Looking back or looking forward in corpus linguistics:what can the last 20 years suggest about the next?

Starting with a description of the software and hardware used for corpus linguistics in the late 1980s to early 1990s, this contribution discusses difficulties faced by the software designer when attempting to allow users to study text. Future human-machine interfaces may develop to be much more sophisticated, and certainly the aspects of text which can be studied will progress beyond plain text without images. Another area which will develop further is the study of patternings involving not just single words but word-relations across large stretches of text.

Two-phase flow analogy as an effective boundary condition for modelling liquids at atomistic resolution

A hybrid Molecular Dynamics/Fluctuating Hydrodynamics framework based on the analogy with two-phase hydrodynamics has been extended to dynamically tracking the feature of interest at all-atom resolution. In the model, the hydrodynamics description is used as an effective boundary condition to close the molecular dynamics solution without resorting to standard periodic boundary conditions. The approach is implemented in a popular Molecular Dynamics package GROMACS and results for two biomolecular systems are reported. A small peptide dialanine and a complete capsid of a virus porcine circovirus 2 in water are considered and shown to reproduce the structural and dynamic properties compared to those obtained in theory, purely atomistic simulations, and experiment.

French linguistics research and teaching in UK and Irish HE institutions

Introduction: The research and teaching of French linguistics in UK higher education (HE) institutions have a venerable history; a number of universities have traditionally offered philology or history of the language courses, which complement literary study. A deeper understanding of the way that the phonology, syntax and semantics of the French language have evolved gives students linguistic insights that dovetail with their study of the Roman de Renart, Rabelais, Racine or the nouveau roman. There was, in the past, some coverage of contemporary French phonetics but little on sociolinguistic issues. More recently, new areas of research and teaching have been developed, with a particular focus on contemporary spoken French and on sociolinguistics. Well supported by funding councils, UK researchers are also making an important contribution in other areas: phonetics and phonology, syntax, pragmatics and second-language acquisition. A fair proportion of French linguistics research occurs outside French sections in psychology or applied linguistics departments. In addition, the UK plays a particular role in bringing together European and North American intellectual traditions and methodologies and in promoting the internationalisation of French linguistics research through the strength of its subject associations, and that of the Journal of French Language Studies. The following sections treat each of these areas in turn. History of the French Language There is a long and distinguished tradition in Britain of teaching and research on the history of the French language, particularly, but by no means exclusively, at the universities of Cambridge, Manchester and Oxford.

Exploiting heterogeneous scientific literature networks to combat ranking bias:evidence from the computational linguistics area

It is important to help researchers find valuable papers from a large literature collection. To this end, many graph-based ranking algorithms have been proposed. However, most of these algorithms suffer from the problem of ranking bias. Ranking bias hurts the usefulness of a ranking algorithm because it returns a ranking list with an undesirable time distribution. This paper is a focused study on how to alleviate ranking bias by leveraging the heterogeneous network structure of the literature collection. We propose a new graph-based ranking algorithm, MutualRank, that integrates mutual reinforcement relationships among networks of papers, researchers, and venues to achieve a more synthetic, accurate, and less-biased ranking than previous methods. MutualRank provides a unified model that involves both intra- and inter-network information for ranking papers, researchers, and venues simultaneously. We use the ACL Anthology Network as the benchmark data set and construct the gold standard from computer linguistics course websites of well-known universities and two well-known textbooks. The experimental results show that MutualRank greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors, including PageRank, HITS, CoRank, Future Rank, and P-Rank, in ranking papers in both improving ranking effectiveness and alleviating ranking bias. Rankings of researchers and venues by MutualRank are also quite reasonable.

The Routledge handbook of forensic linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics provides a unique work of reference to the leading ideas, debates, topics, approaches and methodologies in Forensic Linguistics. Forensic Linguistics is the study of language and the law, covering topics from legal language and courtroom discourse to plagiarism. It also concerns the applied (forensic) linguist who is involved in providing evidence, as an expert, for the defence and prosecution, in areas as diverse as blackmail, trademarks and warning labels. The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics includes a comprehensive introduction to the field written by the editors and a collection of thirty-seven original chapters written by the world’s leading academics and professionals, both established and up-and-coming, designed to equip a new generation of students and researchers to carry out forensic linguistic research and analysis. The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics is the ideal resource for undergraduates or postgraduates new to the area.

Forensic linguistics : the application of language description in legal contexts

In this article I first divide Forensic Linguistics into three sub-disciplines: the language of written legal texts, the spoken language of legal proceedings, and the linguist as expert witness and then go on to give a small number of examples of the research undertaken in these three areas. For the language of written legal texts, I present work on the (in) comprehensibility of police cautions and of judges instructions to juries. For the spoken language of legal proceedings, I report work on the problems of interpreted interaction, of vulnerable witnesses and the need for more detailed research comparing the interactive rules in adversarial and investigative systems. Finally, to illustrate the role of the linguist as expert witness I report a trademark case, five different authorship attribution cases, three very different plagiarism cases and I end reporting briefly the contribution of linguists to language assessment techniques used in the linguistic classification of asylum seekers. © Langage et société no 132 - juin 2010.

