Rights statement: This article has been accepted for publication in International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Volume ?, Issue ?, 2021, pages: ?-?, © 2021 John Benjamins, the publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use the material in any form.
Accepted author manuscript, 482 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Problematising Characteristicness
T2 - A Biomedical Association Case Study
AU - Prentice, Sheryl
AU - Knight, Jo
AU - Rayson, Paul
AU - El-Haj, Mahmoud
AU - Rutherford, Nathan
N1 - This article has been accepted for publication in International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Volume 26, Issue 3, 2021, pages: 305-335, © 2021 John Benjamins, the publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use the material in any form.
PY - 2021/8/31
Y1 - 2021/8/31
N2 - Keyness is a commonly used method in corpus linguistics and is assumed to identify key items that are characteristic of 1 corpus when compared to another. This paper puts this assumption to the test by comparing case study corpora in the fields of genetic, immunological and psychiatric biomedical association studies, using what we refer to as a ‘K-FLUX’ analysis to produce a set of key items. Experts from within these fields are asked to evaluate the extent to which identified key items are characteristic of their discipline. The paper concludes that less than 50% of the items identified by the method are rated as highly characteristic by experts and that this ranges between types of association study. Further, there is difficulty in reaching a consensus over what is deemed to be ‘characteristic’, thus posing a challenge to the ultimate aim of the keyness method. The paper demonstrates the value of supporting corpus linguistic studies with expert assessments to evaluate whether (and which) items can be said to be indicative of a particular field.
AB - Keyness is a commonly used method in corpus linguistics and is assumed to identify key items that are characteristic of 1 corpus when compared to another. This paper puts this assumption to the test by comparing case study corpora in the fields of genetic, immunological and psychiatric biomedical association studies, using what we refer to as a ‘K-FLUX’ analysis to produce a set of key items. Experts from within these fields are asked to evaluate the extent to which identified key items are characteristic of their discipline. The paper concludes that less than 50% of the items identified by the method are rated as highly characteristic by experts and that this ranges between types of association study. Further, there is difficulty in reaching a consensus over what is deemed to be ‘characteristic’, thus posing a challenge to the ultimate aim of the keyness method. The paper demonstrates the value of supporting corpus linguistic studies with expert assessments to evaluate whether (and which) items can be said to be indicative of a particular field.
KW - key items
KW - keyness
KW - characteristic
KW - evaluation
KW - biomedical
U2 - 10.1075/ijcl.19019.pre
DO - 10.1075/ijcl.19019.pre
M3 - Journal article
VL - 26
SP - 305
EP - 335
JO - International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
JF - International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
SN - 1384-6655
IS - 3
ER -