Refine
Year of publication
- 2021 (3) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (1)
- Book (1)
- Part of a Book (1)
Language
- English (3) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (3)
Keywords
- Soziolinguistik (2)
- Deskriptive Linguistik (1)
- Empirische Forschung (1)
- Englisch (1)
- Ethnolinguistik (1)
- Forschung (1)
- Forschungsmethode (1)
- Interaktion (1)
- Klassifikation (1)
- Kognitive Linguistik (1)
Publicationstate
Reviewstate
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (1)
- Peer-Review (1)
Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (3) (remove)
Over the past decade, conducting empirical research in linguistics has become increasingly popular. The first of its kind, this book provides an engaging and practical introduction to this exciting versatile field, providing a comprehensive overview of research aspects in general, and covering a broad range of subdiscipline-specific methodological approaches. Subfields covered include language documentation and descriptive linguistics, language typology, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics, cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. The book reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of each single approach and on how they interact with one-another across the study of language in its many diverse facets. It also includes exercises, example student projects and recommendations for further reading, along with additional online teaching materials. Providing hands-on experience, and written in an engaging and accessible style, this unique and comprehensive guide will give students the inspiration they need to develop their own research projects in empirical linguistics.
Social actions
(2021)
Social actions are recipient-designed actions that occur in the context of interaction sequences. This chapter focuses on sources and practices for the formation and ascription of social actions. While linguists stress the relevance of linguistic social action formats, conversation analysts highlight the relevance of the sequential position of an action, and sociolinguists point to the influence of social identities for action-formation and -ascription. The combination of these three approaches helps us to solve the analytic problem of indirectness, which, however, only rarely becomes a problem for the participants in an interaction themselves. Social properties which recurrently apply when using verbal and bodily resources of action-formation, i.e. the social actions themselves, inferred meanings, projected next actions, the participation framework, the activity type, speaker’s stance, participants’ identities, etc. lead to stable pragmatic connotations of those forms, i.e. action-meanings, which become idiomatic and part of our common-sense competence. Still, social actions are multi-layered and can be ambiguous at times. Therefore, their meaning can be open for negotiation. Intersubjectivity of action ascription is ultimately secured neither by conventions nor by speaker’s intentions, but is accomplished by their treatment in subsequent discourse.
Alleviating pain is good and abandoning hope is bad. We instinctively understand how words like alleviate and abandon affect the polarity of a phrase, inverting or weakening it. When these words are content words, such as verbs, nouns, and adjectives, we refer to them as polarity shifters. Shifters are a frequent occurrence in human language and an important part of successfully modeling negation in sentiment analysis; yet research on negation modeling has focused almost exclusively on a small handful of closed-class negation words, such as not, no, and without. A major reason for this is that shifters are far more lexically diverse than negation words, but no resources exist to help identify them. We seek to remedy this lack of shifter resources by introducing a large lexicon of polarity shifters that covers English verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Creating the lexicon entirely by hand would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, we develop a bootstrapping approach that combines automatic classification with human verification to ensure the high quality of our lexicon while reducing annotation costs by over 70%. Our approach leverages a number of linguistic insights; while some features are based on textual patterns, others use semantic resources or syntactic relatedness. The created lexicon is evaluated both on a polarity shifter gold standard and on a polarity classification task.