An historical analysis of species references in American English

Corpora ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-349
Author(s):  
Craig Frayne
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Sentiment Analysis ◽  
Quantitative Methods ◽  
English Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
American English ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The Past ◽  
Corpus Studies ◽  
Google Books

This study uses the two largest available American English language corpora, Google Books and the Corpus of Historical American English (coha), to investigate relations between ecology and language. The paper introduces ecolinguistics as a promising theme for corpus research. While some previous ecolinguistic research has used corpus approaches, there is a case to be made for quantitative methods that draw on larger datasets. Building on other corpus studies that have made connections between language use and environmental change, this paper investigates whether linguistic references to other species have changed in the past two centuries and, if so, how. The methodology consists of two main parts: an examination of the frequency of common names of species followed by aspect-level sentiment analysis of concordance lines. Results point to both opportunities and challenges associated with applying corpus methods to ecolinguistc research.

scholarly journals ENGLISH PERFECT IN COGNITION OF SLOVAK ISCED3 LEARNERS OF ENGLISH – PRELIMINARY EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomáš Hlava
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Proficiency Test ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Procedural Knowledge ◽  
Language Instruction ◽  
Declarative Knowledge ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
The Past ◽  
English Language Instruction ◽  
Different Types

In English language instruction in Slovakia, a strong preference for declarative knowledge at the expense of procedural knowledge development has been reported over the last two decades. However, the cognitive aspects of language attainment predict no impact of instructional efforts, since mental representations of language to be attained are told to be supported by different cognitive systems than associative learning develops. Language variation materializes differences among languages based on differences in digitalizing the experience and thus understanding the world. For Slovak learners, the English present perfect is one such anomaly in categorization. This paper aims to answer what the specific interactions between past simple and present perfect are and how the predicted cognitive aspects of language attainment influence the use of different types of knowledge. A proficiency test focusing on declarative knowledge and language use without context and in context was distributed to 600 Slovak learners of English at the ISCED3a level. In Past simple conditions, students proved highly proficiency in all 3 types of tasks. In present perfect conditions, declarative knowledge strongly dominated over language use in context. In Present perfect conditions, substitutions by past simple were significantly more frequent than substitutions of present perfect by past simple. Cognitive funneling was recognized as a process inhibiting fast proceduralization of the English present perfect compared to fast and reliable proceduralization of the past simple.

Predicting the past

2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 235-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Trudgill ◽  
Elizabeth Gordon
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Southern Hemisphere ◽  
English Language ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
American English ◽  
Canadian English ◽  
The Past ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
English Canadian

The division of the world’s Englishes into rhotic and non-rhotic types is clearly due to the fact that the former are conservative in not having undergone loss of non-prevocalic /r/, whereas the latter have. The beginnings of the loss of non-prevocalic /r/ in English have generally been dated by historians of the language to the 18th century. It is therefore obvious, and has been widely accepted, that Irish English, Canadian English, and American English are predominantly rhotic because the English language was exported to these colonial areas before the loss of rhoticity in England began; and that the Southern Hemisphere Englishes are non-rhotic because English was exported to these areas in the 19th century after the loss of rhoticity. Analysing newly-discovered data from Australia, we present some surprising evidence that shows that this obvious conclusion is incorrect.

scholarly journals American English in Teaching English as a Second Language

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 52-57
Author(s):  
Mammadova Gunay Aqil
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
English Learners ◽  
Quantitative Methods ◽  
English Language ◽  
American English ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Teaching English ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative Methods ◽  
The Usa

