences. For instance, majeur 'major' is always postposed to the noun, unless it is in the sequence majeure partie 'most part'. In a second class, we still see a great preference for a given position but the alternating cases show less fixity. Two patterns appear within this class: the alternate order either corresponds to a use driven by one major constraint, or to a cumulation/interaction of different constraints. For the first pattern, the constraint involved is not necessarilly the same for every adjective. It can be semantically grounded, which usually leads to distinct nominal paradigms combining with the adjective given its position (e.g. ancien : 'ancien+N' means 'former', 'N+ancien' means 'old'), or it can be based on other devices, as illustrated by différent. The data of the ER corpus differs from the FTB by the fact that it shows a strong preference for anteposition. The findings concerning the definite/indefinite nature of the NP were however confirmed, with 97,5% cases of definite in anteposition and 96% of indefinite in postposition. The adjective nouveau 'new' illustrates the second pattern: it prefers anteposition, but postposition is favoured when combined with a concrete noun, or ehanced when the NP is complement of a preposition. The third class concerns adjectives for which the general pattern shows a much weaker preference, if any, for one position over the other. There are however differences in usage for each position. The two patterns outlined for the preceeding class may also apply here: for instance, the placement of principal 'main' depends on a cumulation of information based on different grounds, whereas the semantics of pauvre (pitiful + N/N + not rich) clearly separates the uses. To sum up, the problem of adjective alternation does not depend on general principles, it is tightly linked to the item and to the NP within which it appears. Our study shows that the constraints previously proposed play a role in the placement of adjectives, but on a more specific level than the broad NP. In other words, locutors speak according to more specific patterns present in their linguistic knowledge.

The present paper uses the methods of corpus analysis to create a learning environment apt to enhance the reading skills of university students.

This contribution aims at illustrating the projects carried out in non-linguistic Faculties and within the framework of ESP courses. The projects were meant to check the added value of a combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis in teaching English to students at non-linguistic Faculties, to promote students’ involvement and active participation in the learning process, to increase language awareness through corpus analysis of specialized texts. The courses were organised according to the needs of first- and second-year students of the second (graduate) degree courses (Laurea Magistrale) in International Relations and Diplomatic Studies at the Faculty of Political Science and students of the Faculty of Law (Laurea Magistrale) of the University of Napoli Federico II in the academic years 2006-07 and 2007-08. The teaching/learning experience has helped students explore language behaviour in the specialised textual environment which is embedded in the discursive practices of professional communities, facilitated language English learning/teaching by enhancing motivation and favoured the acquisition of skills, autonomy and language awareness which may help students face studying and working contexts in the new world scenarios.

This paper describes two very large (> 1 billion words) Web-derived “reference” corpora of English and French, called ukWaC and frWaC, and reports on a pilot study in which these resources are applied to a bilingual lexicography task focusing on collocation extraction and translation. The two corpora were assembled through automated procedures, and little is known of their actual contents. The study aimed therefore at providing mainly qualitative evaluation of the corpora by applying them to a practical task, i.e. ascertaining whether resources built automatically from the Web can be profitably applied to lexicographic work, on a par with more costly and carefully-built resources such as the British National Corpus (for English). The lexicographic task itself was set up simulating part of the revision of an English-French bilingual dictionary. Focusing unidirectionally on English=>French, it first of all compared the coverage of ukWaC vs. the widely used BNC in terms of collocational information of a sample of English SL nodewords. The evidence thus assembled was submitted to a professional lexicographer who evaluated relevance. The validated collocational complexes selected for inclusion in the revised version were then translated into French drawing evidence from frWaC, and the translations were validated by a professional translator (native speaker of French). The results suggest that the two Web corpora provide relevant and comparable linguistic evidence for lexicographic purposes. The paper is structured as follows: section 2 sets the framework for the study, reviewing current approaches to the use of the Web for cross-linguistic tasks, describing the Web corpora used, and the applications of corpora in lexicography work. Section 3 presents the objectives of the pilot investigation, the method followed and its results. In section 4, we draw conclusions and suggest directions for further work.

