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| Image from PolyU |
Have not been writing for quite awhile as I am trying to rush for my first ever 7000-word assignment deadline. It has to be 7000 words in length to meet the word limit requirement for a publishable paper. Of course, to be actually publishable, there is still a lot of work and refinement, but at least, being able to write a paper this long is already quite an achievement. Right now I still have 2000 words to go, let's hope I can finish this by Thursday as I have to submit another paper on Friday for my talk at the upcoming Asialex 2015 at PolyU from 25-27 June 2015, exact time and date have yet to be confirmed.
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| Image from HKU |
On that note, before giving a talk at PolyU, I will be giving a talk at the CAES International Conference at HKU from 4:25pm to 4:50pm on the 11th June 2015. Both talks will basically be on the same topic with slightly different focus.
Here's my abstract for the Asialex 2015,
House M.D. Corpus Analysis: A Linguistic Intervention of
Contemporary American English
Law, Locky
Full-time PhD
student
Abstract
Television drama, despite its enormous popularity
across the globe, has rarely received attentions from the linguistics field.
The dearth of research into television drama dialogue is further exposed by the
thriving contributions from various other fields such as philosophy, psychology,
cultural studies and media studies. This paper seeks to promote research interest
in this unique mediated text by selecting renowned medical dramedy House M.D. as research subject and comparing
its 927,922-word House M.D. pure dialogue
corpus (HMDC) to both the 450-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American
English (COCA) and its 95-million-word spoken subcorpus (COCA Spoken) using an
adaptation of Bednerak’s (2011) ranked frequency list method. Using WordSmith
Tools in the calculation of n-gram (n = 1, 2, 3) at the words/clusters level, the
findings indicate that HMDC is more interpersonal than COCA and has a closer resemblance
to COCA Spoken than to COCA. HMDC also contains 3.4 times more negativity than
COCA Spoken and 2.8 times more than COCA. As such, viewers are presented with English
far more interpersonal, as well as involving significantly more disagreement than
one will encounter in the real world. This study not only shows similarities
and differences between House M.D.
and contemporary American English, but also provides a preview of the huge
potential in television drama-related research.
Keywords:
TV drama, House M.D., corpus linguistics, ngram, COCA, ranked frequency
list
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Resources:
Asialex 2015
http://asialex2015.engl.polyu.edu.hk/
CAES International Conference
http://caes.hku.hk/facesofenglish/
CAES International Conference Programme Schedule
http://caes.hku.hk/facesofenglish/files/2015/01/provisional_programme_schedule.pdf
