Topic modelling is a form of text mining where a computer program is used to trace word clusterin... more Topic modelling is a form of text mining where a computer program is used to trace word clustering and word co-occurrence within a corpus. These word clusters are considered topics, and the model works on the assumption that each document is made up of a series of topics, each with differing proportions and distributions. However, whilst the algorithm produces the topic model itself, it is the role of the human analyst to assign social meaning to those clusters, and infer what the topic may be. My review of current literature in the field suggests that this is done on the basis of mere eyeballing, whereas my analysis and subsequent discussion throughout this thesis suggests that a much more systematic closer reading of documents would be more beneficial. Not only would this result in the much more accurate labelling of topics, but it would inevitably make topic modelling a much more inviting method to humanist researchers.
Drawing on the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus: First Folio Plus and using corpus-based methods, th... more Drawing on the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus: First Folio Plus and using corpus-based methods, this paper explores, quantitatively and qualitatively, Shakespeare's depictions of five deceptive characters (Aaron, Tamora, Iago, Lady Macbeth, and Falstaff). Our analysis adopts three strands: • Firstly, statistical keywords relating to each character are examined, to determine what this tells us about their natures more generally. • Secondly, the wordlists produced for each of the five characters are drawn upon to determine the extent to which they make use of linguistic features that have been correlated with, or linked to, acts of deliberate deception in real-world contexts. • Thirdly, we make use of the results identified during the two aforementioned strands by using them to identify particular (sequences of) turns that are worthy of more detailed analysis. Here, we are primarily interested in (a) whether these keywords/deceptive indicators cluster or co-occur; and (b) whether these interactions are the same as those identified by other scholars exploring depictions of deception in Shakespeare from a literary perspective. The findings indicate that deception-related features are indeed used collectively/in close proximity, by Shakespeare, at points where a character speaks to other characters disingenuously. They also suggest that Shakespeare's deceptive depictions do change stylistically, from character to character, in line with those characters' different characterisations and situations; that Shakespeare draws on atypical language features-such as self-oriented references-when it comes to some of his depictions of deception; and that Shakespeare uses these various stylistic features to achieve a range of dramatic effect(s).
Teaching and learning Shakespeare takes place across the world. Pedagogical matters have been the... more Teaching and learning Shakespeare takes place across the world. Pedagogical matters have been the subject of much discussion in the last few decades. This paper begins by reviewing that discussion, showing how different approaches-textual, contextual and active (or performance)-connects with the language of the plays. No study, it is pointed out, has conducted an empirical investigation as to what exactly students find problematic when they read the language of Shakespeare's plays, an obvious first step, one might think, in designing an approach. The main aim of this paper is to describe a study designed to do exactly this. It was conducted with two groups of Shakespeare students, one with English as a first language and one with English as an additional language. Participants were asked to identify difficulties in extracts from plays, rate specific linguistic forms according to difficulty, and discuss what they think of Shakespeare's language. Common areas of difficulty included archaic words, borrowings from other languages, coinages and false friends. With these findings in mind, the paper briefly reflects on pedagogical solutions that are corpus-related, arguing that these address some of the problems associated with traditional textual approaches by requiring the active involvement of learners, treating language in a contextualised fashion and focussing on the language itself.
In: Robbie Love, Vaclav Brezina and Karin Aijmer (eds.) Corpus Approaches to Contemporary British... more In: Robbie Love, Vaclav Brezina and Karin Aijmer (eds.) Corpus Approaches to Contemporary British Speech: Sociolinguistic Studies of the Spoken BNC2014
This paper identifies the trends in the data used in pragmatics studies over the last 20 years, a... more This paper identifies the trends in the data used in pragmatics studies over the last 20 years, and thereby makes predictions about how pragmatics might develop in the next few years, other things being equal. To establish those trends, 200 papers from the Journal of Pragmatics, covering the period 1999 to 2018, were categorised. The categorisation scheme was designed to capture some of the key ways in which data in pragmatics varies, and included: the general focus of the paper (e.g. whether it is data-driven), the focal point in the data of the analysis, the quantity of the data, the medium of the data, the number of modes or channels represented in the data, the degree of interactivity of the data, the fictionality of the data, and the language of the data (specifically whether it only contains English). Trends discovered include: a continual strong focus on data, a shift of analytical focus towards more macro units, increasing use of greater quantities of data, decreasing dominance of purely spoken data, increasing use of multimodal data, increasing use of more interactive data, decreasing use of constructed examples, no increasing use of fictional data, and the continual diversification of the languages treated.
