Category: Corpus Linguistics Conference 2015

Plenary session: Alan Partington
Non-obvious meaning in CL and CADS: from ‘hindsight post-dictability’ to sweet serendipity

Chair: Amanda Potts

http://www3.lingue.unibo.it/blog/clb/

Introspection & intuition

Processes of inference from the linguistic trace left by speakers/writers

Shared meaning

Idiom principle

Complexity of common grammatical items

Colligation: every word primed to occur in or avoid certain grammatical positions and functions (Hoey, 2005: 13)

SiBol (Siena-Bologna) corpus of newspapers, judicial inquiries, press briefings. Link.

Rapid language change

Corpus methodology is useful in detecting absence, not only presence

Language looks rather different when you look at a lot of it at once (Sinclair 1991)

Qualitative: anaphoric, historic, past behaviour

Quantitative anaphoric and cataphoric; enough data with which to infer

If primed >> psychologically fixed >> reproduced

Evaluation as prototypicality: inner circle obvious, outer circle non-obvious

Prosody can depend on grammar (Louw 1993), pov, literal vs figurative use and on field of register

Embedding is an important factor to interpret prosody

The added value of CL in discourse studies

Looking at language at different levels of abstraction: overview & close reading

Data are not sacred

Much of textual meaning is accretional

Positive cherry-picking: find counter examples

Almost all explanation in DA is informed speculation: in human science this is the closest you get to explanation

Moral panics have evolved over the years (globesity in 2015)