This paper aims to describe the phraseology associated with adjectives in the language of tourism. The adjectives appearing in the word list of a British farmhouse holidays corpus were grouped into three different semantic fields (‘description of rooms’, ‘description of surroundings’, and ‘description of food’) and from which their collocational profiles were then identified. In order to compare and contrast the Italian and the British languages of tourism, we searched an Italian comparable agriturismi corpus for items that are used to describe rooms, food, and surroundings. The results are discussed with reference to Sinclair’s theories on the influence of context and register on language choices (Sinclair 1991), and Hall’s theory of high vs. low context cultures (Hall 1976, 1989; Katan 2003). This analysis shows that the language of tourism is highly phraseological. It also gives insights into some differences and similarities between English and Italian in terms of ‘language systems’ and cultural orientations.

This poster presents the latest version of ANNIS2, a web browser-based search and visualization environment designed to access richly annotated corpora with heterogeneous annotation schemes. Developed within Collaborative Research Centre 632 (SFB 632: “Information Structure: The Linguistic Means for Structuring Utterances, Sentences and Texts”), ANNIS (ANNotation of Information Structure) must meet the requirements imposed by diverse data from partner projects within the Research Centre and beyond. Since information structure interacts with linguistic phenomena on many levels, the need to concurrently query and visualize data annotated for syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, phonetics, referentiality and lexis, must be addressed, including where the data is multimodal. For this reason, ANNIS2 supports annotations of tokens, token spans and trees or other DAGs (directed acyclic graphs), and uses an appropriate query language capable of searching these structures. Both query language and visualizations are fully Unicode compatible to ensure support for a wide variety of non-European languages. The underlying data for the system is annotated using both automatic taggers/parsers and a small set of manual annotation tools: EXMARaLDA (Schmidt 2004), annotate (Brants & Plaehn 2000) / Synpathy (www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/synpathy/), MMAX2 (Müller & Strube 2006), RSTTool (O’Donnell 2000) and PALinkA (Orasan 2003). These are then mapped onto the encoding standard of the SFB, PAULA (Potsdamer AUstauschformat für Linguistische Annotation / Potsdam Interchange Format for Linguistic Annotation), a stand-off multilevel XML format, which serves as the basis for further processing. The XML data is compiled into a relational database scheme, making the system’s backend particularly scalable.

Literature on genre analysis mainly focuses on the description of language use in the different professional and institutional domains (Bhatia 2004). Despite the different directions of the studies on genre (Bhatia 1993; Martin and Christie 1997; Swales 1990), a common orientation may be seen in their tendency to describe homogeneous concepts, such as communicative situation, register and function. Nevertheless, genre-specific features are subject to changes due to the ongoing processes of internationalisation and globalisation (Candlin and Gotti 2004; Cortese and Duszak 2005; Crystal 1997). In particular, political and institutional communication genres have been experiencing in-depth transformation in the last few decades, mainly due to evolutions in the media market, fuelled by technological developments and by the economic globalisation (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999). Within the framework of a wider research project titled “Tension and change in English domain-specific genres” funded by the Italian Ministry of Research, the present paper aims to outline, through a corpus-based analysis of lexico-grammatical and syntactic features (Baker 2006), in what ways White House press briefings as a genre have evolved in the last 16 years under the pressure of technological developments and of media market transformation. White House press briefings are meetings between the White House press secretary and the press, held on an almost daily basis. They may be regarded as the main official channel of communication for the White House and therefore play a crucial role in the communication strategies on the world’s most powerful institution (Kumar 2007). Embracing a diachronic perspective, our analysis aims at identifying the main features of the evolution of the briefings as a genre, during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. A corpus (DiaWHoB) including all the briefings from January 1993 to January 2009, available on the American Presidency Project website, has been collected in order to carry out the analysis. The corpus consists of about 4,000 briefings and is made up of more than 18 million words. The scope and size of a specialised corpus of this kind make it a powerful tool to investigate the evolution of the White House press briefing. In order to manage the data more efficiently, the corpus has been annotated by using XML mark-up, which incorporates information about individual speakers and their roles, date, briefing details and text structure. The present research paper outlines the corpus structure and discusses the ways in which the corpus architecture helps in investigating the evolution of the genre, and also presents some preliminary results. In particular, it focuses on some examples of evolution in phraseology within the genre of briefings in order to support the hypothesis that a diachronic corpus-based investigation facilitates comparisons among different speakers thanks to the XML mark-up while providing interesting insight into the evolution of a genre.