Topic modelling is a form of text mining where a computer program is used to trace word clusterin... more Topic modelling is a form of text mining where a computer program is used to trace word clustering and word co-occurrence within a corpus. These word clusters are considered topics, and the model works on the assumption that each document is made up of a series of topics, each with differing proportions and distributions. However, whilst the algorithm produces the topic model itself, it is the role of the human analyst to assign social meaning to those clusters, and infer what the topic may be. My review of current literature in the field suggests that this is done on the basis of mere eyeballing, whereas my analysis and subsequent discussion throughout this thesis suggests that a much more systematic closer reading of documents would be more beneficial. Not only would this result in the much more accurate labelling of topics, but it would inevitably make topic modelling a much more inviting method to humanist researchers.
Drawing on the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus: First Folio Plus and using corpus-based methods, th... more Drawing on the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus: First Folio Plus and using corpus-based methods, this paper explores, quantitatively and qualitatively, Shakespeare's depictions of five deceptive characters (Aaron, Tamora, Iago, Lady Macbeth, and Falstaff). Our analysis adopts three strands: • Firstly, statistical keywords relating to each character are examined, to determine what this tells us about their natures more generally. • Secondly, the wordlists produced for each of the five characters are drawn upon to determine the extent to which they make use of linguistic features that have been correlated with, or linked to, acts of deliberate deception in real-world contexts. • Thirdly, we make use of the results identified during the two aforementioned strands by using them to identify particular (sequences of) turns that are worthy of more detailed analysis. Here, we are primarily interested in (a) whether these keywords/deceptive indicators cluster or co-occur; and (b) whether these interactions are the same as those identified by other scholars exploring depictions of deception in Shakespeare from a literary perspective. The findings indicate that deception-related features are indeed used collectively/in close proximity, by Shakespeare, at points where a character speaks to other characters disingenuously. They also suggest that Shakespeare's deceptive depictions do change stylistically, from character to character, in line with those characters' different characterisations and situations; that Shakespeare draws on atypical language features-such as self-oriented references-when it comes to some of his depictions of deception; and that Shakespeare uses these various stylistic features to achieve a range of dramatic effect(s).
Teaching and learning Shakespeare takes place across the world. Pedagogical matters have been the... more Teaching and learning Shakespeare takes place across the world. Pedagogical matters have been the subject of much discussion in the last few decades. This paper begins by reviewing that discussion, showing how different approaches-textual, contextual and active (or performance)-connects with the language of the plays. No study, it is pointed out, has conducted an empirical investigation as to what exactly students find problematic when they read the language of Shakespeare's plays, an obvious first step, one might think, in designing an approach. The main aim of this paper is to describe a study designed to do exactly this. It was conducted with two groups of Shakespeare students, one with English as a first language and one with English as an additional language. Participants were asked to identify difficulties in extracts from plays, rate specific linguistic forms according to difficulty, and discuss what they think of Shakespeare's language. Common areas of difficulty included archaic words, borrowings from other languages, coinages and false friends. With these findings in mind, the paper briefly reflects on pedagogical solutions that are corpus-related, arguing that these address some of the problems associated with traditional textual approaches by requiring the active involvement of learners, treating language in a contextualised fashion and focussing on the language itself.
In: Robbie Love, Vaclav Brezina and Karin Aijmer (eds.) Corpus Approaches to Contemporary British... more In: Robbie Love, Vaclav Brezina and Karin Aijmer (eds.) Corpus Approaches to Contemporary British Speech: Sociolinguistic Studies of the Spoken BNC2014
This paper identifies the trends in the data used in pragmatics studies over the last 20 years, a... more This paper identifies the trends in the data used in pragmatics studies over the last 20 years, and thereby makes predictions about how pragmatics might develop in the next few years, other things being equal. To establish those trends, 200 papers from the Journal of Pragmatics, covering the period 1999 to 2018, were categorised. The categorisation scheme was designed to capture some of the key ways in which data in pragmatics varies, and included: the general focus of the paper (e.g. whether it is data-driven), the focal point in the data of the analysis, the quantity of the data, the medium of the data, the number of modes or channels represented in the data, the degree of interactivity of the data, the fictionality of the data, and the language of the data (specifically whether it only contains English). Trends discovered include: a continual strong focus on data, a shift of analytical focus towards more macro units, increasing use of greater quantities of data, decreasing dominance of purely spoken data, increasing use of multimodal data, increasing use of more interactive data, decreasing use of constructed examples, no increasing use of fictional data, and the continual diversification of the languages treated.
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