Literary “higher dimensions” quantified: a stylometric study of nine stories

The study will focus on the quantitative assessment of nine stories, considered important contributions in the supernatural and in the early and modern science-fiction prose. Besides the two treatments of the topic of imaginary Flatland – penned by E. A. Abbott and C. H. Hinton –, the corpus includes writings by H. G. Wells, A. Blackwood, M. Leinster, G. Waldeyer, R. A. Heinlein, L. Padgett, and A. C. Clarke. Texts are researched on the bases of four analyses (moving-average type-token ratio, average tokens length, Busemann’s coefficient, and collocation associativity), with the results tested for statistical significance; next, the textual comparisons will provide a springboard for sketches of literary criticism interpretations. The analyzed corpus has revealed the distinctive and colorful take writers have in their stories. By the nature of their subject, the texts are expected to share higher dimensions and time warps, a thread implying a meeting point in terms of vocabulary richness, plot development, and possibly of narrative structure. Yet, in most cases, the findings suggest basic and nuanced differences, hinting at clear stylistic physiognomies in the authorship. The outcome affects not only the assessment of the weight individual samples have, but also the interface between a common (sub)genre and personal style.

Differentiating Interpreting Types: Connecting Complex Networks to Cognitive Complexity

Prominent interpreting models have illustrated different processing mechanisms of simultaneous interpreting and consecutive interpreting. Although great efforts have been made, a macroscopic examination into interpreting outputs is sparse. Since complex network is a powerful and feasible tool to capture the holistic features of language, the present study adopts this novel approach to investigate different properties of syntactic dependency networks based on simultaneous interpreting and consecutive interpreting outputs. Our results show that consecutive interpreting networks demonstrate higher degrees, higher clustering coefficients, and a more important role of function words among the central vertices than simultaneous interpreting networks. These findings suggest a better connectivity, better transitivity, and a lower degree of vocabulary richness in consecutive interpreting outputs. Our research provides an integrative framework for the understanding of underlying mechanisms in diverse interpreting types.

Heaps’ law and vocabulary richness in the history of classical music harmony

Music is a fundamental human construct, and harmony provides the building blocks of musical language. Using the Kunstderfuge corpus of classical music, we analyze the historical evolution of the richness of harmonic vocabulary of 76 classical composers, covering almost 6 centuries. Such corpus comprises about 9500 pieces, resulting in more than 5 million tokens of music codewords. The fulfilment of Heaps’ law for the relation between the size of the harmonic vocabulary of a composer (in codeword types) and the total length of his works (in codeword tokens), with an exponent around 0.35, allows us to define a relative measure of vocabulary richness that has a transparent interpretation. When coupled with the considered corpus, this measure allows us to quantify harmony richness across centuries, unveiling a clear increasing linear trend. In this way, we are able to rank the composers in terms of richness of vocabulary, in the same way as for other related metrics, such as entropy. We find that the latter is particularly highly correlated with our measure of richness. Our approach is not specific for music and can be applied to other systems built by tokens of different types, as for instance natural language.

Insights into codeswitching from online communication: Effects of language preference and conditions arising from vocabulary richness

Twitter data from a crisis that impacted many English–Spanish bilinguals show that the direction of codeswitches is associated with the statistically documented tendency of single speakers to prefer one language over another in their tweets, as gleaned from their tweeting history. Further, lexical diversity, a measure of vocabulary richness derived from information-theoretic measures of uncertainty in communication, is greater in proximity to a codeswitch than in productions remote from a switch. The prospects of a role for lexical diversity in characterizing the conditions for a language switch suggest that communicative precision may induce conditions that attenuate constraints against language mixing.

Heaps' Law and Vocabulary Richness in the History of Classical Music Harmony

Music is a fundamental human construct, and harmony provides the building blocks of musical language. Using the Kunstderfuge corpus of classical music, we analyze the historical evolution of the richness of harmonic vocabulary of 76 classical composers, covering almost 6 centuries. Such corpus comprises about 9500 pieces, resulting in more than 5 million tokens of music codewords. The fulfilment of Heaps' law for the relation between the size of the harmonic vocabulary of a composer (in codeword types) and the total length of his works (in codeword tokens), with an exponent around 0.35, allows us to define a relative measure of vocabulary richness that has a transparent interpretation. When coupled with the considered corpus, this measure allows us to quantify harmony richness across centuries, unveiling a clear increasing linear trend. In this way, we are able to rank the composers in terms of richness of vocabulary, in the same way as for other related metrics, such as entropy. We find that the latter is particularly highly correlated with our measure of richness. Our approach is not specific for music and can be applied to other systems built by tokens of different types, as for instance natural language.

