Thematic patterning in English and Spanish: contrastive annotation of a bilingual newspaper corpus for liguistic and computational applications

Thematization is recognized as a fundamental phenomenon in the construction of messages and texts by di erent linguistic schools. This location within a text privileges the elements that guide the reader in the orientation and interpretation of discourse at di erent levels. Thematizing a linguistic unit by locating it in the rst-initial position of a clause, paragraph, or text, confers upon it a special status: a signal of the organizational strategy which characterizes di erent text types playing a role as a variable in the distinction of registers, text types and genres. However, in spite of the importance of the study of thematization for message and textual structuring, to date there are no linguistic studies that have undertook the task of validating its aspects in a comparative manner, either for linguistic or computational purposes. This study, therefore, lls a research gap by implementing a methodology based on contrastive corpus annotation, which allows to empirically validate aspects of the phenomenon of Thematization in English and Spanish, it also seeks to develop a bilingual English-Spanish comparable corpus of newspaper texts automatically annotated with thematic features at clausal and discourse levels. The empirically validated categories (Thematic Field and its elements: Textual Theme, Interpersonal Theme, PreHead and Head) are used to annotate a larger corpus of three newspaper genres news reports, editorials and letters to the editor in terms of thematic choices. This characterization, reveals interesting results, such as the use of genre-speci c strategies in thematic position. In addition, the thesis investigates the possibility to automate the annotation of thematic features in the bilingual corpus through the development of a set of JAVA rules implemented in GATE. It also shows the e cacy of this method in comparison with the manual annotation results...

An empirical study of the recreationalexpressive and referential roles of the cell phone among young students and their potential applications to advertising

The cell phone has become a means of finding persuasive content, making friends and accessing information. For this reason it is of great interest in analyzing is use by young people during their formative years. Regarding this point, the objectives of the research are: to obtain percentage data on the distraction call phones cause among students; to define their habits re fun activities and their study responsibility in their personal and academic lives; and to identify leisure-expressive and referential trends. It was decided to analyze the Spanish discourse found on Twitter. To do so, a quantitative and qualitative methodology was used, with a linguistic pattern extraction tool which allows us to obtain categories of meaning. The sample was 10,000 tweets in Spanish, with key words such as “cell” and “study” and all possible derivatives. The data were gathered between 30 May and the 6 June 2014, which coincides with the start of the exam period in Spain. Finally, the potential applications of the research to the specific field of publicity and advertising is discussed as a possible solution to the current needs of the brands, which have to find participative formats taking into account the students’ leisure trends.