Volume 38 (2014): Issue 1 (April 2014)

Computer-assisted content analysis has many advantages compared to a manual scoring system, provided that computerised dictionaries represent valid and reliable measures. This study aimed to assess the inter-coder reliability, alternate- form reliability and scoring consistency of the Body Type Dictionary (BTD) (Wilson 2006) based on Fisher and Cleveland’s (1956, 1958) manual body boundary scoring scheme. The results indicated an acceptable inter-coder agreement with barrier and penetration imagery in the sub-sample (N = 53) of manually coded Rorschach responses. Additionally manually coded scores showed an acceptable correlation with the computerised frequency counts, and thus indicating an alternate-form reliability. In the full data set (N = 526), barrier imagery in the Rorschach responses only correlated with the picture response test, showing low scoring consistency, which might disconfirm the notion of body boundary awareness representing a stable personality trait but instead it might be dependent on the level of cognitive dedifferentiation.

This paper shows how online travel articles may provide important insights into how a tourist destination is perceived and to what extent what is known as the ‘tourist gaze’ may be used to recontextualise tourist material in order to produce more effective tourist texts, which meet receivers’ expectations. For this purpose, three comparable corpora of online travel articles in English, Italian and German language were assembled and analysed in order to understand the way ordinary travellers perceive and experience a tourist destination in Italy (Puglia) by taking language as a point of reference. The first fifteen words of the frequency lists in the three corpora highlighted what landmarks and elements of attraction English, Italian and German travel writers gaze at while on holiday in Puglia. The analysis demonstrated that the Italian tourist gaze is different from the English and German tourist gazes, since not all of them focus on the same landscapes, and even when they gaze at the same sights, their perception and representation are often different. The similarities and differences between the ways the tourists behave suggest a distinction between a model of ‘global gaze’ embodied by English and German travellers, seen as ‘outsiders’, and a model of ‘local gaze’ embodied by Italian tourists, seen as ‘insiders'

This paper argues for, and presents, a modest approach to XML encoding for use by the majority of contemporary linguists who need to engage in corpus construction. While extensive standards for corpus encoding exist - most notably, the Text Encoding Initiative’s Guidelines and the Corpus Encoding Standard based on them - these are rather heavyweight approaches, implicitly intended for major corpus-building projects, which are rather different from the increasingly common efforts in corpus construction undertaken by individual researchers in support of their personal research goals. Therefore, there is a clear benefit to be had from a set of recommendations (not a standard) that outlines general best practices in the use of XML in corpora without going into any of the more technical aspects of XML or the full weight of TEI encoding. This paper presents such a set of suggestions, dubbed Modest XML for Corpora, and posits that such a set of pointers to a limited level of XML knowledge could work as part of the normal, general training of corpus linguists.

The Modest XML recommendations cover the following set of things, which, according to the foregoing argument, are sufficient knowledge about XML for most corpus linguists’ day-to-day needs: use of tags; adding attribute value pairs; recommended use of attributes; nesting of tags; encoding of special characters; XML well-formedness; a collection of de facto standard tags and attributes; going beyond the basic de facto standard tags; and text headers.

This paper combines data from learner corpora and psycholinguistic experiments in an attempt to find out what advanced learners of English (first language backgrounds German and Spanish) know about a range of common verbargument constructions (VACs), such as the ‘V about n’ construction (e.g. she thinks about chocolate a lot). Learners’ dominant verb-VAC associations are examined based on evidence retrieved from the German and Spanish subcomponents of ICLE and LINDSEI and collected in lexical production tasks in which participants complete VAC frames (e.g. ‘he ___ about the...’) with verbs that may fill the blank (e.g. talked, thought, wondered). The paper compares findings from the different data sets and highlights the value of linking corpus and experimental evidence in studying linguistic phenomena

Computer-assisted content analysis has many advantages compared to a manual scoring system, provided that computerised dictionaries represent valid and reliable measures. This study aimed to assess the inter-coder reliability, alternate- form reliability and scoring consistency of the Body Type Dictionary (BTD) (Wilson 2006) based on Fisher and Cleveland’s (1956, 1958) manual body boundary scoring scheme. The results indicated an acceptable inter-coder agreement with barrier and penetration imagery in the sub-sample (N = 53) of manually coded Rorschach responses. Additionally manually coded scores showed an acceptable correlation with the computerised frequency counts, and thus indicating an alternate-form reliability. In the full data set (N = 526), barrier imagery in the Rorschach responses only correlated with the picture response test, showing low scoring consistency, which might disconfirm the notion of body boundary awareness representing a stable personality trait but instead it might be dependent on the level of cognitive dedifferentiation.

This paper shows how online travel articles may provide important insights into how a tourist destination is perceived and to what extent what is known as the ‘tourist gaze’ may be used to recontextualise tourist material in order to produce more effective tourist texts, which meet receivers’ expectations. For this purpose, three comparable corpora of online travel articles in English, Italian and German language were assembled and analysed in order to understand the way ordinary travellers perceive and experience a tourist destination in Italy (Puglia) by taking language as a point of reference. The first fifteen words of the frequency lists in the three corpora highlighted what landmarks and elements of attraction English, Italian and German travel writers gaze at while on holiday in Puglia. The analysis demonstrated that the Italian tourist gaze is different from the English and German tourist gazes, since not all of them focus on the same landscapes, and even when they gaze at the same sights, their perception and representation are often different. The similarities and differences between the ways the tourists behave suggest a distinction between a model of ‘global gaze’ embodied by English and German travellers, seen as ‘outsiders’, and a model of ‘local gaze’ embodied by Italian tourists, seen as ‘insiders'

This paper argues for, and presents, a modest approach to XML encoding for use by the majority of contemporary linguists who need to engage in corpus construction. While extensive standards for corpus encoding exist - most notably, the Text Encoding Initiative’s Guidelines and the Corpus Encoding Standard based on them - these are rather heavyweight approaches, implicitly intended for major corpus-building projects, which are rather different from the increasingly common efforts in corpus construction undertaken by individual researchers in support of their personal research goals. Therefore, there is a clear benefit to be had from a set of recommendations (not a standard) that outlines general best practices in the use of XML in corpora without going into any of the more technical aspects of XML or the full weight of TEI encoding. This paper presents such a set of suggestions, dubbed Modest XML for Corpora, and posits that such a set of pointers to a limited level of XML knowledge could work as part of the normal, general training of corpus linguists.

The Modest XML recommendations cover the following set of things, which, according to the foregoing argument, are sufficient knowledge about XML for most corpus linguists’ day-to-day needs: use of tags; adding attribute value pairs; recommended use of attributes; nesting of tags; encoding of special characters; XML well-formedness; a collection of de facto standard tags and attributes; going beyond the basic de facto standard tags; and text headers.

This paper combines data from learner corpora and psycholinguistic experiments in an attempt to find out what advanced learners of English (first language backgrounds German and Spanish) know about a range of common verbargument constructions (VACs), such as the ‘V about n’ construction (e.g. she thinks about chocolate a lot). Learners’ dominant verb-VAC associations are examined based on evidence retrieved from the German and Spanish subcomponents of ICLE and LINDSEI and collected in lexical production tasks in which participants complete VAC frames (e.g. ‘he ___ about the...’) with verbs that may fill the blank (e.g. talked, thought, wondered). The paper compares findings from the different data sets and highlights the value of linking corpus and experimental evidence in studying linguistic phenomena