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Markers of orality in lexical verb choice in a corpus of student academic writing
CCCCIndianapolis 2014
Sandra Gollin-KiesBenedictine University, Lisle, Illinois. USA.
Markers of orality in lexical verb choice in a corpus of student
academic writing
Sandra Gollin-KiesBenedictine University
CCCC - IndianapolisMarch 20, 2014
Background
This paper reports on a subset of a larger ongoing project:
“What is the evidence for orality in first-year composition?
Exploring the question empirically with a controlled data set”
Kies,D., Gollin-Kies,S., Lambert, O.
See related papers at: www.rhetory.com
Oral discourse is characterized by:
“interactiveness and personal involvement: (e.g., 1st and 2nd person pronouns, WH questions) personal stance (e.g., mental verbs, that clauses with likelihood verbs, and factual verbs, factual adverbials, hedges), and structural reduction and formulaic language (e.g., contractions, that omission, common vocabulary, lexical bundles).
negative features are informational density and complex noun phrase structures (frequent nouns and nominalizations, prepositional phrases, adjectives, and relative clauses) together with passive constructions.” (Biber et al. 2004, p.186.)
Why focus on verbs?
The verb/verb phrase is central to the meaning and structure of the clause (Halliday 1985).
Little previous corpus-based research on the effect of verb choices on academic writing style of native or near-native speaker students
Lexical verbs
Lexical specificity in verbs has been overlooked in corpus research. (But see Partridge, 2011 on communication verbs).
In academic writing, lexical verbs are less frequent than nouns.
In spoken registers, lexical verbs carry a greater burden of meaning and are used to about the same extent as nouns.
Therefore, the relative frequency and kinds of lexical verbs used in student writing may suggest a degree of orality.
Research Questions
Have students’ lexical verb choices changed over time?
Does the frequency of certain lexical verbs vary significantly from the reference corpora?
Do lexical verb choices indicate lesser or greater orality in student writing? (investigate troponyms)
Lexical verbs investigated
Verbs drawn from T2K-SWAL word frequency lists (Biber et al., 2004)
Speech-skewed common words (found over 70% of the time in spoken registers)
Writing skewed common words (found over 70% of the time in written registers)
Evenly distributed common words (comparable occurrence in sp. & wr. registers)
Special focus: “Mental”, “activity”, and “communication” verbs phrasal verbs
Dimension 1: Verbs in Oral VS Literate Discourse (Biber et al. 2004)
POSITIVE LOADING
Common verbs: Mental +81
Verbs: Progressive +73 Common verbs: Activity
+65 Pro-verb DO +58 Verbs: Past tense +56 Verbs: Phrasal +50 Common verbs:
Communication +40
NEGATIVE LOADING
Passives: Agentless -75 Passives: Postnominal -75 Passives: By phrase -54 Common verbs: Causative
-34
Corpus Materials
The First Year Writing Corpus (FYC): Student research essays on George Orwell’s “1984.”
The assignment: an argumentation/analytic exploration of ideas and themes of 1984 or George Orwell's work more generally. 2500 words. include quotes or paraphrases from scholarly sources. Details at:
http://papyr.com/hypertextbooks/comp2/paper.htm
Dataset 1: 1998-99 (504,340 running words)
Dataset 2: 2012-13 (406,281 running words)
Note about the corpus
Our data most closely matches humanities (e.g. literature, history, sociology).
But first yr. comp is not so discipline specific.
Method Sub-sets of the FYC corpus from 1998-99
and 2012-13 Parsed using UAM Corpus Tool (O’Donnell) Analyzed using UAM Corpus Tool and Wordsmith
Tools 6 (Scott, 2012) focus on verb frequency and category
Findings compared against reference corpora: T2K-SWAL corpus wordlists (Biber et al.,2004) -
Academic spoken and written texts, but no student writing
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): academic and spoken genre sub-corpora of 100 million running words (Davies).
Verbs and their lemmas assigned to distribution lists based on the T2K-SWAL corpus lists (speech-skewed SP, writing skewed WR, and equally distributed ED).
Be, have, and do, and all modal verbs excluded.
Word frequency categories in T2K-SWAL Corpus (Biber et al, 2004).
Speech-skewed common words (SP) More than 200/million; 20-200/million
Writing-skewed common words (W) More than 200/million; 20-200/million
Evenly distributed common words (ED) More than 200/million; 20-200/million
Less common words (LC) 20-200/million;
Rare words (R) less than 20/million
Student writing: Random samples
The following samples are paragraphs from essays chosen at random from the two sub-sets of student writing.
Color coding of lexical verbs matches the categories on the previous slide.
Today’s people love their appliances, remote controls, and luxury cars. I know I do. They make our lives so much easier, and leave us more time to do other things; like wash our cars, and clean our appliances. Are things easier? I know the computer saves me time when writing papers for school; leaving me more time to play games on it. There is no question we love our inventions.(98-99).
SP1, SP2; ED1, ED2; W1,W2; LC; R.
