The stages of human life in social representations: a Corpus Linguistics perspective
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21165/el.v50i1.3077Keywords:
Corpus Linguistics, Google Books, social representation, sentiment analysis.Abstract
The article presented here has been motivated by the need to understand representations of the human being in the different stages of life. These were operationalized through the following lexical items: man, woman, adolescent, adolescence, adult, boy, girl, child, kid, teen, and teenager (as well as in their plural forms). The analysis data consisted of the publications enabled by Google Books from 1800 to 2008. Therefore, several analyzes of sequences of adjacent words created by the Google Books Ngrams database were carried out. The research is based on Corpus Linguistics, by which it was possible to verify the usage patterns of these words as well as the variation in the use of such items. The study comprised quantitative analysis, first, and qualitative, later, through the interpretation of the theme pointed out by the lexicon, by reading and analyzing texts provided by the Google Books database. From the analysis of the patterns and the temporal variation of use, the emerging representations of each item investigated were highlighted. Based on such analysis, it was possible to detect the presence of the representations, being possible to verify how the human being has been represented by language (in the English language) in the last three centuries. In addition to the results obtained, this research highlights the power of the study on historical analysis based on large amounts of textual data.Downloads
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