Representações discursivas sobre lampião e seu bando em notícias de jornais mossoroenses (1927): “O mais audaz e miserável de todos os bandidos” e o seu “grupo de asseclas”

In this doctoral thesis analyzed the discursive representations of the bandit Lampião, the Lantern and his bandits gang in news mossoroenses newspapers published in the twenties of the last century (1927), when the gang invasion of the city of Mossoro in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, on June 13 of that year. To this end, we take as basis the theoretical assumptions of linguistics Textual, especially the narrower context of what is known today as Textual Analysis of the Discourses (ADT), theoretical and descriptive approach to linguistic studies of the text proposed by the French linguist Jean-Michel Adam. In this approach, we are interested in, specifically, the semantic level of the text, highlighting the notion of discursive representation, studied based on benchmarking operations, predication, modification, spatial location and temporal connection and analogy (ADAM, 2011; CASTILHO, 2010; KOCH, 2002, 2006; MARCUSCHI, 1998, 2008; NEVES, 2007; RODRIGUES, PASSEGGI & SILVA NETO, 2010). The corpus of this research consists of three reports in the twenties of the last century in newspapers The Mossoroense, Correio do Povo and the Northeast, and reconstituted through the collection held in the Municipal Museum Lauro Scotland files, Memorial Resistance Mossoro, both located in Natal, and in the news collection of Lampião newspapers in Natal, north of Rio Grande Raimundo Nonato historian. The discursive representations are built from the use of semantic analysis operations. Lampião to, the following representations are built: bandit, head of bandits, briber, defeated, Captain and Lord. To the outlaws of Lampião bunch of the following discursive representations were built: group, gang, gangsters, mates, bloodthirsty pack, brigands, bandits, criminals, burglar horde, and wild beasts. These representations reveal mainly the views of the newspapers of that time, which represented mainly the interests of traders, politicians, the government itself and generally Mossoró population.

Regional variation and change in the history of English strong verbs

This thesis investigates how the strong verb system inherited from Old English evolved in the regional dialects of Middle English (ca. 1100-1500). Old English texts preserve a relatively complex system of strong verbs, in which traditionally seven different ablaut classes are distinguished. This system becomes seriously disrupted from the Late Old English and Early Middle English periods onwards. As a result, many strong verbs die out, or have their ablaut patterns affected by sound change and morphological analogy, or transfer to the weak conjugation. In my thesis, I study the beginnings of two of these developments in two strong verb classes to find out what the evidence from Middle English regional dialects can tell us about their origins and diffusion. Chapter 2 concentrates on the strong-to-weak shift in Class III verbs, and investigates to what extent strong, mixed and weak past tense and participle forms vary in Middle English dialects, and whether the variation is more pronounced in the paradigms of specific verbs or sub-classes. Chapter 3 analyses the regional distribution of ablaut levelling in strong Class IV verbs throughout the Middle English period. The Class III and IV data for the Early Middle English period are drawn from A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, and the data for the Late Middle English period from a sub-corpus of files from The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English and The Middle English Grammar Corpus. Furthermore, The English Dialect Dictionary and Grammar are consulted as an additional reference point to find out to what extent the Middle English developments are reflected in Late Modern English dialects. Finally, referring to modern insights into language variation and change and linguistic interference, Chapter 4 discusses to what extent intra- and extra-linguistc factors, such as token and type frequency, stem structure and language contact, might correlate with the strong-to-weak shift and ablaut levelling in Class III and IV verbs in the Middle English period. The thesis is accompanied by six appendices that contain further information about my distinction of Middle English dialect areas (Appendix A), historical Class III and IV verbs (B and C) and the text samples and linguistic data from the Middle English text corpora (D, E and F).

The Analogy as a Cognitive Strategy that Encourages Reading Comprehension in Expository Texts

This research arises from the current state of reading in Mexico, because the contextual situation to local and national level has become critical on this issue. Results on standardized tests such as ENLACE (National Assessment of Academic Achievement in Schools) and PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) have shown that Mexican basic level students have text comprehension problems. Given this reality, this is a qualitative descriptive study on the use of analogies in reading as a strategy for reading comprehension, through application of an ethnographic survey, a questionnaire and the application of a pedagogical model for the use of analogies in reading. The study incorporates the theoretical tenets of Constructivism, referring to Piaget (1969), Vygotsky (1997) and Ausubel (2002). The results show that the use of analogies promotes reading comprehension in 4th grade students, from an expository text that compares the evolution of man and the metamorphosis of a butterfly.

Generative linguistics and grammar in Primary Education

This paper aims to relate the generative assumptions and possible collaborations they have given to the "teaching" of Portuguese. With a methodology of research and reflection, it investigates the contribution of the concepts of generative theory and related studies to her in three areas related to the classroom: (a) the delivered content, what is meant by grammar; (b) the effectiveness of teaching materials, given the concepts that express; and (c) the teaching practices, difficulties and issues in "teaching" the mother tongue and the teaching methodology. Is adopted as theoretical frameworks, Chomsky's research (1965 and underlying works) to the basic concepts of Principles and Parameters Theory, the theory Kato (2005) on the grammar of the literate, the proposed VanPatten (2003) on the input and output, the precursor work of Silva (2013) which relates gerativismo and teaching, and the papers of Neves (1994), Costa and Barin (2003) and Pilati (2014) on the current reality of the classroom. It concludes that the gerativismo has contributed indeed with concepts that can mitigate the problems faced in "teaching" mother tongue and bring a significant change to education. The need for innovation in teaching practices is imminent and linguistic studies have proven the delay and inefficiency of the methodologies used in the school.

Analogy between the socio-cultural thematic of Macunaíma and the Tarsila do Amaral’s paintings: a possibility of broaden the senses of literary texts

This research seeks establishing relationships between the socio-cultural theme of Macunaíma and the some paintings by Tarsila do Amaral bringing reflections to literature teaching to suggest the seek to broaden the sense of literary texts. We will discuss the literature importance at school according to what is to predicted in the Diretrizes Curriculares de Língua Portuguesa. Research is based  on the notions of intertextuality by Bakhtin (2003),  on the postulates by Etienne Souriau (1983), on the criticism by Candido (2006) on the Reception Aesthetics, by Jauss (2002), Iser (1999) and on the writings by Bordini and Aguiar (1993).