I invented Corpus Stylistics in 1987 at A British Council Workshop chaired by Ron Carter at St Hilda's College Oxford. My work has developed in the following areas since then: Semantic Prosody (1993)
It is common cause that for a theory of meaning to subsist (whilst still unfalsified), it must, a... more It is common cause that for a theory of meaning to subsist (whilst still unfalsified), it must, at the very least, be capable of providing a starting point for successful interpretation. Its telos in the development of theory would, in the information age, would emerge as instrumentation. In other words, the output of an analysis of the given would always and everywhere need to be both diagnostic and unerring. The cognitive would stand defeated and falsified in any situation in which it found itself incapable of fulfilling both of these basic conditions. The fact that mass deception continues to subsist within institutional meaning may be our best indication that the cognitive and concepts are overdue for replacement. However, the persistence with which the cognitive continues to survive begins to lend fake credence to claims that it still has a right to operate within corpus studies. It has become a matter of urgency for all inquiry to focus on setting criteria and conditions for the ejection from corpus studies of the cognitive and its exclusion by scientific means from that discipline. Attempts to provide 'footholds for the falsified' within corpus work must be uncovered and dismantled. They must be resisted along with all initiatives that argue for a 'convergence theory' of corpus studies. It is pointless and irresponsible to make light of the glaring issue of intuitive failure or to fail, even in major scholarly works, to mention it. Secrecy thrives on a lack of mention. Because progress in dismantling intuitive theories and schools of thought within linguistics is likely to be slow and far from durable, the final solution must involve reforming analytic philosophy at the same time. Quine's Third Dogma of Empiricism will need to be replaced by instrumentation that philosophers believe can be 'handed over to science'. Collocation will be that instrumentation. It will cause no disruption in philosophy because its operation is not syntactic (i.e, abstracted at the level of syntax) and it presents itself, not as an opponent to logic, but as an ally. After collocation has been accepted by philosophy and science, it may be re-imported into linguistics from science, shorn of all of its erstwhile ideological stigmata.
Comprehensive instrumentation for both the analysis and creation of humour is to be found within ... more Comprehensive instrumentation for both the analysis and creation of humour is to be found within and among the software resources for corpus linguistics that were set in place by the late John Sinclair during the production of two editions (1987; 1995) of the COBUILD English Language Dictionary. The approach is contextual and involves the automation by collocation of the work of philosophers and linguists from the precomputational period. The philosophers include Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolph Carnap, and Bertrand Russell. Other scholars include the ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski and John Rupert Firth and John McHardy Sinclair. Visual and textual humour may now be analysed using Wittgenstein's picture theory of meaning (1922: 7) as this is easily automated by collocation and the corpus. Although the approach is light-hearted and simple to use, the empiricism and science that underpin it offer incontrovertible proof that digital collocation is comprehensive instrumentation for meaning both in the real world and within any Fregean subset of fictional worlds (Louw, 2009; Louw, 2010). Collocation is capable of predicting and grading the likely success of all humorous contexts of situation as well as composition. Furthermore, because the COBUILD dictionaries are themselves scientific products, based upon respectable levels of empiricism set out in every entry of the dictionary itself (1995), readers will, after reading this paper, be able to pursue the topic by using the COBUILD dictionary alone, without necessarily making a commitment to the direct use of corpora. The contribution of John Sinclair in creating these resources and the theories that support them (such as semantic prosody) will be demonstrated and celebrated in this paper, both for their consistency, down to and including his last publications, and for their contribution to the benefit of science and mankind.
