Culture, corpora and semantics. Methodological issues in using elicited and corpus data for cultural comparison - 2012

Francesca Bianchi Full Version (PDF)
Culture, corpora and semantics - CovereISBN: 978-88-8305-093-0

Culture, corpora and semantics is a methodological investigation in the use of elicited data and Web data in the analysis of cultural specificities starting from semantic elements. After considering and discussing several theoretical and analytical approaches to culture in linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and marketing research, a specifically developed method of analysis and cross-cultural comparison is applied to elicited data on chocolate and wine, gathered through free sentence-completion and sentence-writing tests on English and Italian respondents. The results obtained are discussed within the framework of cultural systems theories and used as control reference for further methodological investigations. In particular, the elicited data are qualitatively and quantitatively compared to non-elicited sentences on chocolate and wine from general Web corpora in English and Italian. Furthermore, in order to find an alternative route which could avoid the complex and time-consuming process of manually coding a large dataset, some alternative routes are tested, based on the creation of sub-corpora using sampling procedures and analysis of a limited number of the most frequent words in the dataset’s wordlist. Finally, an automatic semantic tagger is tested on the elicited data, in order to assess the extent of its possible application in cultural analysis. Comparisons between the Web corpora and the elicited data suggest that large general Web corpora can be considered representative of the cultural associations to a node word and could thus be used in cultural analysis or in exploratory marketing research. Finally, in the light of the results of the various methodological tests, the work discusses general issues, such as the relationship between word frequency and cultural relevance, and tagset granularity.








Table of Contents


Title page     PDF
i-ii

Contents     PDF
Francesca Bianchi iii-x

Preface     PDF
Francesca Bianchi xi-xii

Acknowledgments     PDF
Francesca Bianchi xiii-xiv

Chapter 1 - Introduction     PDF
Francesca Bianchi 1-4

Chapter 2 - Culture     PDF
Francesca Bianchi 5-30

Chapter 3 - Corpora and corpus linguistics     PDF
Francesca Bianchi 31-54

Chapter 4 - Marketing research     PDF
Francesca Bianchi 55-64

Chapter 5 - The current study: materials and method     PDF
Francesca Bianchi 65-78

Chapter 6 - Semantic associations of chocolate and wine in the Italian and English cultures     PDF
Francesca Bianchi 79-96

Chapter 7 - Alternative routes to highlight cultural semantic associations of a given key word     PDF
Francesca Bianchi 97-130

Chapter 8 - Alternative routes to highlight cultural semantic associations of a given key word: further experiments     PDF
Francesca Bianchi 131-138

Chapter 9 - Automatic tagging     PDF
Francesca Bianchi 139-146

Chapter 10 - Semantic associations of chocolate and wine in general Web corpora     PDF
Francesca Bianchi 147-156

Chapter 11 - Conclusion     PDF
Francesca Bianchi 157-168

References     PDF
Francesca Bianchi 169-182

Appendix     PDF
Francesca Bianchi 183-193

Colophon     PDF
Francesca Bianchi 194


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e-ISBN: 978-88-8305-093-0