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A Sprinkling of Key Words. Mike Scott Aston University June 30, 2010. Issues: Key words (KWs). Keyness Aboutness Distribution patterns of KWs. complex pattern. or simple. fractal?. Fractal. - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
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A Sprinkling of Key Words
Mike ScottAston UniversityJune 30, 2010
Issues: Key words (KWs)
Keyness AboutnessDistribution patterns of KWs
complex pattern
or simple
fractal?
Fractal
• A fractal is "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole,"[1] a property called self-similarity – (Wikipedia)– [1] Mandelbrot, B.B. (1982). The Fractal
Geometry of Nature. W.H. Freeman and Company.
Keyness
• aboutness
• importance
• a textual category
aboutness
• what the text is about
• what the message is
• what it all means
• picture from mindreadersdictionary.com
importance
centrality
Context
• Claimp by Maya Goldblum
• New Designers 07
Impoverished context
• Dandelion Light by Sunghwa Jang
• New Designers 07
Levels of Context
P hysica l env ironm ent
Identification of KWs: criteria
simple verbatim repetitionno allowance for anaphora, synonymy, antonymy etc.thresholdone word, or more than one?
Corpus-bound or corpus-driven?
• Machine-identified keyness is ideal for corpus-driven research
• The researcher lets the PC suggest areas needing further chasing up
• See recent work by McEnery, Baker, etc. and Nelia Scott 1998
Research Questions
How are the KWs of Bleak House distributed? Are the KWs of different kinds (nouns/verbs … character/place/style words) distributed differently?Do the KWs of the chapters reflect the pattern of the whole text but on a smaller scale?
Bleak House
published 1852-3(20 monthly instalments)
350,000 wordsPreface + 66 Chapters
reference corpus
9 million words52 novels,
29 other 19th Century authors23 Dickens
Procedures
• download Bleak House (Gutenberg Project)
• separate each chapter as a separate file
• create a wordlist of the reference corpus
• create a wordlist of the whole of Bleak House
• create a batch of wordlists, one of each chapter of Bleak House
ref. corpus
BH
KW Procedures
• Compute KW list of the whole novel
• Compute batch of KW lists, one for each chapter
Overall Results
Over 300 positive KWs for the whole novelAbout 70 negative KWs including God (half as frequent as in 19th C literature overall)
Excel• spreadsheet constructed at
the same time as the batch of KW files
http:\\www.lexically.net\downloads\corpus_linguistics\Bleak_House.xls
fewer characters in first chapters
pronouns are sprinkled
Chapter by Chapter
Average of 23 KWs per chapter – same settings, same reference corpus (19th C Lit.)Per chapter: minimum 5, maximum 38.
Chapter by chapter variationKW Categories
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
120%
1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49 52 55 58 61 64 67
Other
Characters
Places
Pronouns
Titles
Global KWs
Local KWs
middling burstiness
• verbsappears
begins
puts
observes
replies
continues
says
considers
etc.
Preliminary findings
• All chapters have KWs• Individual chapters differ considerably in their
KWs• because KWs are not all global• Character KWs enter the novel gradually• Pronouns and verbs present in many sections
but absent in many too– not much to do with aboutness– middling level of burstiness
• KWs of different kinds are distributed differently
Preliminary conclusion
• KWs of the chapters do not simply reflect the pattern of the whole text but on a smaller scale
• Keyness is not fractal
References• Baker, P., Gabrielatos C., Khosravinik, M., Krzyzanowski, M.,
McEnery, T. & Wodak, R., 2008. A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press. Discourse & Society 19(3), 273-305.
• McEnery, Tony, 2009. "Keywords and Moral Panics: Mary Whitehouse and Media Censorship". in Dawn Archer (ed.) What's in a Word-list? Investigating word frequency and keyword extraction. Farnham: Ashgate, 93-124.
• Scott, M. Nelia, 1998, Normalisation and Readers' Expectations: A Study of Literary Translation with Reference to Lispector's A Hora da Estrela. Liverpool: Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Liverpool.