Dr. Michael O'Donnell, the developer of the UAM Corpus Tool, from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid will deliver his talk titled "Exploring meaningful differences in political discourse: analysing speeches of heads-of-state with UAM CorpusTool".

Abstract:

This talk will present how UAM CorpusTool can be used to discover meaningful differences between the language used by politicians in their speeches. A corpus consisting of 5 speeches each from 8 heads-of-state was constructed. Where possible, speeches were matched in regards to the situation (e.g., UN address, Trade conference, election victory speech, etc.). To allow comparison on the same features, where speeches were delivered in a language other than English, an official English transcription of the speech was used, although it needs to be kept in mind this may have an effect on results. The talk focuses on automatic analysis, showing how certain lexico-syntactic features can be used to indicate deeper patterns in the text, e.g., Academicness (measured through average word length, lexical density, academic word use), Involvement (use of first and second person pronouns), Subjectivity (degree of use of positive or negative words), Keywords (identification of central themes of the speaker's message), Modality (identifying to what degree and in what direction speakers distance from realis in terms of certainty, obligation or inclination), Temporal Placement (exploration of tense-aspect combinations to identify if the speaker focuses on the past, present, or future, and whether on states or events), Transitivity (mainly to identify whether the speaker speaks more of the material world, the relational world, or of emotions/cognition, or verbalisations).

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Please send an e-mail to wwwdisco@metu.edu.tr for online meeting details.

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For more information about this session and other DISCORE events, you can visit our website: https://discore.metu.edu.tr/sessions

Here is a suggested readings list compiled by Dr. O'Donnell (for those of you who would like to read more on the topic before the session):

1. O'Donnell, M. 2008. "The UAM CorpusTool: Software for corpus annotation and exploration". In Bretones Callejas, Carmen M. et al. (eds) Applied Linguistics Now: Understanding Language and Mind / La Lingüística Aplicada Hoy: Comprendiendo el Lenguaje y la Mente(pp. 1433-1447). Almería: Universidad de Almería. . www.wagsoft.com/Papers/AESLA08.pdf

2. Mick O'Donnell (2013) "Exploring Identity through Appraisal Theory: a Corpus Annotation Methodology". Linguistics and the Human Sciences. Vol 9, No 1. http://www.wagsoft.com/Papers/ODONNELL-APPRAISAL-IDENTITY-v4-distrib.pdf

3. Sinclair, J. (2005). Corpus and Text: Basic Principles. Chapter 1 in M. Wynne (ed.) Developing Linguistic Corpora: a Guide to Good Practice. Oxford: Oxbow https://users.ox.ac.uk/~martinw/dlc/chapter1.htm

Please email us at wwwdisco@metu.edu.tr for your questions.

We are looking forward to seeing you all at the online session tonight at 19.00!

Please feel free to share the attached poster and spread the word to all interested parties:)

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