Смирнова Елизавета Александровна

Terminology of Migration Studies: A Corpus Analysis of Research Papers in Social Sciences

2022 · ARTICLE · en

Migration studies is a new, rapidly developing research area whose terminology is being established at the intersection of various social sciences. This article undertakes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of terms associated with migration, conducted on a 281,000-word corpus of research articles in social sciences, published in leading academic journals. Our analysis involves corpus processing with AntConc software and semantic tagging of terms that contain the words migrant and migration, with the purpose of detecting the semantic categories that migration-related terms belong to and identifying what areas of research in the field they outline. The qualitative analysis proves two directions in migration studies, focusing on migrant communities as national groups and experience of individual migrants. Semantically, there are two approaches to studying migration: time-oriented, referring to past, present, future, and subject-oriented, e.g. geography, economy, demography, etc.

Clausal complexity of expert and student writing: a corpus-based analysis of papers in social sciences

2022 · ARTICLE · en

Syntactic complexity has been extensively approached in the fields of corpus linguistics and academic discourse studies. However, works focusing on disciplinary variation in terms of linguistic complexity and comparison of professional and novice academic writing are scarce. Addressing these issues is likely to have important implications for EAP/ESP practitioners in terms of selection of target structures and learning material design. This study is a corpus analysis of the use of clausal complexity features in two social sciences, management and economics. The research is based on two kinds of corpora: expert corpora which comprise articles published in peer-reviewed journals, and learner corpora of L2 undergraduate students’ research papers. This work aims at answering two questions: Do clausal complexity features vary in the texts in management and economics? What are the differences in syntactic use between the academic texts written by professional authors and learner writing? The data showed that economists and managers tend to use the structures under consideration with significantly different frequencies. The professional writing was found to demonstrate more signs of clausal complexity than the learners’ texts.

Software development for corpus research in English studies

2021 · CHAPTER · en

Disciplinary Variation in Syntactic Complexity: A Corpus Analysis of Professional Academic Writing

2021 · CHAPTER · en

This study deals with the analysis of syntactic complexity in professional academic writing and is based on a corpus of so-called ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ papers published in leading international journals. We aim at describing the main complexity features of academic discourse and testing the hypothesis that there is considerable disciplinary variation in linguistic complexity. We conclude that, first, clausal complexity strategies are more prevalent in the ‘hard’ sciences, while phrasal-complexity features dominate in the ‘soft’ ones. Second, the data reveal a continuum across subdisciplines within the broad categories of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ genres with respect to the adoption of complexity strategies.

Синтаксическая сложность академического текста: корпусное исследование работ русскоязычных студентов, изучающих английский язык, в сравнении с текстами профессиональных авторов.

2020 · ARTICLE · ru

В статье анализируются данные получения автоматизированной оценки синтаксической сложности академического текста на базе размеченных частеречной разметкой удовлетворяющих требованиям сравниваемости корпусов, двух экспертных и двух учебных, в двух тематических областях. Исследование проводилось с использованием двух различных компьютерных инструментов – парсера UDPipe и комплекса программ AntConc. Были сделаны следующие выводы: экспертные академические тексты показывают высокую клаузальную и фразовую сложность, уровень которой выше в текстах по менеджменту, нежели по экономике. По сравнению с текстами студентов клаузальная сложность текстов профессионалов существенно выше, в то время как параметры фразовой сложности были почти одного уровня или даже незначительно ниже, чем у студентов. Наиболее значимые различия наблюдаются в употреблении генитивов с предлогом of, нормализованная частотность которых в учебных корпусах превышает оную в профессиональных статьях примерно в 1,7 раз в обеих областях. Результаты противоречат выводам предыдущих исследований о том, что с повышением уровня владения языком клаузальная сложность снижается, а фразовая растет.