Els corpus són recursos lingüístics importants que permeten obtenir una gran quantitat d'informació sobre l'ús real de la llengua. Aquest treball mostra els recursos més importants en aquesta àrea, ja sigui en forma de corpus ja compilats o de recursos informàtics que en faciliten la compilació, el processament i l’explotació., Los corpus son recursos lingüísticos importantes que permiten obtener gran cantidad de información sobre el uso real de la lengua. Este trabajo muestra los recursos más importantes en esta área bien sea en forma de corpus ya compilados como de recursos informáticos que facilitan su compilación, procesamiento y explotación., Corpora are important linguistic resources from which it is possible to obtain a great deal of information on real language use. This piece of work looks at the main resources in the field in question, encompassing both precompiled corpora and IT resources for their compilation, processing and exploitation.

The CorDis television corpus is an XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) TEI (Text Encoding Initiative)-conformant collection of texts representing a signifi cant portion of the television news discourse on the 2003 Iraqi confl ict, comprising four subcorpora, that is, the evening news broadcasts for BBC, CBS, RAI Uno and Canale 5 from 20 March to 18 April (see Introduction, this volume). The main purpose of this paper is to show the function and importance of markup for the retrieval of discourse-specific information in a television news corpus. In order to do so, some preliminary issues have to be addressed: (1) the role of annotation in the creation of a harmonized and consistent corpus, with specific reference to TEI mark-up of spoken discourse, and (2) an overview of the corpus composition and of the relevant categories that have been encoded. The focus will be particularly on the function of mark-up associated with television news discourse, in order to illustrate the way mark-up gives access to meta-linguistic information by telling part of the parallel story constituted by the visual text, thus permitting the recovery of non-verbal data, a fundamental characteristic of the medium (television) and of the genre (television news). Finally, we will argue that such a homogeneously encoded corpus is a precious resource for research, both because it enhances reliability and favours reusability, making the data easily retrievable, and because it gives access to a whole set of information that would otherwise be lost.

Research article abstracts, as academic texts, are not necessarily more objective than other texts; they are simply more effective at hiding subjectivity linguistically (cf. Bhatia 1993, 1996). Abstracts are largely based on rhetorical activity, involving interactions between writers and readers. In this perspective, researchers do not just offer their own points of view, but seek to negotiate a credible account of themselves and their work by claiming solidarity with their readers, evaluating ideas and acknowledging alternative views. The aim of the present research paper is to investigate the way authors assert and present their results to their colleagues and peers, in order to build their own identity vis-à-vis their discourse-community. The data is drawn from an xml TEI conformant corpus of 1,035 research article abstracts, about 200,000 words, from two disciplines in two scientific international journals. The analysis, both quantitative and qualitative, sets out to highlight certain lexico-grammatical features specifically related to ‘cultural-identity’ language. Since, this research paper focuses on evaluation (Aijmer 2005, Mauranen 2004, Stubbs 2001, and Swales 2004) and identity, words under investigation are singular and plural personal pronouns. By means of collocational analysis, we attempt to offer a framework for analysing the linguistic resources connected to evaluation which occur with specific words related to evaluation. The comparative distributional frequencies are the basis for assessing the pragmatic or rhetorical role played by those specific words or constructions. Results of the present study support the hypothesis that evaluation is genre specific and embodies interactions between writers and readers, regardless of the discipline. Precise lexical choices and words appear to be more frequent. However, textual analysis and identification of evaluation pose serious problems to the methodological approach especially with the application of computer-assisted analytic techniques in academic arguments.

