The Behaviour of Key Words (KWs)

1. The Behaviour of Key Words (KWs) Mike Scott University of Liverpool

2. Key Words and Keyness • “… strong, difficult and persuasive words in everyday usage … [and words] common in descriptions of wider areas of thought and experience … they are significant, binding words in certain activities and their interpretation; they are significant, indicative words in certain forms of thought.” (Williams, 1983: 14-15)

3. Aims • Keyness • Different Reference Corpora • Where KWs appear in a text • Linkage between KWs • KWs and part of speech

4. Starting Points… Words in Texts sentences paragraphs sections key words etc. Words in the Brain memory e.g. tip-of-the-tongue word associations enjoyment priming Words in Culture cultural key words, indicators of class and stance, bias, etc. Words in the Language lexicography terminology, phraseology, etc. patterns of “standard English”

5. Keyness • Words are not key in a language but in a given text • Words can be key to a culture (Stubbs 2002, Williams 1976) • Keyness: • Importance • “Aboutness” (Phillips, 1989)

6. Related Work • Stubbs (2002) Cultural KWs; Williams (1979) updated • Kintsch & van Dijk (1978) EastEnders star Steve McFadden was 'stable' in St Thomas's Hospital, London, last night after being stabbed in the back, arm and hand under Waterloo Bridge, central London, on Friday. 1 S. McF. is a star 2 S. McF. is in EastEnders 3 S. McF. was stable 4 someone said that [3] 5 S. McF. is in hospital 6 The hospital is called St. Thomas’s 7 The hospital is in London 8 [3] was so last night

7. Hoey (1991) Links between sentences Bonds Sentential units v. Kintsch & van Dijk’s propositional units Repetition, not verbatim but of concepts

8. WordSmith KWs • Simple verbatim repetition • Comparison with reference corpus • Dunning’s 1993 Log Likelihood statistic

9. Do KWs show Keyness? • Some are “important” and reflect “aboutness” love, lips, light, night, banished, death, poison Names of characters in the play • Others are style markers O, Ah, thou,art,wilt, she

10. Exclamations in Romeo & Juliet • 21 occurrences of “Ah”, mostly negative prosody Ah, well a’day he’s dead, Ah, what an unkind hour • 148 occurrences of “O” as exclamation • “Ah” more male than female • more female exclamations than male, especially Nurse

11. Choice of Reference Corpus • Does it make a difference? • Elizabethan English in general • Shakespeare’s complete works • Shakespeare’s plays • Shakespeare’s tragedies

12. Choice of Reference Corpus: • BNC • Complete Works • Tragedies • Robust core of KWs whatever the corpus • but extra style indicator KWs too

13. Strings Stars Cliques Clumps Patterns of Linkage (Jones, 1971:56 adapted)

14. A …linked together in a network …

15. Global KWs in R&J

16. Local KWs in BNC A8H

17. Linkage between KWs • KWs share keyness, therefore are “co-key” in the same text • Size of co-(n)text • Linkedness <> frequency but they are related • Linkedness & phraseology: “Lady Capulet”, “Friar Lawrence”, “County Paris”

18. Linkage with 15-25 word span is similar to 5-word span, but phraseology linkages disappear

19. Co-keyness explored further • Co-keyness: shared keyness in the same text E.g. dead, love, lips, poison, Romeo • Associates: the set of words which are co-key with a KW-node across a range of texts

20. KWs and Part of Speech • 1000 randomly selected BNC texts • Nearly 50% of KWs were nouns • KW-types v. KW-tokens • 10 thousand KW noun types • 1.8 million KW noun tokens

21. POS most likely to be key • Interjection • Pronoun • Alphabetical symbol • Proper noun • Possessive –s • Verb BE • Noun