[Corpora-List] Laypersons' applied corpus linguistics

[Hongyin Tao]

Thanks to Adam and everyone for the useful references. Perhaps I should
clarify my subject line a bit. When I read passages like the following as
reported by the journalist (of course without checking the actual study), it
made me to think that a corpus linguist would do more than just looking at
individual words alone:

"The researchers read through the conversations, noting the context of the
IM threads. Then, they used a linguistic word count program to analyze the
conversations' pronouns and words with emotional content.

Among pronouns in IMs, couples used "I" nearly 20 times more frequently than
"we." And of the emotion words, all couples were most likely to use positive
words.

"We found that the extent to which people used positive emotion words like
'great,' 'happy,' 'love,' tended to be happier in their relationships and to
stay in their relationships for a longer period of time," Slatcher said."
While individual words are useful to look into, combinations/collocations
would be equally, if not more, important in understanding texts. This is of
course not exactly an earth-shattering discovery to folks on this list.

Hongyin

On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 10:55 PM, Adam Kilgarriff
<adam at lexmasterclass.com>wrote:

> Dear Hongyin Tao
>
> this isn't layperson's corpus linguistics, it's another discipline called
> Content Analysis, which has been around for longer than corpus linguistics
> but has remarkably little crossover of references and interest despite
> simialrity of methods - the only person I know of who has explicitly linked
> the two approaches is Ken Litkowski.
>
> From the little I know, CA blossomed as a method of propoganda analysis in
> the US in the 60s, and now lives on particularly in psychotherapy and
> related areas, as in the news clip you show.  One big famous system was
> called General Enquirer.  They developed very large lexicons withe words
> marked up for whether they were positive or negative, etc, adn also did lots
> of work on WSD, as polysemy was aproblem for their method.
>
> Refs
>
> Harvard IV Psycho-Sociological Dictionary (*Kelly* & *Stone*, 1975).
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_analysis
> or for the abstract of a psychological piece using it, with a decent intro,
> see http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a785037098~db=all<http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content%7Econtent=a785037098%7Edb=all>
>  Or here:
>
>  The assessment of psychological states through content analysis of verbal
> communications.
> Viney, Linda L.
> Psychological Bulletin. Vol 94(3), Nov 1983, 542-563.
> Abstract
>
>    1. Presents a history of the use of content analysis in psychology and
>    describes the development of CA scales, including an example of a scale in
>    construction. The variety of verbal communications to which CA is applicable
>    is also considered. Issues of reliability and validity were considered in a
>    survey of the literature on a sample of 10 relatively well-developed CA
>    scales. Some of the theoretical and practical advantages of the technique
>    over other methods of assessing psychological states are also examined, as
>    well as some of its problems and limitations. Information about available CA
>    scales is included. Applications of CA in personality, developmental, and
>    social psychology are considered, together with others in clinical,
>    community, and health psychology. The scoring of CA scales by computer is
>    also discussed, as is their contribution to an ethical relationship between
>    researcher and research participant. The viability of CA as an aid in
>    psychological research is evaluated. (158 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c)
>    2008 APA, all rights reserved)
>
> (which scarcely looks layperson-like to me!)
>
> Regards,
>
> Adam Kilgarriff
>
> 2009/1/24 Hongyin Tao <bbs.lists at gmail.com>
>
>>  A recent example that just came up...
>>
>> http://www.livescience.com/culture/090123-instant-message-couples.html
>>
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>
>
> --
> ================================================
> Adam Kilgarriff
> http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk
> Lexical Computing Ltd                   http://www.sketchengine.co.uk
> Lexicography MasterClass Ltd      http://www.lexmasterclass.com
> Universities of Leeds and Sussex       adam at lexmasterclass.com
> ================================================
>
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