The volume presents Louw's Contextual Prosodic Theory from its beginnings to its newest applicati... more The volume presents Louw's Contextual Prosodic Theory from its beginnings to its newest applications. It journeys from delexicalisation and relexicalisation into Semantic Prosody and then to the heart of its contextual requirements within collocation and the thinking of J.R. Firth. Once there, it moves much of Firth’s and Malinowski’s thinking into a computational method based upon the ability of language to govern and analyse itself using collocation to plot its scope and limits. With the assistance of analytic philosophy, it parts logic (grammar) from metaphysics (vocabulary) along the lines of a non-computational formula of Bertrand Russell, and so falsifies the major premise of the Vienna Circle using its own central tenet: the Principle of Verification. Having arrived at corpus-derived subtext (the semantic aura of grammar strings, as distinguished from Semantic Prosody), the second half of the book proceeds to verify the theory on Slavic languages. The focus is on the poet Alexander Pushkin, whose authorial intention becomes computationally recoverable. Prose is handled on samples authored by David Lodge, where authorial (in)sincerity (Louw 1993) is viewed on a cline of inspiration and quality of discourse. Other applications in the volume include studies on translation, negotiation, humour, and the reception of CPT by Belgrade students of English. [Linguistic Approaches to Literature, 23] Expected February 2016. xvii, 414 pp. + index
Your e-mail address appears to be invalid because the domain name was not recognised, perhaps due... more Your e-mail address appears to be invalid because the domain name was not recognised, perhaps due to a typo. Please enter a valid e-mail address so that we can verify your account. ... Please enable JavaScript to make signing up easier. ... Read more about these features on the ...
... Automating the estraction of literary worlds and their subtexts from the poetry of William Bu... more ... Automating the estraction of literary worlds and their subtexts from the poetry of William Butler Yeats. Autores: Bill Louw; Localización: Para, por y sobre Luis Quereda / coord. por Marta Falces Sierra, 2010, ISBN 978-84-338-5170-3 , págs. 635-658. Fundación Dialnet. ...
The initial section of Louw’s paper illustrates the theoretical premises of his analysis and focu... more The initial section of Louw’s paper illustrates the theoretical premises of his analysis and focuses on the fi gures of Jakobson and Firth. Louw writes that Jakobson’s article entitled ‘Poetry of grammar and grammar of poetry’ (1968) shows that his investigative technique was very close to that of Firthian stylistics. At the same time, however, he also argues that Jakobson’s work managed only a glimpse into the possibilities offered by the notion of ‘context of situation’ as theorised by Malinowski and Firth, and that, as a consequence, his theory of poetry is marred by this serious limitation.
Before the advent of corpus linguistics and the information age, the fact that language would bec... more Before the advent of corpus linguistics and the information age, the fact that language would become its own instrumentation could not have been foreseen. This, coupled with the simultaneous realisation (largely as a result of lexicographical studies by John Sinclair in 1987 and into ...
It is common cause that for a theory of meaning to subsist (whilst still unfalsified), it must, a... more It is common cause that for a theory of meaning to subsist (whilst still unfalsified), it must, at the very least, be capable of providing a starting point for successful interpretation. Its telos in the development of theory would, in the information age, would emerge as instrumentation. In other words, the output of an analysis of the given would always and everywhere need to be both diagnostic and unerring. The cognitive would stand defeated and falsified in any situation in which it found itself incapable of fulfilling both of these basic conditions. The fact that mass deception continues to subsist within institutional meaning may be our best indication that the cognitive and concepts are overdue for replacement. However, the persistence with which the cognitive continues to survive begins to lend fake credence to claims that it still has a right to operate within corpus studies. It has become a matter of urgency for all inquiry to focus on setting criteria and conditions for the ejection from corpus studies of the cognitive and its exclusion by scientific means from that discipline. Attempts to provide 'footholds for the falsified' within corpus work must be uncovered and dismantled. They must be resisted along with all initiatives that argue for a 'convergence theory' of corpus studies. It is pointless and irresponsible to make light of the glaring issue of intuitive failure or to fail, even in major scholarly works, to mention it. Secrecy thrives on a lack of mention. Because progress in dismantling intuitive theories and schools of thought within linguistics is likely to be slow and far from durable, the final solution must involve reforming analytic philosophy at the same time. Quine's Third Dogma of Empiricism will need to be replaced by instrumentation that philosophers believe can be 'handed over to science'. Collocation will be that instrumentation. It will cause no disruption in philosophy because its operation is not syntactic (i.e, abstracted at the level of syntax) and it presents itself, not as an opponent to logic, but as an ally. After collocation has been accepted by philosophy and science, it may be re-imported into linguistics from science, shorn of all of its erstwhile ideological stigmata.
