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The edited volume Motifs in Language and Text is the first collection of original research in the area of the quantitative analysis of motifs. It hosts a collection of contributions that give insight to linguistic motifs theoretically across different languages, text genres, and structural levels, such as lexical, syntactic, semantic etc., and also to the tentative efforts upon the practical applications of the linguistic motifs. .

The present book finds and collects absolutely new aspects of word frequency. First, eminent characteristics (such as the h-point, first used in scientometrics, the k-, m-, and n-points) are introduced – it can be shown that the geometry of word frequency is fundamentally based on them. Furthermore, various indicators of text properties are proposed for the first time, such as thematic concentration, autosemantic text compactness, autosemantic density, etc. In detail, the autosemantic structure of a given text is evaluated by means of a graph representation and its properties (according to a problem from network research). Special emphasis is given to the part-of-speech differentiation, which plays a significant role in stylistics. On the basis of a general theory, which has been developed especially for linguistic research, problems of the frequency structure of texts with respect to word occurrence are investigated and discussed in detail. Methodologically, specific reference is made to synergetic linguistics, including some exemplary analyses, showing that there are points of contact with this field. A separate chapter is dedicated to within-sentence word position; this issue considers grammar as well as language genesis; another chapter is dedicated to the type-token ratio, discussing all established methods and their relevance for word frequency analysis. All methods presented in the book are statistically tested; to this end, some new tests have been developed. All procedures and calculations are conducted for 20 languages, ranging from Polynesia, Indonesia, India, and Europe to a North American Indian language. The broad distribution of the data and texts from all genres allows generalizations with respect to language typology.

Collocations and Action Research is a thorough investigation of both the theory and practice behind improving second language learners’ vocabulary and fluency through the teaching of multi-word units of language. Taking these collocations as its focus, this book provides a clear and in-depth description of the cognitive processing language learners go through when producing speech in relation to them. Using the findings of a two-year action research study into improving learners’ spoken fluency, Joshua Brook Antle also explores the practical sides of collocations, explaining how the research study was constructed and conducted. Orientating the findings within the larger field of second language acquisition, especially within the L2 classroom, the practical applications of the findings are then presented through a series of pedagogical tasks all focusing on collocations and productive fluency. Providing a template for how to conduct an action research study using both qualitative and quantitative research techniques, Collocations and Action Research will appeal to researchers interested in vocabulary and spoken fluency, as well as language instructors wanting to better understand the nature of vocabulary and spoken discourse.

Word lists lie at the heart of good vocabulary course design, the development of graded materials for extensive listening and extensive reading, research on vocabulary load, and vocabulary test development. This book has been written for vocabulary researchers and curriculum designers to describe the factors they need to consider when they create frequency-based word lists. These include the purpose for which the word list is to be used, the design of the corpus from which the list will be made, the unit of counting, and what should and should not be counted as words. The book draws on research to show the current state of knowledge of these factors and provides very practical guidelines for making word lists for language teaching and testing. The writer is well known for his work in the teaching and learning of vocabulary and in the creation of word lists and vocabulary size tests based on word lists.

Contrary to earlier approaches, this study suggests that Modern Greek (MG) is a language that exhibits reduplication, in the form of Total Reduplication (TR). The analysis addresses the morphosyntactic, phonological, semantic and pragmatic aspects of the types of TR in MG, and the constraints and/or preferences of speakers concerning their use. The typology of TR focuses on four cross-linguistically common meanings/functions, identified as the intensive, the contrastive, the distributive and the iterative. Part of the analysis of these functional types is based on data that come from two experiments with native speakers; the one confirms or refines earlier assumptions on to the relation of the above meanings/functions with word classes and semantic features of words; the other clarifies the idea of prosodic unity in TR and sheds light into various aspects of the relation of intonation with the interpretation of TR constructions. Also, the formal and lexical constraints on the use of TR are discussed with respect to the status of TR (particularly, the \"grammatical\"-\"lexical\" opposition). In general, TR seems to be a borderline case between grammar and the lexicon and a heterogeneous category, in that it involves grammatical, pragmatic and lexical construction types. However, the constructions in question meet highly specific criteria for their status as TR types and the process is productive and considerably regularized (rule-governed) in MG. In this sense, TR should not be merely taken as a strategy for \"emphasis\", but should be systematically represented in grammar textbooks.

The Bible is the product of a complex process of oral and written transmissions that stretched across centuries and traditions. This implies ongoing revision of the “original” or oldest textual layers over the course of hundreds of years. Although critical scholarship recognizes this fact, debates abound regarding the reconstruction of the different layers, their date of composition and their historical backgrounds. Traditional methodologies have grappled with these challenges through textual and diachronic criticism, employing linguistic, stylistic, inner-biblical, archaeological and historical criteria. In this study, we use computer-assisted methods to address the question of authorship of biblical texts by employing statistical analysis that is particularly sensitive to deviations in word frequencies. Here, the term “word” may be generalized to “n-gram” (a sequence of words) or other countable text features. This paper consists of two parts. In the first part, we focus on differentiating between three distinct scribal corpora across numerous chapters in the Enneateuch, the first nine books of the Bible. Specifically, we examine 50 chapters labeled according to biblical exegesis considerations into three corpora: the old layer in Deuteronomy (D), texts belonging to the “Deuteronomistic History” in Joshua-to-Kings (DtrH), and the Priestly writings (P). For pragmatic reasons, we chose entire chapters, in which the number of verses potentially attributed to different authors or redactors is negligible. Without prior assumptions about author identity, our approach leverages subtle differences in word frequencies to distinguish among the three corpora and identify author-dependent linguistic properties. Our analysis indicated that the first two scribal corpora — (D, the oldest layers of Deuteronomy, and DtrH, the so-called Deuteronomistic History) — are much more closely related to each other than they are to the third, (P). This observation aligns with scholarly consensus. In addition, we attained high accuracy in attributing authorship by evaluating the similarity of each chapter to the reference corpora. In the second part of the paper, we report on our use of the three corpora as ground truth to examine other biblical texts whose authorship is disputed by biblical experts. Here, we demonstrate the potential contribution of insights achieved in the first part. Our paper sheds new light on the question of authorship of biblical texts by offering interpretable, statistically significant evidence of the existence of linguistic characteristics in the writing of biblical authors/redactors, that can be identified automatically. Our methodology thus provides a new tool to address disputed matters in biblical studies.

The monograph investigates the relationship between form and meaning in different domains and centers on a group of methods referred to as \"linguistic profiles\" that have been developed recently by researchers at the University of Tromsø.