The Bias Toward Single-Unit Turns in Conversation Robinson, Jeffrey D.; Rühlemann, Christoph; Rodriguez, Daniel Taylor
Research on language and social interaction,
04/2022, Letnik:
55, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson argued that the rules for turn taking for conversation involve a confluence of pressures that bias turn size toward single turn constructional units (TCUs), which ...leads to an empirical prediction that turns are more likely to be composed of single (vs. multiple) TCUs. We directly test and confirm this "single-TCU bias" by using conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, and Bayesian statistics to assess the conversational subcorpus of the British National Corpus (BNC-C), which contains 475,509 turns of talk. Our results confirm this bias, showing that 67% of turns are composed of single TCUs; we discuss why this estimate is conservative. The mean word length for single-TCU turns was 4.5 (SD = 3.4), compared to 19.9 (SD = 22.6) for multi-TCU turns. Our findings reinforce the ideas that the natural habitat for an accountable social action is the single TCU (vs. the turn), and that interaction is fundamentally organized (i.e., both produced and understood) on an action-by-action basis, which is a TCU-by-TCU basis. Data are in British English.
This article examines the functioning of emojis in a hate speech context. It investigates whether emojis are an independent mechanism of hate speech or if they serve as an auxiliary device. By this, ...I mean if emojis can constitute a hate speech message. A corpus containing hate speech from three different Russian social networks is analyzed: the Russian Toxic Comments corpus from Odnoklassniki and two self-collected corpora from Twitter and VK. The findings suggest that emojis do not function as a separate mechanism of hate speech, but are rather used to clarify the intended meaning of the message. The study also highlights that the usage of emojis is context-dependent, specifically in terms of whether the user is involved in a confrontation with another user.
This article examines the functioning of emojis in a hate speech context. It investigates whether emojis are an independent mechanism of hate speech or if they serve as an auxiliary device. By this, I mean if emojis can constitute a hate speech message. A corpus containing hate speech from three different Russian social networks is analyzed: the Russian Toxic Comments corpus from Odnoklassniki and two self-collected corpora from Twitter and VK. The findings suggest that emojis do not function as a separate mechanism of hate speech, but are rather used to clarify the intended meaning of the message. The study also highlights that the usage of emojis is context-dependent, specifically in terms of whether the user is involved in a confrontation with another user.
There is debate among linguists as to whether overt subject pronouns (SPs) are pragmatically obligatory in contrastive contexts. While many authors would argue that overt SPs are necessary to ...maintain a pragmatically felicitous utterance (e.g. Cameron 1995; Silva-Corvalán 1994; Solomon 1999; Mayol 2010; Posio 2011), numerous researchers have challenged this view (e.g. Enríquez 1984; Schwenter 2002; Amaral & Schwenter 2005; Otheguy & Zentella 2012; Travis & Torres Cacoullos 2012). The current study explores these contexts in further detail using spoken corpus data from Mexican Spanish. Through a qualitative analysis of contrastive environments in the discourse of 20 speakers, numerous cases of contrast are analyzed in terms of SP use, type of contrast conveyed, and pragmatic (in)felicity. The data demonstrate that there are several contrastive contexts that permit the use of null SPs, further corroborating previous studies. Furthermore, the analysis moves beyond existing research by revealing additional contrastive contexts not here-to-fore discussed in the literature (to my knowledge), which engender the establishment of new types of contrast, a broadening of the notion of contrast, and an extension of the scope of pragmatic felicity.
Abstract This paper examines the conceptualizations of endometriosis-related pain by combining Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) with a corpus-based approach. Endometriosis is a complex and ...multi-faceted condition, affecting one in ten people assigned female at birth and bearing serious consequences on one’s physical, social and psychological wellbeing. Especially in cases when the pain is invisible, communication resorts to violent metaphors implying harm, physical damage, or fight. These metaphors are thought to increase the likelihood of eliciting an empathetic response in the interlocutor. However, such narratives may be detrimental at the individual level (e.g., increasing pain catastrophizing) and at the community level (e.g., overshadowing the capacity of communities to construct and use metaphors in alternative ways). Therefore, this study presents an initial exploratory analysis of metaphorical source domains in descriptions of endometriosis-related pain written in online, freely accessible blogs. Metaphorical expressions were manually annotated in a sample of KWICs basing on the MIPVU procedure and thematically categorized. The adoption of a bottom-up and top-down approach within a qualitative framework allowed an empirically grounded analysis of candidate source domains, which calls for further quantitative testing.
In 1915 the echo of the Ottoman massacres of the Christian minorities living within the borders of the Empire reached the international press at once. The Times functioned as an English-language ...cross-cultural referential platform for its international readership, and regularly published letters to the editor reporting on the political and humanitarian events involving the Armenians. Those letters to the editor were written in English by notable authors from different national backgrounds and political appointments, including also Armenian notables and delegates. A corpus of letters to the editor of The Times was collected for the purpose of this study and examined through a corpus-driven and a corpus-assisted approach. This article focuses on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of recurring language of evaluation related to discursive news value analysis, with a specific focus on how the parameter of “emotivity” is expressed through the language used in the letters. This study attempts to explain the linguistic strategies through which a cross-cultural intersubjective connection with the readership of The Times was created, and it also attempts to clarify the textual strategies implemented in the letters to the editor of The Times to keep the Armenian events newsworthy.