Comprehensive instrumentation for both the analysis and creation of humour is to be found within ... more Comprehensive instrumentation for both the analysis and creation of humour is to be found within and among the software resources for corpus linguistics that were set in place by the late John Sinclair during the production of two editions (1987; 1995) of the COBUILD English Language Dictionary. The approach is contextual and involves the automation by collocation of the work of philosophers and linguists from the precomputational period. The philosophers include Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolph Carnap, and Bertrand Russell. Other scholars include the ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski and John Rupert Firth and John McHardy Sinclair. Visual and textual humour may now be analysed using Wittgenstein's picture theory of meaning (1922: 7) as this is easily automated by collocation and the corpus. Although the approach is light-hearted and simple to use, the empiricism and science that underpin it offer incontrovertible proof that digital collocation is comprehensive instrumentation for meaning both in the real world and within any Fregean subset of fictional worlds (Louw, 2009; Louw, 2010). Collocation is capable of predicting and grading the likely success of all humorous contexts of situation as well as composition. Furthermore, because the COBUILD dictionaries are themselves scientific products, based upon respectable levels of empiricism set out in every entry of the dictionary itself (1995), readers will, after reading this paper, be able to pursue the topic by using the COBUILD dictionary alone, without necessarily making a commitment to the direct use of corpora. The contribution of John Sinclair in creating these resources and the theories that support them (such as semantic prosody) will be demonstrated and celebrated in this paper, both for their consistency, down to and including his last publications, and for their contribution to the benefit of science and mankind.
The volume presents Louw's Contextual Prosodic Theory from its beginnings to its newest applicati... more The volume presents Louw's Contextual Prosodic Theory from its beginnings to its newest applications. It journeys from delexicalisation and relexicalisation into Semantic Prosody and then to the heart of its contextual requirements within collocation and the thinking of J.R. Firth. Once there, it moves much of Firth’s and Malinowski’s thinking into a computational method based upon the ability of language to govern and analyse itself using collocation to plot its scope and limits. With the assistance of analytic philosophy, it parts logic (grammar) from metaphysics (vocabulary) along the lines of a non-computational formula of Bertrand Russell, and so falsifies the major premise of the Vienna Circle using its own central tenet: the Principle of Verification. Having arrived at corpus-derived subtext (the semantic aura of grammar strings, as distinguished from Semantic Prosody), the second half of the book proceeds to verify the theory on Slavic languages. The focus is on the poet Alexander Pushkin, whose authorial intention becomes computationally recoverable. Prose is handled on samples authored by David Lodge, where authorial (in)sincerity (Louw 1993) is viewed on a cline of inspiration and quality of discourse. Other applications in the volume include studies on translation, negotiation, humour, and the reception of CPT by Belgrade students of English. [Linguistic Approaches to Literature, 23] Expected February 2016. xvii, 414 pp. + index
Your e-mail address appears to be invalid because the domain name was not recognised, perhaps due... more Your e-mail address appears to be invalid because the domain name was not recognised, perhaps due to a typo. Please enter a valid e-mail address so that we can verify your account. ... Please enable JavaScript to make signing up easier. ... Read more about these features on the ...
... Automating the estraction of literary worlds and their subtexts from the poetry of William Bu... more ... Automating the estraction of literary worlds and their subtexts from the poetry of William Butler Yeats. Autores: Bill Louw; Localización: Para, por y sobre Luis Quereda / coord. por Marta Falces Sierra, 2010, ISBN 978-84-338-5170-3 , págs. 635-658. Fundación Dialnet. ...
The initial section of Louw’s paper illustrates the theoretical premises of his analysis and focu... more The initial section of Louw’s paper illustrates the theoretical premises of his analysis and focuses on the fi gures of Jakobson and Firth. Louw writes that Jakobson’s article entitled ‘Poetry of grammar and grammar of poetry’ (1968) shows that his investigative technique was very close to that of Firthian stylistics. At the same time, however, he also argues that Jakobson’s work managed only a glimpse into the possibilities offered by the notion of ‘context of situation’ as theorised by Malinowski and Firth, and that, as a consequence, his theory of poetry is marred by this serious limitation.
Before the advent of corpus linguistics and the information age, the fact that language would bec... more Before the advent of corpus linguistics and the information age, the fact that language would become its own instrumentation could not have been foreseen. This, coupled with the simultaneous realisation (largely as a result of lexicographical studies by John Sinclair in 1987 and into ...
