Taming the Corpus: From Inflection and Lexis to Interpretation

Description

This book bridges the current quantitative and qualitative text analyses, using grammar as a crucial source of investigation. Taking data from Czech, an inflected language, in which the most optimal conditions to respond to this research question are met, the book expands the understanding of language and text in ways that have not been executed before. For predominantly English-based quantitative research, this volume fills a crucial gap by examining the relationship between inflection and other phenomena (including discourse, translation and literature). For the current qualitative research, the volume provides large empirical data to confirm some of its claims, but more importantly, it demonstrates the important role of detailed grammatical concepts that have not been considered before. Besides addressing fundamental questions about text analysis methods, the volume presents a diverse array of Czech data that are unique in their own right and worthy of dissemination to the general audience. Taming the Corpus: From Inflection and Lexisto Interpretation is divided into three sections. Section 1 deals with phonotactics, poetic structure, morphological complexity used to differentiate literary style, and native speakers’ sense of grammaticality – issues pertinent to linguistic typology, cognition and language, and literary studies. Section 2 focuses on inter-language relations, especially the theory of translation. Section 3 demonstrates how quantitative analysis of texts can contribute to our understanding of society and connects the volume to legal language, construction of gender and discourse position and implicit ideology. Front Matter ....Pages i-vi Introduction (Václav Cvrček, Masako Fidler)....Pages 1-8 Front Matter ....Pages 9-9 Do Users’ Reading Skills and Difficulty Ratings for Texts Affect Choices and Evaluations? (Neil Bermel, Luděk Knittl, Jean Russell)....Pages 11-35 Vowel Disharmony in Czech Words and Stems (Jiří Milička, Hana Kalábová)....Pages 37-61 Morphological Richness of Text (Radek Čech, Miroslav Kubát)....Pages 63-77 A Collocation-Driven Method of Discovering Rhymes (in Czech, English, and French Poetry) (Petr Plecháč)....Pages 79-95 Front Matter ....Pages 97-97 Prominent POS-Grams and n-Grams in Translated Czech in the Mirror of the English Source Texts (Lucie Chlumská)....Pages 99-117 Revolution with a “Human” Face: A Corpus Approach to the Semantics of Czech Lidskost (David S. Danaher)....Pages 119-144 Front Matter ....Pages 145-145 Keeping and Bearing Arms in Czech (Kieran Williams)....Pages 147-166 Image of Politicians and Gender in Czech Daily Newspapers (Adrian Jan Zasina)....Pages 167-194 Going Beyond “Aboutness”: A Quantitative Analysis of Sputnik Czech Republic (Masako Fidler, Václav Cvrček)....Pages 195-225