[Corpora-List] Keyness across Texts

[Przemek Kaszubski]

Dear Mike and All,

I very much second your remark there. This is also why I am so fond of 
your consistent spelling "key word" rather than "keyword" (reflected 
even in the name of the KeyWords module!).

One fantastic feature of KeyWords is of course the possibility of 
extracting key clusters. One can, for example, group and count those 
clusters in which specific key words repeat, and this way additionally 
confirm and contextualize their status, very nicely indeed.

Oh, I wish I too had been able to attend the Siena feast...

Regards,

Przemek


Mike Scott wrote (2007-07-10 13:37):
> 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  
>

-- 
Dr Przemyslaw Kaszubski
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