corpus linguistics Corpus linguistics is an empirical method for the study of language by way of a text corpus (plural ''corpora''). Corpora are balanced, often stratified collections of authentic, "real world", text of speech or writing that aim to represent a giv ...

a key word is a word which occurs in a text more often than we would expect to occur by chance alone. Key words are calculated by carrying out a

statistical test A statistical hypothesis test is a method of statistical inference used to decide whether the data provide sufficient evidence to reject a particular hypothesis. A statistical hypothesis test typically involves a calculation of a test statistic. ...

(e.g., loglinear or chi-squared) which compares the word frequencies in a text against their expected frequencies derived in a much larger corpus, which acts as a reference for general language use. Keyness is then the quality a word or phrase has of being "key" in its context. Combinations of nouns with

parts of speech In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are as ...

that human readers would not likely notice, such as prepositions, time adverbs, and pronouns can be a relevant part of keyness. Even separate pronouns can constitute keywords. Compare this with

collocation In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words t ...

, the quality linking two words or phrases usually assumed to be within a given span of each other. Keyness is a ''textual'' feature, not a language feature (so a word has keyness in a certain textual context but may well not have keyness in other contexts, whereas a node and collocate are often found together in texts of the same genre so collocation is to a considerable extent a ''language'' phenomenon). The set of keywords found in a given text share keyness, they are co-key. Words typically found in the same texts as a key word are called ''associates''.

Sociological aspects

In politics, sociology and critical discourse analysis, the key reference for keywords was

Raymond Williams Raymond Henry Williams (31 August 1921 – 26 January 1988) was a Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist and critic influential within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the media and literature contribu ...

(1976), but Williams was resolutely

Marxist Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflic ...

, and Critical Discourse Analysis has tended to perpetuate this political meaning of the term: keywords are part of ideologies and studying them is part of

social criticism Social criticism is a form of academic or journalistic criticism focusing on social issues in contemporary society, in respect to perceived injustices and power relations in general. Social criticism of the Enlightenment The origin of modern ...

Cultural studies Cultural studies is an academic field that explores the dynamics of contemporary culture (including the politics of popular culture) and its social and historical foundations. Cultural studies researchers investigate how cultural practices rel ...

has tended to develop along similar lines. This stands in stark contrast to present day linguistics which is wary of political analysis, and has tended to aspire to non-political objectivity. The development of technology, new techniques and methodology relating to massive corpora have all consolidated this trend.

Translatability

There are, however, numerous political dimensions that come into play when keywords are studied in relation to cultures, societies and their histories. The Lublin Ethnolinguistics School studies Polish and European keywords in this fashion. Anna Wierzbicka (1997), probably the best known cultural linguist writing in English today, studies languages as parts of cultures evolving in society and history. And it becomes impossible to ignore politics when keywords migrate from one culture to another. Underhill and Gianninoto demonstrate the way political terms like, "citizen" and "individual" are integrated into the Chinese worldview over the course of the 19th and 20th century. They argue that this is part of a complex readjustment of conceptual clusters related to "the people". Keywords like "citizen" generate various translations in Chinese, and are part of an ongoing adaptation to global concepts of individual rights and responsibilities. Understanding keywords in this light becomes crucial for understanding how the politics of China evolves as Communism emerges and as the free market and citizens' rights develop. Underhill and Gianninoto argue that this is part of the complex ways ideological worldviews interact with the language as an ongoing means of perceiving and understanding the world. Barbara Cassin studies keywords in a more traditional manner, striving to define the words specific to individual cultures, in order to demonstrate that many of our keywords are partially "untranslatable" into their "equivalents. The Greeks may need four words to cover all the meanings English-speakers have in mind when speaking of "love". Similarly, the French find that "liberté" suffices, while English-speakers attribute different associations to "liberty" and "freedom": "freedom of speech" or "freedom of movement", but "the Statue of Liberty".

Software-assisted identification

Keywords are identified by software that compares a word-list of the text with a word-list based on a larger reference corpus. Software such as e.g.

WordSmith Wordsmith may refer to: * A writer A writer is a person who uses written words in different writing styles, genres and techniques to communicate ideas, to inspire feelings and emotions, or to entertain. Writers may develop different forms ...

, lists keywords and phrases and allows plotting their occurrence as they appear in texts.

References

Bibliography

* * especially chapters 4 & 5. * * *

External links