Volume 41 (2017): Issue 1 (March 2017)

There have been significant social and political changes in Australian society since federation in 1901. The issues that are considered politically salient have also changed significantly. The purpose of this article is to examine changes in the style and content of election campaign speeches over the period 1901-2016. The corpus consists of 88 election campaign speeches delivered by the Prime Minister and Opposition leader for the 45 elections from 1901 to 2016. I use natural language processing to extract from the speeches a number of linguistic variables which serve as independent variables and use the year of delivery as the dependent variable. I then use machine learning to develop a regression model which explains 77 per cent of the variance in the dependent variable. Examination of the salient independent variables shows that there have been significant linguistic changes in the style and content of election speeches over the study period. In particular speeches have become less linguistically complex, less introspective, more focused on work and the home, and contain more visual and social references. I discuss these changes in the context of changes in Australian society over the study period.

The study explores the potential of quantitative methods to shed light on how texts originally written in English (EO) and texts translated into English (ET) from Norwegian cluster in terms of functional classes. The object of study are sequences of three words (3-grams), classified into 15 functional categories. The investigation establishes that EO and ET do not differ significantly in half of the categories. As for the categories that do differ, two (Comparison and Spatial) are investigated in more detail, uncovering that the more frequent use of Comparison and Spatial 3-grams in ET is most likely a result of source language shining through. The findings are important in the context of both descriptive translation studies and translation-based contrastive studies. With regard to the former, the current study shows that, in many cases, ET does not seem to constitute a ‘third code’ at the level of 3-gram functions, since the same functions are equally attested in EO. As far as contrastive studies are concerned, the investigation reveals few, if any, lexico-grammatical differences between EO and ET that overturn the belief that translations are a good tertium comparationis when comparing and contrasting language systems.

Held at The John Rylands Library, Manchester, the Mary Hamilton Papers are a valuable, but still largely untapped resource for linguistic, cultural and literary studies focussing on the late eighteenth century. In her diaries Lady Mary Hamilton (1756-1816) documents daily life and friendships with intellectual figures of the time, for instance Horace Walpole and members of the Bluestocking circle, which included Elizabeth Montagu and Frances Burney. The archive also contains letters written to Lady Mary Hamilton by her family and other members of her social network.

The aim of this project is to prepare a digital edition of materials from the Mary Hamilton Papers with TEI-conformant XML mark-up, in which both a facsimile of the manuscripts and their transliterations (preserving the original spelling, punctuation and layout) will be displayed. In addition, the edition will offer rich meta-data and mark-up of places, persons and literary works, as well as normalized spellings, which will assist searches for linguistic features differing from Present-day English such as (non-)capitalisation (e.g. english, Breakfast) and past tense spellings like dress’d and staid.

Drawing on material from the Mary Hamilton Papers and the Corpus of Late Modern English Prose, we provide a case study to illustrate the usefulness of the Mary Hamilton Papers for the study of language change and social networks in the Late Modern period.

The present study seeks to contribute to two sparsely examined areas of World Englishes research by (i) quantitatively evaluating two potential linguistic epicenters in Asia (Indian and Singapore English) while (ii) investigating the English genitive alternation in a cross-varietal perspective. In a corpus-based bottom-up approach, we evaluate 4,200 interchangeable genitive cases of written English from Great Britain, Hong Kong, India, the Philippines, Singapore and Sri Lanka, as represented in the International Corpus of English. We use a new method called MuPDARF, a multifactorial deviation analysis based on random forest classifications, to evaluate to what extent and with which factors the Asian varieties differ from British English in their genitive choices. Results show conspicuous differences between British English and the Asian varieties and validate the potential epicenter status of Indian English for South Asia, but not unanimously that of Singapore English for Southeast Asia.

This study examines for the first time a very large set of psychological verbs and their derived adjectives in English. To determine whether an item is an adjective or not, we take the standard structural criteria of morphological (-ly or un-), morpho-syntactic (very, -er/-est or more/most) and syntactic (seem, look, or feel) characteristics. As for the data, we selected three data bases and gathered those containing certain items in specific contexts, such as whether the item in question takes a -ly or un- affix, or a comparative or superlative form, or follows seem, look or feel. We took dictionaries as our source of criteria in checking whether an item was perceived to be an adjective. As a result, we found some hierarchy within adjectives as to whether they take morphological, morpho-syntactic, or syntactic characteristics. The most powerful determinant of adjectives is the morphological characteristic -ly.

Since the inception of the ICE project in 1990, ICE corpora have been used extensively in the investigation and comparison of varieties of English on different linguistic levels. These levels, however, have so far primarily been restricted to lexis and lexico-grammar, while relatively little has to date been achieved in the investigation of pragmatic strategies used by the speakers in these corpora. One of the main reasons for this shortcoming is a lack of suitable annotation that would make such a detailed pragmatic comparison possible. This paper will propose a suitable model and format for converting and enriching the ICE corpora with different levels of pragmatics-relevant information, as well as discussing the issues involved in this endeavour. And finally, to illustrate the feasibility of this aim, the paper will also include a small case study carried out on a number of files, pointing out how the resulting annotations could later be exploited in pragmatics research.