[Corpora-List] Keyness across Texts

[Mike Scott]

I agree with Jin-Dong Kim's points 99% -- with one little proviso, 
namely that "verbs like 'be' or 'observed' as keywords which will be 
hardly accepted as keywords" depends on what one wants to accept, so I 
am less confident of Kim's "hardly".
In Siena recently at a conference on keyness, those present considered 
suggested possibilities that a) a key word (or phrase) must definitely 
be a noun, and b) that a key word definitely could not be a function 
word (like "the" or "do"). My own position was that a machine-generated 
key word can be a word like "do" or "it", that when it is such a word 
(and I agree a human would never consider them as potentially key) it is 
likely to be extremely interesting and to merit further investigation as 
to why it has stood out. In that way, "be" could be key of a certain 
text or set of texts and could actually point not directly but 
indirectly to aboutness.
BE is not as "about-y" a word as ELEPHANT, because I cannot picture BE 
but I can imagine an elephant -- but in any case to decide that ELEPHANT 
reflects aboutness surely is to assume a dodgy kind of naive semantics, 
rather like BACHELOR being +MALE -MARRIED etc.
I am happy to agree that BE cannot point straight to "be-ness", whatever 
that might be, but it could point to some other pattern involving "be" 
which might well tell us what the focus texts were about, as my 
Shakespeare examples involving DO in Othello can.

Cheers -- Mike  

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