With the lapse of time the two nations- Americans and British always blamed each other for “ruining” English. In this article we aim to trace historical “real culprit” and try to break stereotypes about American English status in teaching English as a second language. In comparison with Great Britain the USA has very short and contemporary history; nevertheless, in today’s world American English exceeds British and other variants of English in so many ways, as well as in the choices of language learners. American English differs from other variants of the English language by 4 specific features: Inclusiveness, Flexibility, Innovativeness and Conservativeness. Notwithstanding, British disapprove of Americans taking so many liberties with their common tongue, linguistic researcher Daniela Popescu in her research mentions the fields of activities in which American words penetrated into British English. She classifies those words under 2 categories: everyday vocabulary (480 terms) and functional varieties (313 terms). In the case of functional varieties, the American influence is present in the areas of computing (10 %), journalism (15 %), broadcasting (24%), advertising and sales (5 %), politics and economics (24%), and travelling and transport (22%). Further on, the words and phrases in the broadcasting area have been grouped as belonging to two areas: film, TV, radio and theatre (83%), and music (17%). The purpose of the research paper is to create safe and reliable image of American English in the field of teaching English as a second language. Americans are accused in “ruining” English and for that reason learners are not apt to learn American English. The combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is used while collecting the data. The study concluded that the real culprits are British who started out to ruin English mainly in in the age of Shakespeare and consequently, Americans inherited this ruin from the British as a result of colonization. Luckily, in the Victorian Age British saved their language from the ruins. The paper discusses how prejudices about American English effect the choices of English learners.

scholarly journals Gender associations in the twentieth-century English-language literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Schulz ◽  
Štěpán Bahník
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
The Past ◽  
English Language Literature ◽  
Google Books ◽  
Language Literature

The data required to study stereotypes held in the past are often not available. Using Google Books Ngram corpus, we explored the depiction of male and female characters in the twentieth-century English-language fiction. By analyzing adjective-noun bigrams, we examined adjectives used in association with “man”, “woman”, “boy”, and “girl”. Men were described in more positive terms than women. Girls were depicted in more positive terms than boys at the beginning of the twentieth century, but the tendency reversed in the middle of the century. Boys were described in more masculine terms than girls; however, men were described in similarly masculine adjectives as women. Despite limitations of interpretability of the results, the study presents a possible approach of exploring past stereotypes.

scholarly journals Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (30) ◽  
pp. e2102061118
Author(s):  
Johan Bollen ◽  
Marijn ten Thij ◽  
Fritz Breithaupt ◽  
Alexander T. J. Barron ◽  
Lauren A. Rutter ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Cognitive Distortions ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Historical Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The World ◽  
Google Books ◽  
Writing Standards

Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual’s mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders.

British-American Contrasts in the Use of the Past Perfect: Negotiating Ambiguity versus Redundancy?

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-319
Author(s):  
Stephanie Kleppel ◽  
Matthias Eitelmann ◽  
Britta Mondorf
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Language Change ◽  
American English ◽  
Recent Change ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
British English ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
The Past ◽  
Distribution Studies ◽  
The Cost

Abstract The present study provides an empirical analysis of British-American contrasts in the overall use of the past perfect as well as its functional distribution. Studies on variation according to national variety report a decline of the past perfect spearheaded by American English (cf. Elsness, J. 1997. The Perfect and Preterite in Contemporary and Earlier English (Topics in English Linguistics 21). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyte; Bowie, J., S. Wallis, and B. Aarts. 2013. “The Perfect in Spoken British English.” In The Verb Phrase in English. Investigating Recent Language Change with Corpora, edited by B. Aarts, J. Close, G. Leech, and S. Wallis, 318–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 348; Yao, X., and P. Collins. 2013. “Recent Change in Non-present Perfect Constructions in British and American English.” Corpora 8 (1): 115–35: 121f.). However, these findings still await an explanation as to possible motivations for the decline. The present study is able to provide novel insights by taking the semantic functions of past perfect structures into account (anteriority, backshifting in indirect speech, hypothetical past). A functional quantitative and qualitative analysis of newspaper corpora comprising 112 million words (27 million British English and 85 million American English) reveals that the overall decline results in a reduction of redundant information at the cost of potential ambiguity. Finally, our findings will be related to the four dichotomies of British-American differences outlined in Rohdenburg and Schlüter (2009 “New Departures.” In One Language, Two Grammars? Differences between British and American English (Studies in English Language), edited by G. Rohdenburg, and J. Schlüter, 364–423. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 421), i.e. progressiveness, formality, consistency and explicitness.

