第五组：李玉祯 陈肖如 李晓 王晨萱

⽬录
CONTENTS

01 Introduction
foundation and application of key word 02 Key words
Implications and other studies.

03 The corpus 04 Method＆findings

The total range of the corpus 4 major methods and result.
Part 01
Introduction
Foundation and application of key word
 Introduction
Foundation and application of key words

Key words
Assuming that the specific use of the chosen words can give us insights
into social and cultural preoccupations, attitudes and preferences.

Units of meaning
Individual key words, however, are usually only the center of units of
meaning in language.

Relative frequency
Relative frequency of words in comparison to occurrence in other texts
gives an indication of noteworthy propositional content, maybe also about
deviant structural preferences.

Absolute frequency
The frequency and distribution of key words and, to a certain extent also
phrases, characterizes texts. We need information from large background
corpora to find out about important linguistic habits.
Part 02
Key words
Implications and other studies
 Key words
Implication and studies

What makes a “key word” Unit of meaning

habitual use in certain contexts along with the It is not the individual key word that is of interest, but
construction or transmission of contents, views and the whole unit of meaning with its typical collocational
attitudes, these words gain a particular value in a patterns and accompanying evaluation
socio-cultural community. .

Text types
The individual texts in my corpus are instances of a
text-type. With each change in the texts, the diachronic
development of the text-type becomes observable.

Individual texts Discourse

Individual texts are tokens of text-types which Discourse, as the analysable trace of our behaviour
themselves are higher structural orders in our in the social world, shows our repeated, partly
conventions of communication. conventionalized ways of using language.
Key words
Implication and studies

Key words as indicator

The idea of key words as indicators for central
concepts and topics in a sociocultural community
has a long tradition.

Hermeneutic approach
The definition stresses individual choice.
According to different view the decisions about
“significance” will obviously vary.

Statistic method
Selecting words according to their relative
frequency is independent of personal views and
preferences.
Part 03
The corpus
The total range of the corpus
 The corpus
The total range of the corpus

1. The corpus is a collection of travel writing from the 16th to the 21st
century.

2. Each century covers approximately 500.000 words, for the most part
consisting of complete texts.

3. The texts are as evenly distributed between the beginning, middle and
end of each century as possible.
Part 04
Method＆findings
The total range of the corpus
 4.1 Key Words in the Travel Corpus

Investigated Text:
Travel Corpus (TC) from the 16th to the 21st
centuries

Background Corpus:
a) C16-C18: the Early Modern English section
of the Helsinki Corpus (HC)
b) C19-C21: a self-compiled three-million-word
background corpus of mixed written and
spoken sources of contemporary
4.1 Key Words in the Travel Corpus
4.2 Key-key words and associates
Key-key words
Key-key words
Key-key words
Key-key words are those words that are found to be key words
in a large number of individual texts in the corpus.
C21
C20
Associates
Associates
 4.3 Key words and their contexts-Extended lexical units

Analysis
This section focuses on how to

use the corpus to explore and

Abundance
analyze the relationship between - abundance of Would
- in abundance
key words and their contexts, as - I would advise
- abundance
well as the history of their
C16 - C20 C16 - C21
frequency of use.
 Method: ELUs
To get this result the authors have used the ELUs.

ELU means Exponential Linear Unit, which is a

popular activation function (激活函数) that speeds

up learning and produces more accurate results.

In this study, the authors used ELUs as evaluative

units to capture cognitive schemata, which in turn
give evidence of culturally shared knowledge.
 Key word procedure
We can draw from this that the obvious benefit of the

key word procedure is that it shows in a principled

way lexical differences to larger collections of mixed

text. A complete analysis of all key words would

probably show, beyond issues of content, interesting

socio-cultural and group-specific particularities.

 Key word procedure
If we look at the absolute frequency of the words within a text or text collection,

it becomes clear that the more frequent words are highly frequent. This is again

text specific for those that occur frequently for reasons of topic, but also general

for those that take on general functions in a variety of language uses. So, we can

see differences between text types, in particular if we expand the notion of key

words into key phrases.

 4.4 Key Phrases in the Travel Corpus

Part-of-speech-
N-grams
grams

Diachronic Change
• Language-internal grammaticalization processes
• Language-related socio-cultural development
4.4 Key Phrases in the Travel Corpus

>preposition-article-noun-of-article<
第五组：李玉祯 陈肖如 李晓 王晨萱