Transcript Markers of orality in lexical verb choice in a corpus of

Markers of orality in lexical
verb choice in a corpus of
student academic writing
Writing Research Across Borders III
Paris 2014
Sandra Gollin-Kies, PhD
Benedictine University, Lisle, Illinois. USA.
Why verbs?
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The verb (or verb phrase) is central
to the meaning and structure of the
clause (Halliday 1985).
Little previous corpus-based research
on the effect of verb choices on the
academic writing style of native, or
near-native speaker, students (But
see Partridge, 2011).
Lexical verbs
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Lexical specificity in verbs has been
overlooked in corpus research.
In academic writing, lexical verbs are less
frequent than nouns.
In conversation, lexical verbs carry a
greater burden of meaning, and are
almost as frequent as nouns.
Therefore, the kind and relative frequency
of lexical verbs used in student writing
may suggest a degree of orality.
My Research Questions
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Have students’ verb choices changed?
Do students’ lexical verb choices indicate
lesser or greater orality than the
reference corpora?
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Reference corpora:
Biber et. al. (2004). (Academic spoken and
written texts, but no student writing).
COCA Academic (Academic journal articles).
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Sub-sets of the FYC corpus from 1998-99
and 2012-13 analyzed using Wordsmith
Tools 6 (Scott, 2012) for markers of orality
with a focus on verb choice.
Findings compared against Biber et al’s
T2K-SWAL corpus wordlists and the
academic and spoken genre sub-corpora of
the Corpus of Contemporary American
English COCA (100 million running words).
Which aspects of verbs are most
interesting to interrogate?
mental verbs
 common vocabulary (verbs
only)
 phrasal verbs
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Corpus Materials and Methods
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The corpus: student research
essays on George Orwell’s “1984.”
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Sub-corpus 1: 1998-99 (449,706
running words)
Sub-corpus 2: 2012-13 (363,157
running words)
Words used in academic registers
T2K-SWAL Corpus (Biber et al, 2004).
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Speech-skewed common words
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Writing skewed common words
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More than 200 /million; 20-200/million
Less common words
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More than 200 /million; 20-200/million
Evenly distributed common words
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More than 200 /million; 20-200/million
More than 200 /million; 20-200/million
Words not found
Student writing: random
samples
Today’s people love their appliances, remote
controls, and luxury cars. I know I do. They
make our lives so much easier, and leave us
more time to do other things; like wash our
cars, and clean our appliances. Are things
easier? I know the computer saves me time
when writing papers for school; leaving me
more time to play games on it. There is no
question we love our inventions.
(98-99).
SP1,SP2. ED1, ED2. W1,W2 Rare; V.rare
• George Orwell’s book entitled 1984 describes a
future society where an authoritative figure commonly
named as Big Brother and his government
manipulates a society. This society is constantly
monitored by what Orwell describes as a
“telescreen”. In this piece of equipment is capable of
monitoring all actions performed by the community,
as well as, informs the citizens of any fact or event
related to Big Brother, the government, etc. The
community is always under attack by print and video
media to honor and obey Big Brother.(98-99).
SP1,SP2. ED1, ED2. W1,W2 Rare, V. rare
As we traverse though this life, many of us are secluded
to a profound sense of boredom, and equally so, an
everlasting quest to quench our thirst for entertainment.
Though this quest, in modern times, we explore many
different forms of media and various genres of such
entertainment, we will almost inevitably come across the
idea of utopian and dystopian science fiction. Utopia
being a place of perfection, where all is well, and not
even such simplistic things such as boredom itself has
wrought mankind any form of illness, where naturally
anti-utopian and dystopian worlds are constructed on
the other side of the spectrum, where everything is in
chaos, governments rule over citizens with an iron fist,
people no longer feel emotion, knowledge is forebode,
or the planet itself has been deteriorated and devoid of
human interaction. (2012-13)
SP1,SP2. ED1, ED2. W1,W2 Rare vb. V. rare vb. Vb. not
found
• Unlike the real dictators Hitler and Stalin, Big Brother did not
really exist and never existed. It was only a symbol of
English Socialism (Ingsoc) and the Party that controlled all
aspects of life in Oceania through totalitarian, police state
methods. After all, a dictator with a physical body would
eventually become ill, decline with age and die, but Big
Brother will live forever as the image of a Party that intends
to remain in power forever. Its members will die off, even at
the privileged Inner Party levels, but that matters no more
than cutting off dead fingernails. As a collective
organization, the only goal of the Party was to retain power,
like a jackboot stomping on a face forever, while keeping the
masses of proles sedated, subdued and existing at a
minimal level. (2012-13)
• SP1,SP2. ED1, ED2. W1,W2 Rare vb. V. rare vb. Vb. not
found
Frequencies for verbs in FYC corpora
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Speech-skewed common verbs
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Writing skewed common words
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More than 200 /million. None of the verbs appear at this
frequency in either subcorpus.
