The Behaviour of Key Words KWs

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The Behaviour of Key Words (KWs)

• Mike Scott
• University of Liverpool

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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)

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Aims

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

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Starting Points
Words in Texts sentences paragraphs sections key
words etc.
Words in the Brain memory e.g. tip-of-the-tongue w
ord 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
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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)

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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. Thomass
• 7 The hospital is in London
• 8 3 was so last night

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• Hoey (1991)
• Links between sentences
• Bonds
• Sentential units v. Kintsch van Dijks
  propositional units
• Repetition, not verbatim but of concepts

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WordSmith KWs

• Simple verbatim repetition
• Comparison with reference corpus
• Dunnings 1993 Log Likelihood statistic

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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

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Exclamations in Romeo Juliet

• 21 occurrences of Ah, mostly negative prosody
• Ah, well aday hes dead,
• Ah, what an unkind hour
• 148 occurrences of O as exclamation
• Ah more male than female
• more female exclamations than male, especially
  Nurse

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Choice of Reference Corpus

• Does it make a difference?
• Elizabethan English in general
• Shakespeares complete works
• Shakespeares plays
• Shakespeares tragedies

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Choice of Reference Corpus

• BNC
• Complete Works
• Tragedies
• Robust core of KWs whatever the corpus
• but extra style indicator KWs too

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Patterns of Linkage

• (Jones, 197156 adapted)

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linked together in a network
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Global KWs in RJ
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Local KWs in BNC A8H
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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

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

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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

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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

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POS most likely to be key

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