scholarly journals Sentiment Analysis of Roman-Urdu Tweets about Covid-19 Using Machine Learning Approach: A Systematic Literature Review

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 1112-1120
Keyword(s):  
Sentiment Analysis ◽  
English Language ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Morphological Structure ◽  
Learning Approach ◽  
The Past ◽  
Twitter Data ◽  
Machine Learning Approach ◽  
Effective Decision ◽  
Effective Decision Making

From the past decade, growth of social media encourages researchers to perform several academic studies on the user generated data. Sentiment Analysis is tool used to generate summary of public opinion about a topic, which helps in effective decision making. Most of the work in sentiment analysis has been performed on English Language Dataset. Many Languages such as Urdu, Hindi, and Italian faced lack of attention due to their complex morphological structure and unavailability of resources. COVID-19 has affected human life around the world. Many researchers have performed their studies using twitter data for knowing the sentiments of people throughout the time of pandemic. In this Paper we are giving a general overview about the process of Sentiment Analysis of Roman-Urdu Tweets. For the dataset query we have used the data generated by user about COVID19.

Using the past to explain the present: Tense and temporal reference in Early African American English

2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Walker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Reference System ◽  
English Language ◽  
American English ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
African American English ◽  
Temporal Reference ◽  
The Past ◽  
Several Variables ◽  
Present Tense

This study reconstructs the present temporal reference system of Early African American English by investigating the linguistic factors conditioning several variables within the domain of present temporal reference in three representative varieties. Previous studies have focused only on the opposition between Ø and -s in the present tense, ignoring other morphosyntactic constructions. Expanding the variable context to present temporal reference, I demonstrate that different constructions convey different aspects: the previously noted association between -s and habitual aspect is confirmed, but Ø is also associated with an aspectual distinction—that of duration. The progressive is used most often with nonstative verbs to denote durative aspect, whereas its much rarer use with statives appears to reflect an older stage in its “grammaticization.” Combining variationist analysis with the comparative method, this reconstruction provides linguistically meaningful explanations of the observed variability and places it within the context of the development of the English language.

scholarly journals A Review of the Major Varieties of English Language

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ligang Han
Keyword(s):  
English Language Learners ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Regional Differences ◽  
English Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
American English ◽  
British Isles ◽  
British English ◽  
The World ◽  
Different Parts

English is clarified as a Germanic language, and it began in what is now the British-Isles. After years of development, English language has many varieties in different parts of the world. Different varieties differ in accent, vocabulary, grammar, discourse, sociolinguistics, and have its respective characteristics in pronunciation, tone, intonation, spelling and so on. Therefore, it is important for English language learners to observe the differences in language use. The present paper is an attempt to explore the regional characteristics of the two most commonly used varieties of the English Language–British English and American English. It is concluded that there will be intercommunications which will make the regional differences mild and easily understood. However, some differences may disappear, the others will remain so.

Stress management: Corpus-based insights into vernacular interpretations of stress

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-93
Author(s):  
Laurel Smith Stvan
Keyword(s):  
Traumatic Stress ◽  
American English ◽  
Physical Symptom ◽  
The Body ◽  
Post Traumatic Stress ◽  
The Past ◽  
Academic Texts ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
Post Traumatic ◽  
Semantic Shift

Examination of the term stress in naturally occurring vernacular prose provides evidence of three separate senses being conflated. A corpus analysis of 818 instances of stress from non-academic texts in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus of American Discourses on Health (CADOH) shows a negative prosody for stress, which is portrayed variously as a source outside the body, a physical symptom within the body and an emotional state. The data show that contemporary speakers intermingle the three senses, making more difficult a discussion between doctors and patients of ways to ‘reduce stress’, when stress might be interpreted as a stressor, a symptom, or state of anxiety. This conflation of senses reinforces the impression that stress is pervasive and increasing. In addition, a semantic shift is also refining a new sense for stress, as post-traumatic stress develops as a specific subtype of emotional stress whose use has increased in circulation in the past 20 years.

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