The use of corpus linguistics (CL) tools and methods has been shown to be of great help in fostering language learning. As argued by Aston (2000), language pedagogy has started to plan and create ...corpora to fit its own principles and address its own needs. Most studies focus on classroom activities based on concordances and lexical/grammatical analyses carried out on corpora (McEnery et al. 2006). To date, CL has often been combined with teaching specific topics to carry out text and discourse analyses, and data-driven learning (Friginal 2018). Therefore, it is important to further investigate the use of corpora as a valuable resource for language education. This work is testimony to the usefulness of corpus linguistics and corpus-based analyses for pedagogical purposes, while encouraging students to explore language autonomously and draw their own conclusions and considerations. Indeed, this paper outlines how CL can help learners, with different levels of language proficiency, approach English for Specific Purposes using authentic and concrete examples, and simultaneously lead them to develop new skills which may be integrated within their field of study. The case study occurred in a distance learning context with first-year students majoring in Data Science and Business Analytics at the University of Calabria. The main objective was to enhance students’ motivation while improving their English competences using statistical analyses and corpus tools to investigate data retrieved from the social network Instagram and related to the topic of climate change. In particular, hands-on activities allowed students to create their own corpora, analyze language use through the corpus analysis toolkit AntConc (3.5.8), and carry out topic framing. Students’ final projects were then discussed at the oral exam.
This paper reports the analysis of a 26-million-word corpus of data from an online Pick-Up Artist (PUA) discussion forum. PUAs often use discussion forums as a place to share ‘field reports’ of their ...experiences in seducing and sleeping with women. Such online environments therefore provide a unique communicative space in which the notion of resistance to sex is discursively constructed and represented by forum members. Research in forensic linguistics has traditionally focused on the ways in which discourses of ‘resistance’ are used by police and lawyers to determine whether consent was given in cases of rape and sexual assault. This paper, therefore, provides an alternative perspective to this issue, and applies a corpus-assisted approach to discourse analysis in order to identify the ways in which ‘resistance’ is represented by this part of the PUA community. A collocation analysis of the community-specialist term ‘LMR’ (‘Last Minute Resistance’) finds three major themes emerging from the data: (i) resistance as something to be overcome, (ii) resistance as insincere, and (iii) resistance as remarkable. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of these findings, namely in terms of counter-balancing the utmost resistance standard in the legal system and providing education to prevent the incitement of sexual aggression and cyber-enabled violent offences against women and girls.
The use of Project Gutenberg (PG) as a text corpus has been extremely popular in statistical analysis of language for more than 25 years. However, in contrast to other major linguistic datasets of ...similar importance, no consensual full version of PG exists to date. In fact, most PG studies so far either consider only a small number of manually selected books, leading to potential biased subsets, or employ vastly different pre-processing strategies (often specified in insufficient details), raising concerns regarding the reproducibility of published results. In order to address these shortcomings, here we present the Standardized Project Gutenberg Corpus (SPGC), an open science approach to a curated version of the complete PG data containing more than 50,000 books and more than 3 × 10 9 word-tokens. Using different sources of annotated metadata, we not only provide a broad characterization of the content of PG, but also show different examples highlighting the potential of SPGC for investigating language variability across time, subjects, and authors. We publish our methodology in detail, the code to download and process the data, as well as the obtained corpus itself on three different levels of granularity (raw text, timeseries of word tokens, and counts of words). In this way, we provide a reproducible, pre-processed, full-size version of Project Gutenberg as a new scientific resource for corpus linguistics, natural language processing, and information retrieval.
This article explores customer service interactions between the Irish airline Ryanair and its passengers on the social networking platform Twitter. Using a corpus linguistic methodology, it ...investigates a 1-million-word corpus of Twitter threads comprising tweets addressed to and posted by Ryanair between August 2018 and July 2019. Studying the communicative strategies used in the corpus reveals customers’ main concerns and causes for complaint, and how the airline addresses these in their response tweets offering assistance to passengers. In addition, the analysis of customer response tweets to these corporate replies allows insights into customers’ reactions to and perception of the (often generic) answers they receive. The aim of this case study is to gain further understanding of the linguistic and communicative features that characterize customer service interactions online, and the attitudes customers voice toward them, with a view to streamlining customer communication and improving levels of customer satisfaction.
A large proportion of all graduates study engineering disciplines, and the number of master theses completed far outstrips that of doctoral-level works. However, engineering disciplines in general ...and their master theses in particular have received comparatively little attention from applied linguistics, leaving writing instructors with sparse guidance when preparing courses for MSc students in engineering. Here, we present the results of a corpus analysis of introduction sections in 57 master theses in mechanical engineering and a genre analysis of 16 of their introductions. A concordance analysis of the most frequent keywords revealed the typical discourse functions employed by students when writing about their research in this section. The genre analysis confirmed the presence of most of the elements of Swales's CARS schema in MSc theses. These findings contribute to knowledge of this understudied field in applied linguistics and can be used to design materials and courses for MSc engineering students focussing on vocabulary, rhetorical structures, and academic socialisation.
•Mechanical engineering subdisciplines shared common discourse functions•Discourse functions focussed on engineering processes and text organisation•Introductions broadly adhere to the CARS model, but with sequential variations•An overlap was found between CARS moves and discourse functions
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