Refine
Document Type
- Article (5)
- Working Paper (1)
Language
- English (6) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (6)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (6)
Keywords
- Methodologie (6) (remove)
Institute
The nineteenth century in Britain saw tumultuous changes that reshaped the fabric of society and altered the course of modernization. It also saw the rise of the novel to the height of its cultural power as the most important literary form of the period. This paper reports on a long-term experiment in tracing such macroscopic changes in the novel during this crucial period. Specifically, we present findings on two interrelated transformations in novelistic language that reveal a systemic concretization in language and fundamental change in the social spaces of the novel. We show how these shifts have consequences for setting, characterization, and narration as well as implications for the responsiveness of the novel to the dramatic changes in British society.
This paper has a second strand as well. This project was simultaneously an experiment in developing quantitative and computational methods for tracing changes in literary language. We wanted to see how far quantifiable features such as word usage could be pushed toward the investigation of literary history. Could we leverage quantitative methods in ways that respect the nuance and complexity we value in the humanities? To this end, we present a second set of results, the techniques and methodological lessons gained in the course of designing and running this project.
In this paper, a methodology for the analysis of the structure of the thematic openings of academic journal articles is developed. The methodology is derived from Hyland (2000) and Fredrickson/Swales (1994). After sketching the methodology, it is used to examine a corpus of 14 articles selected from the periodical Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur. The conclusion discusses perspective for further studies in this thematic field.
This paper presents epistemological and methodological problems found in work on the subgrouping of Sino-Tibetan languages and the reconstruction of features of the languages. A key problem is the lack of an accepted standard for judging this work, one that can stand up to statistical evaluation. An alternative methodology that involves using fixed sets of features to give us the statistical probability of common origin is suggested.
The late physicist Carl Sagan, whom I quote in the first part of my title, skillfully phrased the common sense view on evidence in the mature sciences. In linguistics, however, evidence has become a controversial issue, especially so when it comes to the investigation of less well studied languages. In this paper, I argue that Sagan's principle should be applied to linguistics. The growing accessibility of a wide array of experimental techniques and computational tools to analyze such data makes it feasible to back up extraordinary claims with evidence from a variety of sources. At the same time, it is in many cases possible to agree on what constitutes an ordinary claim and focus the extra effort on extraordinary claims. For non-controversial claims no more than the minimum effort to establish the claim and properly document the evidence is necessary.
The medium of (oral) language is mostly disregarded (or overlooked) in contemporary media theories. This "ignoring of language" in media studies is often accompanied by an inadequate transport model of communication, and it converges with an "ignoring of mediality" in mentalistic theories of language. In the present article it will be argued that this misleading opposition of language and media can only be overcome if one already regards oral language, not just written language, as a medium of the human mind. In my argumentation I fall back on Wittgenstein’s conception of language games to try to show how Wittgenstein’s ideas can help us to clear up the problem of the mediality of language and also to show to what extent the mentalistic conception of Chomskyan provenance cannot be adequate to the phenomenon of language.