Hedges in Russian EAP writing: A corpus-based study of research papers in management

2020 · ARTICLE · en

The fact that English has become a lingua franca of academic communication has led to increased attention to teaching English for academic purposes (EAP) at the academia. Academic discourse markers, such as hedges, have been an important topic in academic writing research whose prime aim is helping non-Anglophone researchers to present their research findings in English for international publication. This study investigates the use of the most frequent hedging devices in a corpus of 58 works written by Russian university students and compares it to a corpus of articles published in peer-reviewed journals in business and management. The analysis of learner corpus data has provided evidence of how Russian ELF speakers use the language, showing significant differences between the use of hedges by the students and professional writers. The research has also highlighted a number of challenges which non-native learners face when writing academic texts. The study may contribute to a higher level of L2 academic writing in ELF contexts and have implications for creating EAP courses, research of second language acquisition and writing pedagogy.

Gender Variation in The Discourse of Online Hotel Reviews: A Corpus-Based Semantic Analysis

2020 · CHAPTER · en

The study deals with sematic categories mentioned in a 24,6-million-word corpus of online hotel reviews from Booking.com authored by men and women. The overall objective of the current study is the application of text mining techniques, namely corpusbased semantic analysis, to find if there are significant differences in the discourse of men and women when reviewing hotels. The reviews employed for the analysis were written by people located in the UK and relate to hotels and apartments of all star ratings. The semantic categories suggested by McArthur (1981) were detected by means of sematic tagging with UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS). We found a number of statistically significant differences between male and female discourses both in terms of linguistic expression and highlighted aspects of the stay. For example, women’s writing appears to be more personal and emotional with an extensive use of pronouns and boosters. As for the content of reviews, males tend to mention money paid, the location of the hotel and food; while females are more likely to write about family and friends or partners.

Referential Coherence of Academic Texts: A Corpus-Based Analysis of L2 Research Papers in Management

2019 · ARTICLE · en

This paper focuses on referential coherence, which is seen as a crucial attribute of effective academic writing. Findings are reported from a corpus study of Russian students’ research proposals. The learners’ use of anaphoric expressions is compared with a reference corpus, which comprises research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. It was hypothesised that learners use anaphora less frequently than professional writers and face some difficulties when using anaphoric expressions. The results of the analysis partly confirmed the hypothesis and allowed the identification of particular problems connected with the students’ use of anaphoric expressions, which were then classified into several groups. Examples of exercises aimed at dealing with the identified problems are also provided. It is hoped that the reported findings, as well as the author’s suggested reasons for the problems and possible ways of dealing with them, will be useful for EAP practitioners, researchers, and students writing their research papers in English.

Функциональный подход к изучению глагольной валентности (на примере отсубстантивных глаголов английского языка)

2018 · ARTICLE · ru

В статье глагольная валентность рассматривается как функциональная категория, охватывающая различные языковые средства выражения участников обозначаемой глаголом ситуации. Анализ проводится на примере трех отсубстантивных глаголов английского языка to dog, to hare, to parrot. Автор анализирует словарные дефиниции данных глаголов и примеры их функционирования из корпусов, что позволяет выделить семантические и синтаксические актанты, входящие в их валентность. На основе полученных данных создаются модели валентностной структуры исследуемых глаголов.

Denominal verbs with metaphorical meanings in British business media discourse: A corpus analysis of articles in the “Financial Times”

2018 · ARTICLE · en

This study is a corpus-based examination of denominal verbs with figurative meanings in the texts of the British business broadsheet The Financial Times. Based on the study of word-formation as the source of metaphoricity (Steen et al., 2010; Janda, 2011, 2014; Brdar & Brdar-Szabó, 2013) and propositional analysis (Pankrats, 1992; Steen, 2002), it presents the classification of such verbs and discusses how and why denominal verbs with metaphorical meanings were used in the journalistic discourse about business. The empirical base of this study was a 621-thousand-word corpus of the Financial Times articles from the years 2014-2015. The authors conclude that the commonness of denominal verbs is due to the conceptual and evaluative functions of metaphor. There is consideration of the implications of these findings for linguists, translators, ESP students and those interested in corpus research into metaphor.