20-200/million. Out of more than 200 verbs in this category
only 28 appear in the 98-99 corpus. Only 19 appeared in 12-13.
Evenly distributed common words
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More than 200/million; 20-200/million
No significant differences 98-99 & 12-13
Overall frequencies of all lex. vbs in this class well below 0.2% or
200/million.
At more than 200 /million Only one lexical verb: use. ; 20200/million
Less common words
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More than 200 /million; 20-200/million
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Taxonomies
Bill went to the station
Bill drove, walked, cycled
Bill walked to the station.
Bill staggered, sauntered, hobbled.
Orwell says that …
Claims, explains, points out, denies
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Look for troponyms of the main common verbs in
the corpus.
Especially mental and verbal processes
e.g think
believe
understand
what about verbs like depend, require etc. Can we
trace them back to more basic forms in the
corpus and build some tree diagrams to show
how students are using more specific language
that is typical of literate discourse?
Findings
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In this sample of college writing, after the 12 most common lexical verbs in the language, the
next 20 most frequent verbs students used were from the spoken corpus rather than the
academic corpus.
The most frequent verb in the next 20 most frequent from the academic list is use. This is
also consistent in the student data.
Students rely on general purpose verbs like believe and understand that are also
among the most frequent in conversation, rather than the most common verbs from
the COCA academic list (e.g. provide, include, consider, determine).
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There is less lexical variety in verb choices, and more focus on general “troponymic”
verbs (Fellbaum & Miller, 1990) than in the COCA academic corpus.
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Verb choices and frequencies in this sample of student writing overall share more in
common with the spoken texts than the academic ones in COCA.
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Overall, there is no strong evidence of a shift towards greater orality in lexical verb
choice over the period under investigation; if anything, the students of the 21st century
appear to be making slightly more “academic” choices than their predecessors.
Discussion
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Our data should most closely match
humanities (e.g. literature, history,
sociology).
But first yr. comp is not so discipline
specific.
Students may still be under the influence
of school genres.
Influence of classroom genres like the
lecture and textbook may be stronger
than professional academic writing.
Comparison of FYC and Biber’s data
Feature
Biber 1998
Biber 1998
Academic
prose
Face-to-face
conversation
FYC 1998-99 (2012-13)
Frequency/1,000 words
Noun
188
137.4
267 (265)
Adjective
attrib.
76.9
40.8
3.7(4) (Comp. and super)
Preposition
139.5
85.0
107 (111)
Conjunction
3.0
0.3
32 (33)
Verb (past)
21.9
37.4
27.5 (25)
Verb (pres)
63.7
128.4
49.1 (49.7)
Pronoun
(pers.)
5.8
39.3
(45)
Adverb
51.8
86.0
40 (41)
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Grammatical verbs: be, have, do, modals.
Lexical verbs:
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Difficulty of separating lexical verbs from nouns that look the same. eg.
command and command.
Find all verbs
Past tense
Present tense
Passive
Passive without agent
Present participle
Past participle
Most common verbs in both speech and writing
Most common verbs in COCA spoken corpus
Most common verbs in COCA ac corpus (look for humanities subset).
Latin-based verbs.
Phrasal verbs substituting for Latin-based or single word verbs.
References
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Biber, D. (1988) Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge NY: Cambridge
University Press.
Biber, D., Johannsen, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman
Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow, England: Pearson Education.
Biber, D. (2006) University Language: A corpus-based study of spoken and
written registers. John Benjamins.
Biber, D., Conrad, S.M., Reppen, R., Byrd, R.P. , Helt, P., Clark, V., Cortes, V. ,
Csomay, E., Urzua, A. (2004). Representing Language Use in the University: Analysis
of the TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language Corpus. TOEFL Monograph
Series. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.
Fellbaum, C., & Miller, G. A. (1990). Folk psychology or semantic entailment?
Comment on Rips and Conrad (1989). Psychological Review, 0033295X, 97(4),
565-570.
Freeman Y.S. & Freeman, D. (2009) Academic Language for English language
learners and struggling readers. How to help students succeed across content
areas. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). An introduction to functional grammar. London:
Arnold.
Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London:
Routledge.
Partridge, M. (2011). A comparison of lexical specificity in the communication
verbs of L1 English and TE student writing. Southern African Linguistics and
Applied Language Studies, 29(2), 135-147.
Scott, M. (2012). Wordsmith Tools version 6. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis
Software.