Category Archives: Conferences

Defining the content of a concept from below (Manifesto pt. 2 of 3)

This blog post features the second of three extracts from Susan Fitzmaurice’s paper on “Concepts and Conceptual Change in Linguistic DNA”. (See previous post.)

Before tackling the problem of actually defining the content of a concept ‘from below’, we need to imagine ourselves into the position of being able to recognize the emergence of material that is a candidate for being considered a concept. Let’s briefly consider the question of ‘when is a concept’; in other words, how will we recognize something that is relevant, resonant and important in historical, cultural and political terms for our periods of interest?

In a manner that is not trivial, we want our research process to perform the discovery work of an innocent reader, a reader who approaches a universe of discourse without an agenda, but with a will to discover what the text yields up as worthy of notice. This innocent reader is an ideal reader of course; as humans are pattern finders, pattern matchers and meaning makers, it is virtually impossible to imagine a process that is truly ab initio. Indeed, a situation in which the reader is not primed to notice specific features, characteristics or meanings by the cotext or broader context is rare indeed.

The aim is for our processes to imitate the intuitive, intelligent scanning that human readers perform as they survey the universe of discourse in which they are interested (literary and historical documents). We assume that readers gradually begin to notice patterns, perhaps prominent combinations or associations, patterns that appear in juxtaposition in some places and in connection in others (Divjak & Gries, 2012). The key process is the noticing in the text the formation of ideas that gather cohesion and content in linguistic expression. We hypothesize that in the process of noticing, the reader begins to attribute increasing weight to the meanings they locate in the text. One model for this hypothesis is the experience of the foreign language learner who reads a text with her attention drawn to the expressions she recognises and can construe.

The principal problem posed by our project is therefore to extract from the discourse stuff that we might be able to discern as potential concepts. In other words, we aim to identify a concept from the discourse inwards by inspecting the language instead of defining a concept from its content outward (i.e. starting with a term and discerning its meaning). If we move from the discourse inwards, the meanings that we attribute weight to may be implicit and distributed across a stretch of text, in a text window.

Extract from Richard Wolley's 'Present State of France' (1687)

Extract from ‘Present State of France….’ (Richard Wolley, 1687). (EEBO-TCP A27526)

That is, the meanings we notice as relevant might not be encapsulated in individual lexical items or character strings within a simple syntactic frame. This recognition requires that we resist the temptation to treat a word or a character string as coterminous with a concept. Indeed, the more we associate relevance with, say, the frequency of a particular word or character string in a sub-corpus, the less likely we are to be able to look beyond the word as an index of a concept. To remain open and receptive in the process of candidate concept recognition, we need to expand the range of the things we inspect on the one hand and the scope of the context we read on the other.

The linguistic material that will be relevant to the identification of a concept will consist of a combination or set of expressions in association that occur in a concentrated fashion in a stretch of text. Importantly, this material may consist of lexical items, phrases, sentences, and may be conveyed metaphorically as well as literally, and likely pragmatically (by implicature and invited inference) as well as semantically. If the linguistic elaboration (definition, paraphrase, implication) of a concept precedes the lexicalization of a concept, it is reasonable to assume that the appearance of regularly and frequently occurring expressions in degrees of proximity within a window will aid the identification of a concept.

The scope of the context in which a concept appears is likely to be greater than the phrase or sentence that is the context for the keyword that we customarily consider in collocation studies. This context is akin to the modern notion of the paragraph, or, the unit of discourse which conventionally treats a topic or subject with the commentary that makes up the content of the paragraph. The stretch of text relevant for the identification of conceptual material may thus amount to a paragraph, a page, or a short text.

The linguistic structure of a concept has been shown to be built both paradigmatically (via synonymy) and syntagmatically (via lexical associations, syntax, paraphrase). For our purposes, given that the task entails picking up clues to the construction of concepts from the linguistic material in the context, where ‘context’ is defined pretty broadly, paradigmatic relations are less likely to be salient than syntagmatic relations like paraphrase, vagueness and association, perhaps more than predictable relations like antonymy and polysemy.

See the final post in this Manifesto series.

References

 

Divjak, Dagmar & Gries, Stefan Th. (eds). 2012. Frequency effects in language learning and processing (Vol. 1). Berlin: De Gruyter

 

From Data to Evidence (d2e): conference reflections

HelsinkiFraser and Iona report (November 2015):

Six members of the Linguistic DNA team were present at the recent d2e conference held by the VARIENG research unit at the University of Helsinki, Finland. The focus of the conference was on tools and methodologies employed in corpus linguistics, whilst the event took for its theme ‘big data, rich data, uncharted data’. The conference offered much food for thought, raising our awareness of the tools and methods employed by other researchers in similar fields. Frequently it was clear that despite the differences between the goals of, for example, sociolinguistics and historical semantics, the knowledge and approach towards data taken by one could be effectively and productively applied to another.

The conference’s plenary speeches were of particular interest. Tony McEnery delineated potential limitations of corpus data and its analysis. His call for researchers to remain aware of the limitations of their data struck a chord with our findings from close examination of EEBO data in its raw and processed forms. One of his main conclusions was the importance of conducting cyclical research—analysing the data with software tools and then returning to the data itself to verify the validity of the findings. LDNA is set up to follow this approach, and Professor McEnery’s presentation reaffirmed its importance. Plenaries by Jane Winters and Päivi Pahta looked further into working with historical data and—in the latter particularly—historical linguistic data, whilst a fascinating presentation by Mark Davies emphasised the importance of corpus size in the type of research which we are undertaking.

LDNA is also taking an active interest in innovative approaches to data analysis and visualisation. Demonstrating software, Gerold Schneider, Eetu Mäkelä, and Jonathan Hope each showcased new tools for representing historical language data and wrangling with metadata. As we progress in our thinking about the kinds of processing which will allow us to identify concepts in our data, we are always on the lookout for ideas and methodological developments which might help us to improve our own findings.

Several research papers connected with the interests of LDNA, especially when they adhered closely to the conference’s theme of exploring large and complex datasets in ways which reveal new patterns in the data. James McCracken’s presentation on adding frequency information to the Oxford English Dictionary was very exciting for the possibilities it could open up to future historical linguistics. (We’ve blogged before about the drawback of not having relevant frequency data when using tools like VARD.) Meanwhile, the techniques used to track change in words’ behaviour, with different dimensions of semantic evolution scrutinised by Hendrik De Smet (for Hansard), Gerold Schneider (in COHA), and Hannah Kermes and Stephania Degaetano-Ortlieb of Saarland University (working with the Royal Scientific Corpus) were not only intrinsically fascinating but provide useful pointers towards the depth and complexity of linguistic features LDNA will need to consider. We will also aim to keep in view Joseph Flanagan’s insistence that linguistic studies should aim for reproducibility, an insistence aided (for those who code with R) by the suite of tools he recommended.

The d2e conference packed a lot into a few days, creating an intense and productive atmosphere in which participants could meet, exchange ideas, and become more aware of the scope of others’ work in related fields. We enjoyed the conversations around our own poster, and much appreciated the hospitality throughout. It was a great opportunity for the LDNA team, providing more invaluable input to our thought and approach to our work.

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Abstracts from the conference are available from the d2e pages on the Varieng website.

Anni Aarinen provides a write-up of McEnery’s keynote.

Glasgow-based LDNA member Brian Aitken has written up his d2e experience on the Digital Humanities blog.