The Behaviour of Key Words (KWs)

Mike ScottUniversity of Liverpool

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)

Aims

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

Starting Points…Words in Texts

sentencesparagraphs

sectionskey words

etc.

Words in the Brainmemory e.g. tip-of-the-tongue

word associationsenjoyment

priming

Words in the Languagelexicographyterminology,

phraseology, etc.patterns of “standard English”

Words in Culturecultural key words,

indicators of class andstance, bias, etc.

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)

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 star2 S. McF. is in EastEnders3 S. McF. was stable4 someone said that [3]5 S. McF. is in hospital6 The hospital is called St. Thomas’s7 The hospital is in London8 [3] was so last night

Hoey (1991)Links between sentencesBonds

Sentential units v. Kintsch & van Dijk’s propositional units

Repetition, not verbatim but of concepts

WordSmith KWs

Simple verbatim repetition Comparison with reference corpus Dunning’s 1993 Log Likelihood statistic

Do KWs show Keyness?

Some are “important” and reflect “aboutness”love, lips, light, night, banished, death, poisonNames of characters in the play

Others are style markersO, Ah, thou,art, wilt, she

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 femalemore female exclamations than male,

especially Nurse

Choice of Reference Corpus

Does it make a difference?Elizabethan English in generalShakespeare’s complete worksShakespeare’s playsShakespeare’s tragedies

Choice of Reference Corpus:

BNC Complete Works Tragedies

Robust core of KWs whatever the corpus but extra style indicator KWs too

Patterns of Linkage(Jones, 1971:56 adapted)

Strings

Stars

Cliques

Clumps

…linked together in a network …

A

Global KWs in R&JN Key word Hits Plot1 ROMEO 1282 TYBALT 533 JULIET 574 CAPULET 405 NURSE 566 NIGHT 837 MERCUTIO 208 PARIS 369 LOVE 140

10 MONTAGUE 2611 THOU 27612 FRIAR 3813 ROMEO'S 1614 O 15715 LAWRENCE 1616 BENVOLIO 1517 COUNTY 1618 THURSDAY 1419 BANISHED 1720 CELL 1721 DEATH 71

Local KWs in BNC A8HN Key word Hits Plot1 BOND 92 BREWERIES 53 BUPA 104 BUPA'S 35 BUTTERFIELD 36 CENTREWAY 37 CONSGOLD 78 CSR 49 EC 10

10 HCA 411 HOSPITALS 612 MARTINDALE 313 MURDOCH 614 PACKER 515 PIERCE 316 PUBS 517 REED 818 RUMOUR 419 WHITBREAD 920 HANSON 1521 MINING 6

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”

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

Co-keyness explored further

Co-keyness: shared keyness in the same textE.g. dead, love, lips, poison, Romeo

Associates: the set of words which are co-key with a KW-node across a range of texts

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 types1.8 million KW noun tokens

POS most likely to be key

Interjection Pronoun Alphabetical symbol Proper noun Possessive –s Verb BE Noun