John Sinclair1 defines collocation as the occurrence of two or more words within a short space of... more John Sinclair1 defines collocation as the occurrence of two or more words within a short space of one another. The usual measure of proximity is a maximum of four words intervening. Collocations can be dramatic and interesting because unexpected, or they can be important in the lexical structure of the language because of being frequently repeated… Each citation or concordance line exemplifies a particular word or phrase. This word or phrase is called the node. It is normally presented with other words to the left and the right and these are called collocates. The collocates can be counted and this measurement is called the span… attention is concentrated on lexical cooccurrence. independently of grammatical pattern or positional relationship. (Sinclair, 1991: 170; emphasis added)
Method (Gk. Meta + hodos) means an ‘after-path’. Radical revisions of methodology follow momentou... more Method (Gk. Meta + hodos) means an ‘after-path’. Radical revisions of methodology follow momentous paradigm-shifts within scientific theories. Hence linguistic-stylistics developed analogue collocation into its digital counterpart, especially through the discovery of semantic prosodies (Sinclair 2004b; Louw 1993). This led to the recognition (Louw 1991; 2000; 2007d) that all literary devices have a corpus-accessible feature in common: relexicalisation. Delexicalisation arose out of developments in lexicography. Sinclair refers to the two terms as forming a continuum (Sinclair 2004a: 198fn18). This continuum is marked (Enkvist 1973), unlike Hoey’s (2005) purported, but psychologist priming. He omits Firth’s (1957) pre-condition that collocation is abstracted from syntax and that collocative (relexicalising) power falls off within four words on either side of a node. This paper explores the consequences for science and glossaries of literary terms of collocation as instrumentation for meaning.
It is common cause that for a theory of meaning to subsist (whilst still unfalsified), it must, a... more It is common cause that for a theory of meaning to subsist (whilst still unfalsified), it must, at the very least, be capable of providing a starting point for successful interpretation. Its telos in the development of theory would, in the information age, would emerge as instrumentation. In other words, the output of an analysis of the given would always and everywhere need to be both diagnostic and unerring. The cognitive would stand defeated and falsified in any situation in which it found itself incapable of fulfilling both of these basic conditions. The fact that mass deception continues to subsist within institutional meaning may be our best indication that the cognitive and concepts are overdue for replacement. However, the persistence with which the cognitive continues to survive begins to lend fake credence to claims that it still has a right to operate within corpus studies. It has become a matter of urgency for all inquiry to focus on setting criteria and conditions for the ejection from corpus studies of the cognitive and its exclusion by scientific means from that discipline. Attempts to provide 'footholds for the falsified' within corpus work must be uncovered and dismantled. They must be resisted along with all initiatives that argue for a 'convergence theory' of corpus studies. It is pointless and irresponsible to make light of the glaring issue of intuitive failure or to fail, even in major scholarly works, to mention it. Secrecy thrives on a lack of mention. Because progress in dismantling intuitive theories and schools of thought within linguistics is likely to be slow and far from durable, the final solution must involve reforming analytic philosophy at the same time. Quine's Third Dogma of Empiricism will need to be replaced by instrumentation that philosophers believe can be 'handed over to science'. Collocation will be that instrumentation. It will cause no disruption in philosophy because its operation is not syntactic (i.e, abstracted at the level of syntax) and it presents itself, not as an opponent to logic, but as an ally. After collocation has been accepted by philosophy and science, it may be re-imported into linguistics from science, shorn of all of its erstwhile ideological stigmata.
Scientists…spend their lives in trying to guess right. They are sustained and guided therein by t... more Scientists…spend their lives in trying to guess right. They are sustained and guided therein by their heuristic passion. We call their work creative because it changes the world as we see it, by deepening our understanding of it. The change is irrevocable. A problem that I have once solved can no longer puzzle me; I cannot guess what I already know. Having made a discovery, I shall never see the world again as before. My eyes have become different; I have made myself into a person seeing and thinking differently. I have crossed a gap, the heuristic gap which lies between problem and discovery.'
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Books by Bill Louw
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature, 23] Expected February 2016. xvii, 414 pp. + index
Papers by Bill Louw
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature, 23] Expected February 2016. xvii, 414 pp. + index