From collocations to call-ocations: using linguistic methods to quantify animal call combinations

Emerging data in a range of non-human animal species have highlighted a latent ability to combine certain pre-existing calls together into larger structures. Currently, however, there exists no objective quantification of call combinations. This is problematic because animal calls can co-occur with one another simply through chance alone. One common approach applied in language sciences to identify recurrent word combinations is collocation analysis. Through comparing the co-occurrence of two words with how each word combines with other words within a corpus, collocation analysis can highlight above chance, two-word combinations. Here, we demonstrate how this approach can also be applied to non-human animal communication systems by implementing it on a pseudo dataset. We argue collocation analysis represents a promising tool for identifying non-random, communicatively relevant call combinations in animals.

A cross-disciplinary investigation of multi-word expressions in the moves of research article abstracts

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd Conformity to the epistemological orientations of academic disciplines is often reflected in the ways in which knowledge is constructed and communicated through certain linguistic features in academic genres. This paper explores instances of such conformity in hard and soft science disciplines, as it is reflected in the use of recurrent word combinations in different rhetorical moves of research article abstracts. A corpus-driven approach was adopted to identify the most frequently occurring word combinations of different length in a corpus of 5910 abstracts from six disciplines. Following this, the identified sequences were classified according to their communicative functions in different moves of the abstract. A mixed-methods approach was then adopted through which the patterns of variation reflected in the use of the identified sequences were examined both quantitatively and qualitatively. It was found that members of different academic domains have different priorities for representing their research in academic abstracts.

A cross-disciplinary investigation of multi-word expressions in the moves of research article abstracts

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd Conformity to the epistemological orientations of academic disciplines is often reflected in the ways in which knowledge is constructed and communicated through certain linguistic features in academic genres. This paper explores instances of such conformity in hard and soft science disciplines, as it is reflected in the use of recurrent word combinations in different rhetorical moves of research article abstracts. A corpus-driven approach was adopted to identify the most frequently occurring word combinations of different length in a corpus of 5910 abstracts from six disciplines. Following this, the identified sequences were classified according to their communicative functions in different moves of the abstract. A mixed-methods approach was then adopted through which the patterns of variation reflected in the use of the identified sequences were examined both quantitatively and qualitatively. It was found that members of different academic domains have different priorities for representing their research in academic abstracts.

Aperiodic Two-Dimensional Words of Small Abelian Complexity

In this paper we prove an abelian analog of the famous Nivat's conjecture linking complexity and periodicity for two-dimensional words: We show that if a two-dimensional recurrent word contains at most two abelian factors for each pair $(n,m)$ of integers, then it has a periodicity vector. Moreover, we show that a two-dimensional aperiodic recurrent word must have more than two abelian factors infinitely often. On the other hand, there exist aperiodic recurrent words with abelian complexity bounded by $3$, as well as aperiodic words having abelian complexity $1$ for some pairs $(m,n)$.

Identifying verb collocational patterns in a specialized medical journal corpus

This paper examines the collocational patterns of frequent verbs in medical research articles, and proposes a way to help non-native speakers of English learn word combinations frequently used in specific professional genres. We explore the correlations in the syntactico-semantic behavior and the collocational patterns of related verbs, in order to systematically teach recurrent word combinations.To this end, we present a corpus-based analysis of the collocational patterning of the verbs which belong to the same semantic frame inFrameNet, the frame EVIDENCE. These verbs were identified in 397 medical research articles from a pre-release version of the PERC (Professional English Research Consortium) corpus (3,155,118 tokens and 115,960 word types). The verbs examined, in approximate order of degree of increasing certainty, aresuggest, argue, show, reveal, prove, demonstrate, substantiate, verify, confirmandcorroborate. The results reveal that verbs that can be grouped into semantic and syntactic coherent sets also share combinatorial properties. We conclude that, rather than studying isolated verbs, making learners aware of these patterns of verb groups can greatly contribute toward efficient learning of the language of professional texts.

A Corpus-based Study on the Use of Three-word Lexical Bundles in the Academic Writing by Native English and Turkish Non-native Writers

The utilization of English recurrent word combinations –lexical bundles- play a fundamental role in academic prose (Karabacak & Qin, 2013). There has been highly limited research about comparing Turkish non-native and native English writers’ use of lexical bundles in academic prose in terms of frequency, structure and functions of lexical bundles (Bal, 2010; Karabacak & Qin, 2013, Öztürk, 2014). Therefore, this current research was conducted in order to investigate the most frequently used lexical bundles in the academically published articles of Turkish non-native and native speakers of English and to investigate whether there was a significant difference between native and non-native scholars with respect to the frequency, structures and functions of English language lexical bundles. The data were collected from two corpora; 15 scientific articles of native speakers and 15 scientific articles of Turkish advanced writers. The investigation included a quantitative analysis of the use of three-word lexical bundles and a qualitative analysis of the functions and structures they serve. To be more conservative, three-word lexical bundles which occur 40 times per million words and appear in 5 different texts were described a lexical bundle in this current research. The findings revealed that Turkish non-native writers showed underuse and less variation in the use of lexical bundles in their academic prose compared to native speakers.

Lexical bundles in spoken academic ELF

This corpus-based study explored the effects of two factors – genre (i.e. speech event type) and disciplinary variation – on spoken academic ELF, from the perspective of lexical bundles (i.e. recurrent word combinations). The material was drawn from a corpus of transcribed spoken academic lingua franca English (ELFA). The investigation involved a quantitative analysis of the use of four-word bundles, in terms of frequency, form, and function, across a range of genres (academic lectures and seminars) and disciplines (Medicine, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences). A qualitative analysis was also carried out to give an in-depth account of functional variations associated with one particular lexical bundle I don’t know if. The results demonstrated that genre and discipline are two important factors that cannot be ignored in understanding academic ELF communication and idiomaticity, and lexical bundles provide useful glimpses on genre and disciplinary variation that are worth following up.

A functional comparison of recurrent word-combinations in English original vs. translated texts

The study explores the potential of quantitative methods to shed light on how texts originally written in English (EO) and texts translated into English (ET) from Norwegian cluster in terms of functional classes. The object of study are sequences of three words (3-grams), classified into 15 functional categories. The investigation establishes that EO and ET do not differ significantly in half of the categories. As for the categories that do differ, two (Comparison and Spatial) are investigated in more detail, uncovering that the more frequent use of Comparison and Spatial 3-grams in ET is most likely a result of source language shining through. The findings are important in the context of both descriptive translation studies and translation-based contrastive studies. With regard to the former, the current study shows that, in many cases, ET does not seem to constitute a ‘third code’ at the level of 3-gram functions, since the same functions are equally attested in EO. As far as contrastive studies are concerned, the investigation reveals few, if any, lexico-grammatical differences between EO and ET that overturn the belief that translations are a good tertium comparationis when comparing and contrasting language systems.