The aim of this thesis is to study how words denoting age are used in newspaper texts. I have chosen mainly to study the following Swedish focus words for females and males of different ages (flicka, kvinna, tjej, dam; pojke, man, kille and herre) as they relate to age. Furthermore, age lexemes – different variations of Swedish expressions of age – are investigated and finally also a number of new Swedish expressions that are used to describe age – kids, förtis, grups, tweenie, mappie, senior and what I call “plus gradings” – e.g. 50 +. The study is particularly concerned with where and how age is referred to and how the chosen focus words relate in different ways to age and sex – and finally also with how these things have changed over time. I have examined newspaper corpora from three separate years – 1965, 1987 and 2000. My theoretical perspective is social constructivist, age being understood as something that is constructed and negotiated in language use. As for method, I adopt a corpus linguistic approach – large corpora and quantitative language patterns in frequencies and lexical content. Thus, my investigation is aimed at the focus words, the age lexemes and the terms in their linguistic contexts, primarily as regards adjective attributes, lexical relations and collocations. My conclusion is that the examined expressions occur in different contexts and are used in different ways, but are not always related to age or age differentiation. I have noticed a couple of tendencies; one relates to vagueness when it comes to age and one relates to a semantic division of labour. The focus words are both used as synonyms and as oppositions, and they refer to referents belonging to different age groups. At the same time there is a clear division of labour between them in that variation in many contexts relates more to subject and contextual pattern than to different chronological ages. Ihave also noticed that chronological age is generally used when something is unusual, deviant or when the context has to do with crime, sports, (change of or debut in) a profession, birthday announcements etc. Den här avhandlingen undersöker hur ålder används språkligt i tidningstext. Utgångspunkten är hur ålder har förändrats. Framförallt är det fokusorden flicka, pojke, man, kvinna, kille, tjej, dam och herre som i relation till ålder undersöks i avhandlingen. Därutöver studeras ålderslexem - olika variationer av de språkliga uttrycken ålder och år och slutligen även ett antal nya begrepp som förekommer i relation till ålder – kids, förtis, grups, tweenie, mappie, senior och det jag kallar för plusgraderingar – t ex 50 +. Frågor jag ställer mig har med var och hur ålder förekommer och hur de utvalda fokusorden relateras på olika sätt till ålder och till kön – och slutligen hur detta har förändrats över tid. Jag har studerat tidningskorpusar från tre olika årtal – 1965, 1987 och 2000. Teoretiskt utgår jag från ett socialkonstruktivistiskt perspektiv där ålder ses som någonting som konstrueras och förhandlas i språkanvändningen. Metodologiskt utgår jag från ett korpuslingvistiskt synsätt - stora textkorpusar och kvantitativa språkliga mönster i frekvenser och lexikalt innehåll. Jag studerar alltså fokusorden, ålderslexemen och de nya begreppen i sina språkliga kontexter, och då framförallt adjektivattribut, lexikala relationer och kollokationer. Jag kommer fram till att de olika språkliga uttrycken förekommer i olika typer av kontexter och på olika sätt, men att det långt ifrån alltid har med ålder eller med åldersdifferentiering att göra. Två olika tendenser är tydliga som har med åldersvaghet och arbetsfördelning att göra. De olika fokusorden både likställs och differentieras, och de används om referenter i olika ålderskategorier. Samtidigt är det en tydlig arbetsfördelning mellan dem där variationen i många sammanhang har mer med ämnen och innehållsliga mönster att göra, än med olika kronologiska åldrar. Jag har också kunnat konstatera att kronologisk ålder generellt används när någonting är ovanligt eller avvikande utifrån en åldersnorm eller när kontexterna har med idrott, debut eller byte av profession, födelse- och dödsannonser etc.