Natural emotion vocabularies as windows on distress and well-being

To date we know little about natural emotion word repertoires, and whether or how they are associated with emotional functioning. Principles from linguistics suggest that the richness or diversity of individuals’ actively used emotion vocabularies may correspond with their typical emotion experiences. The current investigation measures active emotion vocabularies in participant-generated natural speech and examined their relationships to individual differences in mood, personality, and physical and emotional well-being. Study 1 analyzes stream-of-consciousness essays by 1,567 college students. Study 2 analyzes public blogs written by over 35,000 individuals. The studies yield consistent findings that emotion vocabulary richness corresponds broadly with experience. Larger negative emotion vocabularies correlate with more psychological distress and poorer physical health. Larger positive emotion vocabularies correlate with higher well-being and better physical health. Findings support theories linking language use and development with lived experience and may have future clinical implications pending further research.

Investigating Chinese EFL College Students’ Writing Through the Web-Automatic Writing Evaluation Program

WWE-pigai is a kind of upgraded automated writing evaluation (AWE) system and there are 444,877,400 essays submitted and corrected on this platform. Some previous research on AWE system indicates that students do not tend to utilize AWE feedback to revise essays and improve writing abilities. The major objective of this study is to investigate Chinese EFL college students’ writing through the comparison of WWE-pigai and traditional writing method. The study lasts two terms and 120 Chinese colleges students participate in the research. The findings reveal that WWE-pigai can motivate EFL students to revise and resubmit their essays more than ten times, improve the scores, increase students’ grammar accuracy and vocabulary richness. The surface-level spelling errors (including punctuation mark misuse) are the most common for freshmen. WWE-pigai is not very effective to correct certain grammatical errors besides spelling and conjugation errors. For certain grammatical errors that the students cannot correct by themselves, the assistance of EFL teachers is necessary. We argue that the results reached through this study can offer useful implications for the usage of EFL writing strategies.

The Vocabulary Richness of Children’s Television in Ireland: A Cross-generational Comparison

This research investigates whether the vocabulary richness of children’s programming has changed over one generation, and therefore compares the programmes offered in 1992 to those offered in 2017. Three hours of programming were sourced, transcribed and coded using the Computerised Language Analysis (CLAN) software (MacWhinney, 1984). CLAN is a language analysis software originally developed for the purpose of analysing child language which allows for the detailed transcription and analysis of linguistic data, including statistical measures of lexical diversity (Pye & MacWhinney, 1994). The total words, words per minute, vocabulary diversity, total object, action, attribute and affective-state words as well as the total object, action, attribute and affective-state words spoken in the presence of a referent were calculated and compared for the programming. The vocabulary richness of children’s television has decreased over time. The number of words spoken in the presence of referents in the programming has increased over time, with this increase being significant for action and attribute words. This pattern of findings reflects a trend in children’s television towards the production of programmes of reduced lexical complexity which may facilitate children’s word learning.

Characterizing queries in cross-device OPAC search: a large-scale log study

Purpose The study focused on online public access catalog (OPAC) users’ cross-device search behavior. The purpose of this paper is to understand the characteristics of cross-device OPAC searches, and to identify query reformulation (QR) patterns during device transitions. Design/methodology/approach The transaction log from a university library, spanning six months, was used to conduct the quantitative analysis. The query vocabulary richness, which refers to the average number of unique words each query contains in a search session, can evaluate query diversity, and contribute to the analysis of QR. Findings The results show that PC-PC transition is the most important pattern of device transition. The time interval of device transition was different to the time interval of transitions in web searches. Short device transitions mainly occurred in daytime, and the number of transitions that occurred in less than one minute was higher than on the web. Searches for Industry and Technology triggered the most device transitions, and the users tended to choose the same search field. In addition, the authors made a detailed analysis of the reasons for same-type device transitions and different-type device transitions. Furthermore, the authors focused on the characteristics of adjacent QR patterns. The authors not only refined the concept of cross-device to include the same-type device transition, but also summarized the characteristics of the cross-device QR patterns, which can be used to predict post-switch queries. Originality/value This study extends research into cross-device interaction and cross-device search to the domain of digital library research. The authors also introduced QR perspective on cross-device interaction on OPAC.