Phrase extension in Haydn's string quartet minuets: A preliminary corpus study

When Austrian composer Alban Berg was working on his opera Lulu, he wrote three Baudelaire songs as a Konzertaria entitled Der Wein. Premiered in 1930, Der Wein is a large-scale work for voice and orchestra. Berg uses a German translation by Stefan George, but the published score is in parallel texts, accommodating the French verse line. The chapter also considers a ‘hidden’ Baudelaire setting from Berg’s 1926 Lyric Suite for string quartet. The analysis covers: (a) the context of composition; (b) the connections established between selected poems; (c) the statistical data generated from the adhesion strength tests; and (d) how the data shape an evaluation of Berg’s settings of Baudelaire. Evidence suggests that Berg’s settings of Baudelaire are loosely entangled; the highly prescriptive score affects syntax, semantics, and prosody. Yet, because Der Wein has stood the test of time, the settings are deemed loosely accretive.

Download Full-text

“They Made us into a Race. We Made Ourselves into a People”: A Corpus Study of Contemporary Black American Group Identity in the Non-Fictional Writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates

Corpus Pragmatics ◽

10.1007/s41701-021-00101-8 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Yulia Hathaway

Keyword(s):

Corpus Linguistics ◽

Group Identity ◽

Black People ◽

Interdisciplinary Approach ◽

Black American ◽

Corpus Study ◽

Black America ◽

Shared Experiences ◽

American Group ◽

Identity Based

AbstractThis article examines representations of contemporary Black American identity in the non-fictional writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates. The dataset is a self-compiled specialized corpus of Coates’s non-fictional writings from 1996 until 2018 (350 texts; 468,899 words). The study utilizes an interdisciplinary approach combining corpus linguistics and corpus pragmatics. Frequencies of five identity-related terms in the corpus (African(–)Americans, blacks, black people, black America/Americans and black community/communities) are compared diachronically; then the pragmatic prosody of the terms is analyzed via the notion of control. The findings suggest that Coates’s representation of Black American group identity has shifted over time. Specifically, the terms African Americans and black America are replaced by the terms blacks and black people. The study’s empirical findings, considered through the theoretical framework on Black solidarity, suggest a shift in representation of group identity in Coates’s writings from an identity based on cultural and ethnic commonalities to an identity based on the shared experiences of anti-Black racism.

Download Full-text

The distribution of short and long pronouns in Maltese

Language Typology and Universals ◽

10.1515/stuf-2018-0010 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 71 (2) ◽

pp. 199-220

Author(s):

Benjamin Saade

Keyword(s):

Weak Effect ◽

Functional Diagnostics ◽

Corpus Study ◽

Text Type ◽

Short Forms ◽

The Status

Abstract This study investigates the distribution of long and short independent pronouns in Maltese. By applying proposed positional and functional diagnostics to explain the variation between short and long pronouns (copular use, modification, coordination, peripheral positions) combined with a corpus study of pronominal form, person, and text type, this study sheds light on the factors that influence pronominal form and the status of reduced person forms in Maltese. While the copular use of pronouns does have a weak effect on pronominal form (long forms preferred), a stronger effect is observed with regard to grammatical person (1 sg prefers short forms, 2 sg & 3 sg prefer long forms) and text type.

Download Full-text

Extravagant “fake” morphemes in Dutch. Morphological productivity, semantic profiles and categorical flexibility

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory ◽

10.1515/cllt-2020-0024 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 0 (0) ◽

Author(s):

Kristel Van Goethem ◽

Muriel Norde

Keyword(s):

Driving Forces ◽

Morphological Properties ◽

Distributional Semantics ◽

Corpus Study ◽

Left Hand ◽

Semantic Coherence ◽

Two Factors ◽

Type Frequency ◽

Imitation Leather ◽

Artificial Grass

AbstractDutch features several morphemes with “privative” semantics that occur as left-hand members in compounds (e.g., imitatieleer ‘imitation leather’, kunstgras ‘artificial grass’, nepjuwelen ‘fake jewels’). Some of these “fake” morphemes display great categorical flexibility and innovative adjectival uses. Nep, for instance, is synchronically attested as an inflected adjective (e.g., neppe cupcake ‘fake cupcake’). In this paper, we combine an extensive corpus study of eight Dutch “fake” morphemes with statistical methods in distributional semantics and collexeme analysis in order to compare their semantic and morphological properties and to find out which factors are the driving forces behind their exceptional “extravagant” morphological behavior. Our analyses show that debonding and adjectival reanalysis are triggered by an interplay of two factors, i.e., type frequency and semantic coherence, which allow us to range the eight morphemes on a cline from more schematic to more substantive “fake” constructions.

Download Full-text