Unlike the real dictators Hitler and Stalin, Big Brother did not really exist and never existed. It was only a symbol of English Socialism (Ingsoc) and the Party that controlled all aspects of life in Oceania through totalitarian, police state methods. After all, a dictator with a physical body would eventually become ill, decline with age and die, but Big Brother will live forever as the image of a Party that intends to remain in power forever. Its members will die off, even at the privileged Inner Party levels, but that matters no more than cutting off dead fingernails. As a collective organization, the only goal of the Party was to retain power, like a jackboot stomping on a face forever, while keeping the masses of proles sedated, subdued and existing at a minimal level. (2012-13)
SP1, SP2; ED1, ED2; W1,W2; LC; R.
George Orwell’s book entitled 1984 describes a future society where an authoritative figure commonly named as Big Brother and his government manipulates a society. This society is constantly monitored by what Orwell describes as a “telescreen”. In this piece of equipment is capable of monitoring all actions performed by the community, as well as, informs the citizens of any fact or event related to Big Brother, the government, etc. The community is always under attack by print and video media to honor and obey Big Brother.(98-99)
SP1, SP2; ED1, ED2; W1,W2; LC; R.
As we traverse though this life, many of us are secluded to a profound sense of boredom, and equally so, an everlasting quest to quench our thirst for entertainment. Though this quest, in modern times, we explore many different forms of media and various genres of such entertainment, we will almost inevitably come across the idea of utopian and dystopian science fiction. Utopia being a place of perfection, where all is well, and not even such simplistic things such as boredom itself has wrought mankind any form of illness, where naturally anti-utopian and dystopian worlds are constructed on the other side of the spectrum, where everything is in chaos, governments rule over citizens with an iron fist, people no longer feel emotion, knowledge is forebode, or the planet itself has been deteriorated and devoid of human interaction. (2012-13)
SP1, SP2; ED1, ED2; W1,W2; LC; R.
Verb frequencies in FYC Orwell corpus
Speech-skewed common verbs More than 200/million; 20-200/million
Writing skewed common words More than 200/million. 20-200/million.
Evenly distributed common words At more than 200 /million 20-200/million
Less common words More than 200 /million; 20-200/million; Rare
Findings
Over 1,000 / million running words Most common lexical verb in both corpora was use
(ED) (over 2,000 times/million words). Next most common verbs:
98-99: make, see, know, take, say, think, CONTROL, become, believe, go
12-13: make, take, know, go, believe, see, say, think, give, get, become, CONTROL and want. 9 of these verbs belong to the 12 most common lexical verbs in the language: say, get, go, know, think, see, come, mean, want (SP), give, make, take (ED). CONTROL was unusually frequent because of the topic: Orwell’s 1984.
Note: At this frequency, bolded verbs appeared in both lists; underlined verbs appeared in only one list.
Findings contd.
Over 200/million words The FYC corpus frequency category of over 200 per
million (based on the T2K-SWAL list) consisted of 87(89) lemmas (including all of the verbs also listed as occurring over 1,000 times/million).
Interestingly, the FYC over 200 per million category contained not only verbs that matched the T2K-SWAL list at this frequency (Table 1 below), but a number of other verbs from the T2K-SWAL list 20-200/million list were also represented at the higher frequency in FYC (Table 2).
This suggests students are perhaps over-using a particular set of words at a higher frequency than in the reference list.
Findings contd.
No significant differences between 98-99 and 12-13
Verb choices in both heavily weighted towards SK or ED verbs.
In each case, only 9 SK verbs occurred from T2K-SWAL’s over 200 /million word frequency list. begin, consider, describe, develop, follow,
include, provide, define, require (98-99 only) involve, occur (12-13 only)
A note on troponyms
The main common verbs in the student corpus tend to be heavily used.
Especially certain mental, activity and communication verbs e.g. think, act, understand
Taxonomic hierarchy
move
saunter ambletoddle
walk crawl
superordinate
subordinate
Basic level
Basic level
Troponyms *
Orwell thinks about a grim future
considers imagines predicts
*Troponymy rather than hyponomy holds between verb senses - based on Fellbaum & Miller (1990)
A possible line of future research
Can we trace lexical verbs back to more basic forms in the corpus and build diagrams to show the extent to which students are using the more specific language that is typical of literate discourse?
Conclusion
No evidence of a shift to orality. Choice of lexical verbs suggests students are in a transitional stage of
academic writing. Students may still be under the influence of
school genres. Influence of classroom genres like the lecture
and textbook may be stronger than professional academic writing.
More research needed on lexical verbs, troponyms, and vocabulary in general.
References
Biber, D. (1988) Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge NY: Cambridge University Press.
Biber, D., Johannsen, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow, England: Pearson Education.
Biber, D. (2006) University Language: A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. John Benjamins.
Biber, D., Conrad, S.M., Reppen, R., Byrd, R.P. , Helt, P., Clark, V., Cortes, V. , Csomay, E., Urzua, A. (2004). Representing Language Use in the University: Analysis of the TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language Corpus. TOEFL Monograph Series. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.
Fellbaum, C., & Miller, G. A. (1990). Folk psychology or semantic entailment? Comment on Rips and Conrad (1989). Psychological Review, 0033295X, 97(4), 565-570.
Freeman Y.S. & Freeman, D. (2009) Academic Language for English language learners and struggling readers. How to help students succeed across content areas. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). An introduction to functional grammar. London: Arnold. Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Routledge. Partridge, M. (2011). A comparison of lexical specificity in the communication verbs of L1
English and TE student writing. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 29(2), 135-147.
Scott, M. (2012). Wordsmith Tools version 6. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software.