This work deals with corpus-assisted research into speaker ideological positioning in the language of diplomacy. It concentrates on the resources used by the foreign minister Margaret Beckett to construe the speaker “orientation” (Lemke 1992) through the analysis of the main participant in the discourse that is international community and the subject matter being debated namely terrorism. The findings have shown assertiveness and determination from the speaker by the use of contractive mechanisms. The image of the international community is based on cooperation and unity just like a family and it is appraised mainly through judgements of tenacity. These are the resources required to fight terrorism always seen as an ever-present potential threat.

CorDis is a large, XML, TEI-conformant, POS-tagged, multimodal, multigenre corpus representing a significant portion of the political and media discourse on the 2003 Iraqi conflict. It was generated from different sub-corpora which had been assembled by various research groups, ranging from official transcripts of Parliamentary sessions, both in the US and the UK, to the transcripts of the Hutton Inquiry, from American and British newspaper coverage of the conflict to White House press briefings and to transcriptions of American and British TV news programmes. The heterogeneity of the data, the specificity of the genres and the diverse discourse analytical purposes of different groups had led to a wide range of coding strategies being employed to make textual and meta-textual information retrievable. The main purpose of this paper is to show the process of harmonisation and integration whereby a loose collection of texts has become a stable architecture. The TEI proved a valid instrument to achieve standardisation of mark-up. The guidelines provide for a hierarchical organisation which gives the corpus a sound structure favouring replicability and enhancing the reliability of research. In discussing some examples of the problems encountered in the annotation, we will deal with issues like consistency and re-usability, and will examine the constraints imposed on data handling by specific research objectives. Examples include the choice to code the same speakers in different ways depending on the various (institutional) roles they may assume throughout the corpus, the distinction between quotations of spoken or written discourse and quotations read aloud in the course of a spoken text, and the segmentation of portions of news according to participants interaction and use of camera/voiceover.

El desenvolupament que han tingut recentment els programes d'alineació de corpus bilingües obre noves perspectives en l'estudi dels textos d'especialitat. La seva utilització permet contrastar i evidenciar diferències discursives entre textos especialitzats paral·lels en llengües diferents, fet que constitueix un benefici a l'hora de tractar el coneixement comparatiu entre un i altre discurs. Tanmateix, la formalització d'aquest coneixement resulta una tasca complexa i així ho demostren els casos de soroll en els resultats dels programes.Partint d'un corpus de textos jurisprudencials paral·lels catalans i castellans i utilitzant el programa ALINEA, fem un estudi descriptiu de detall sobre les diferències discursives entre els textos jurisprudencials catalans i castellans per tal de formalitzar el coneixement comparatiu del discurs jurídic (jurisprudencial) català i castellà. Establim una tipologia dels fenòmens lingüístics propis d'aquest discurs que poden generar alineacions insatisfactòries, n'estudiem les causes i fem una proposta de tractament lexicogràfic i d'estratègies complementàries (regles lingüístiques) per millorar els resultats de l'alineació d'aquest tipus de textos., Recent development in alignment programs of bilingual corpora open horizons in studies about specialized texts. Its use let to contrast and to show discoursive differences between parallel specialized texts in different languages. This constitues a benefit in the treatment of comparative knowledge between one discourse and the other. Nevertheless, the formalization of this knowledge is a complex task and, so, the cases of noise in the results of the programs show it.Considering a corpus of Catalan and Spanish jurisprudencial parallel texts and using the ALINEA program, we present a descriptive study of detail about the discoursive differences between Catalan and Spanish jurisprudencial texts in order to formalize the comparative knowledge of Catalan and Spanish legal (jurisprundencial) discourse. We set a typology of own linguistic phenomena about this type of discourse which can generate non satisfactory alignments, we study the causes of this and we make a proposal of lexicographic treatment and of supplementary strategies (linguistic rules) in order to improve the results of the alignment of this type of texts.

This paper is a contribution of our Research Group (University of Naples Federico II) to the national MIUR project on "Intercultural Discourse in Domain-specific English" (National coordinator: prof. Maurizio Gotti, University of Bergamo). The study reflects two different perspectives and approaches in the analysis of the language of the European Union, both converging on the relation between the source of the legal message and the diversified addressees constituting the EU Community.