Blanca Romero P.

At the beginning of the week´s content we were asked to give definitions of two words "Diamond" and "Cause". Who would have thought those two simple words would open a whole new world of knowledge in relation to the study of language. How we, as humans are magnificen system, yet we still have out flaws and how a computer system can complement us so well.       

     From my teaching experience I am familiar with collocations (my students cringe whenever that word comes up) therefore I had some knowledge about their existence and use, however, there are a lot of co-occurrences in language that I would have never considered a collocation. Furthermore, the asociation of a word not just with a group of word, but with a lemma is something worth deepening into and exploiting with my students and on my research as well.     

    To be honest, I was quite shocked to find out how many negative words are asociated with "Cause". A simple word, harmless by itself, but considered by a large group to have a negative connotation. Interesting how the Discourse Prosody of the speaker or writer can affect the entire text and the underlying meaning of certain words.       

    Though we had already been introduced to the notion of keywords, it is interesting to learn more about such element of the corpus. I find it very useful to have more precise information regarding this and how to work with in an analysis of corpus.    

   I have noticed, to my utter shame that I have been going on about this method in a less than accurate way, but hey, that´s the point of this course, isn´t it?   

    More thoughts on another post...

      As an English teacher, avid reader and eternal student of language, I find the idea of analyzing english as well as spanish rather compelling. My main focus, though, is to study the rhetorical conventions ruling both languages. Why? Well, easy, the rethoric strategies a speaker or writer uses reflect his or her culture, beliefs, ideology, and so on. That is what intrigues me about languanges. What lies underneath the use of one structure over another and how that same structure can vary in meaning from one context to another. There is no better way to understand someone’s culture than through their writing. For me, newspaper articles, especially the Op Eds are excellent means to learning the rhetorical aspects of a language. I would love to devote my time to study those genres.