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UCREL Corpus Research Seminar: Keywords, Collocations and Concordances: Initial findings on differing lexical choices in three corpora on infertility

Date: 17 January 2013 Time: 2.00-3:00 pm

Venue: FASS Meeting Room 3

UCREL Corpus Research Seminar

Keywords, Collocations and Concordances: Initial findings on differing lexical choices in three corpora on infertility

Karen Donnelly (LAEL, Lancaster University)

In the presentation I will present some initial findings on the lexical choices made in three corpora of different text types on the same topic - UK blogs on infertility, UK news articles on infertility and fertility clinic websites.

A keyword analysis of the corpora, using Wordsmith Tools, revealed the two or more of the terms risk, risks, chance and chances to be "key" in both the news corpus and clinic corpus, however, these terms were noticeably absent from the blogs, leading to the question - are bloggers ignoring the issues of risk and chance around infertility or are they using other lexis to write about uncertainty and probability?

I approached this issue initially using collocation and concordance analysis of these keywords in order to identify the types of risk and chance which are present in the corpora, the semantic prosodies of these terms and also which entities/actors are involved in risk/chance. I then returned to the set of keywords to investigate potential alternatives to linguistic markers of uncertainty and probability in the blog corpus.

In conclusion I will present some possible explanations for the difference in keywords across the texts and critique the role of keywords, collocation and concordances in identifying different lexis across text types on a particular topic, with a view to identifying linguistic markers of different discourses.

Event website: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/crs

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Who can attend: Anyone