English collocations extracted from a corpus of university learners and its contribution to a language teaching pedagogy

Taking into consideration the relevance of foreign language teaching and the learning of collocations (ALTENBERG; EEG-OLOFSSON, 1990; FONTENELLE, 1994; MEUNIER; GRANGER, 2008), this paper aims at showing results of an investigation on whether the teaching of collocations should be implicit or explicit to the Brazilian university students. Furthermore, the research has the purpose of presenting some collocational aspects from a corpus of the written language learners made up of intermediate, upper intermediate and advanced university students' argumentative essays at a public university in Brazil. With the help of WordSmith Tools (SCOTT, 2007), it was possible to raise students' most frequent collocational choices and patterns, the most/least used type of collocations, the influence of the mother tongue on their choices, among other aspects. With the purpose of motivating and involving students in classroom research, it was also introduced The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), created by Mark Davies. By doing so, students could compare their collocational choices with the patterns found in the online corpus, extract more collocational patterns and, consequently, be aware of the potential of corpora for the foreign learning process, specifically for raising language awareness, with focus on prefabricated chunks.

IPLR: An online resource for Greek word-level and sublexical information

We present a new online psycholinguistic resource for Greek based on analyses of written corpora combined with text processing technologies developed at the Institute for Language & Speech Processing (ILSP), Greece. The "ILSP PsychoLinguistic Resource" (IPLR) is a freely accessible service via a dedicated web page, at http://speech.ilsp.gr/iplr. IPLR provides analyses of user-submitted letter strings (words and nonwords) as well as frequency tables for important units and conditions such as syllables, bigrams, and neighbors, calculated over two word lists based on printed text corpora and their phonetic transcription. Online tools allow retrieval of words matching user-specified orthographic or phonetic patterns. All results and processing code (in the Python programming language) are freely available for noncommercial educational or research use. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

A reassessment of traditional lexicographical tools in the light of new corpora: sports Anglicisms in Spanish

There is no question nowadays as to the international and powerful status of English at a global scale and, consequently, as to its presence in non-English speaking countries at different levels. Linguistically speaking, English is one of the languages which have mostly influenced Spanish throughout its history and especially from the late 1960s. In this study, the impact of English on Spanish is considered in the language of sports; particularly, sports Anglicisms and false Anglicisms are analysed. Due attention is paid to the different forms that an Anglicism may adopt and to which of those forms are more widely accepted or rejected by prescriptivists and speakers at large, in the light of a contrastive analysis of their appearance in the Nuevo diccionario de anglicismos, the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española and the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual.

The use of corpora as translation resources: A study based on a survey of Spanish professional translators

The aim of this paper is to describe the use that professional translators make of corpora as translation resources. First, we briefly review the literature on translation practitioners’ use of corpora in the contexts of both translation training and professional translation. Then we present our survey-based study, analyse the uptake of corpora among Spanish translators and describe the use of this kind of translation resource. The results show that even if corpora are not as frequently used as other kinds of resources, such as dictionaries, there are professional translators who do use corpora, in a variety of ways, in their work. Additionally, non-users do not seem entirely sceptical about corpora. Against that backdrop, translator trainers are invited to continue to report on how corpora can be used as translation resources.

COMUNICAÇÃO MERCADOLÓGICA EM MÍDIAS SOCIAIS ONLINE ANÁLISES PARA RELACIONAMENTOS EM REDES VIRTUAIS

Com o propósito de incrementar suas campanhas mercadológicas, muitas organizações, recorrem às ferramentas de mídias sociais hospedadas na Internet. Com isso, procuram o aumento de produtividade com adoção de sistemas automatizados de reprodução de mensagens, ou mesmo de recursos de acesso direto, inserindo mensagens de caráter persuasivo nos fóruns de discussões em comunidades online. Uma certa falta de sensibilidade para com o trato comunicacional, num meio potencialmente promissor, mas que pede uma outra interpretação, para posterior ação. Frequentemente implica em uma possibilidade de reverberação indicando ser imprescindível maior atenção na elaboração e no direcionamento desses fluxos comunicacionais, acentuadamente os de propósitos persuasivos. Nesse sentido, o presente trabalho propõe o estudo de comunidades online nas quais possamos a partir da identificação dos fatores que levem à sua formação, analisar e interpretar sua estrutura e seus fluxos comunicacionais, tais que, indiquem seus elementos agregadores. Para tal, com os preceitos metodológicos observados, objetivou-se demonstrar que, com esses componentes, as análises podem ser desenvolvidas para melhor adequação de estratégias de relacionamentos, possibilitando ações inerentes ao processo comunicacional mercadológico com essas comunidades. A metodologia ora empregada envolveu análise estrutural da rede com aplicações de softwares como UCINET, integrado com NetDraw, e dos fluxos comunicacionais, que formaram o corpora, analisado com a suíte Wordsmith Tools. Uma rede formada em comunidade hospedada na ferramenta orkut, por meio da obtenção dos conteúdos de fóruns temáticos, forneceu o corpora para as análises lexicais. Os resultados obtidos puderam caracterizar, não só a própria existência da rede social, como as potencialidades de relacionamento, a partir de interpretações de fluxos dialógicos de seus elementos agregadores, por meio de recursos visuais (grafos), estatísticos e lexicais.

Web-application for Presentation of Bulgarian Language Heritage: Bilingual Digital Corpora and Dictionaries

The paper describes three software packages - the main components of a software system for processing and web-presentation of Bulgarian language resources – parallel corpora and bilingual dictionaries. The author briefly presents current versions of the core components “Dictionary” and “Corpus” as well as the recently developed component “Connection” that links both “Dictionary” and “Corpus”. The components main functionalities are described as well. Some examples of the usage of the system’s web-applications are included.

Analyzing lexical emergence in Modern American English online

This paper introduces a quantitative method for identifying newly emerging word forms in large time-stamped corpora of natural language and then describes an analysis of lexical emergence in American social media using this method based on a multi-billion word corpus of Tweets collected between October 2013 and November 2014. In total 29 emerging word forms, which represent various semantic classes, grammatical parts-of speech, and word formations processes, were identified through this analysis. These 29 forms are then examined from various perspectives in order to begin to better understand the process of lexical emergence.

Evolutions of an Online Generation: Education, Industry and IMC

This paper traces the evolutions of a new generation of students who are predominantly the ‘online generation’; explores the emerging impact of this generation on industry; identifies the changing role of education from traditional classroom to an online environment; and explores the contribution related to integrated marketing communications (IMC). Educational requirements from a business perspective must incorporate global business demands; virtual learning environments progress the online generation towards a post-modern learning state. The central proposition of this paper is that the emergence of IMC in evolving industry practices is influenced by student generations who are producing a new paradigm of alignment between education and industry. This is purely a conceptual exploration using limited examples to provide some context and illustrate the questions raised for consideration.