Dear Anastasia,

I always think that investigating function words in a corpus is a good thing. Often the deictic (pointing) meaning of "this" may be used as an indicator of orality and the dependence of the latter on context. However, I don't know if "this" is correlated with emotions in general and anger in particular. Maybe your corpus could show a link between the two.

hi. I think that this can convey different meanings based on the context in which it happens. therefore, contextual clues can help you to interpret these frequent function words. you should look for the people or objects they refer to using the context. best

can you explain more your question

is it related to stopwords ?

Good luck.

I presume you are concerned about the sheer volume of data that you will need to analyse. The only suggestion I can make is that you randomly sample a manageable amount for analysis. You can repeat this several times until you get stable results.

I presume you are concerned about the sheer volume of data that you will need to analyse. The only suggestion I can make is that you randomly sample a manageable amount for analysis. You can repeat this until you get stable results.

Apologies for the multiple, identical postings. The "Add" button appeared to be unresponsive. Unfortunately, it wasn't.

In my opinion, analysing determiners in English corpora can be tricky.

One problem is that you have classes of determiners which have identical pronominal forms (possessive determiners/pronouns, demonstrative determiners/pronouns). You can minimize this problem by using part-of-speech tagged corpora. Many corpora today come in a part-of-speech tagged version already. By using part-of-speech tags, you can specify whether you are looking for a pronominal form, a determiner form, or both, when looking for a word form such as 'this'.

Second, English has noun phrases where an overt determiner is required, and others where the determiner is either optional or not permitted (as per the standard). NPs without an overt article form (sometimes called zero article) can only be found automatically when the corpus is annotated for syntactic structure. A corpus that is annotated for syntactic structure is referred to as a 'parsed' corpus, and they are quite rare (due to the high error rate involved in automatic parsing). However, using tools such as the UAM CorpusTool, you can parse a corpus yourself.

Finally, you mentioned that you are looking for the use of determiners in the context of emotions such as 'anger'. I fully agree with the suggestions above: You can look for determiners that contain certain words in their immediate context. In corpus linguistics, this is often called 'collocation'. Using a collocation approach, you could compile a list of nouns (or verbs, adjectives) that express the notion of anger, and then ask the corpus software to only give you those instances of 'this' which has one of the words from your lists in its immediate context (e.g. within a range of 9 words to the right or the left). Some corpora are even tagged for synonyms (e.g. the corpora on the popular corpus.byu.edu platform), so that you could search for 'this' and any synonym of 'anger' in its immediate context.

I apologize for the somewhat lengthy response, and hope it was helpful (I explained some corpus-linguistic terminology because I don't know your background). Feel free to ask a follow-up.

Thank you very much for your replies. My primary concern is with the amount of data. And, of course, with the meaning of such particles depending on the context. So I am worried about how to choose right (random?) samples, how to choose contexts, etc., since I don't see that any frequency measure will clarify the issue, that is why it is important for me to focus on the qualitative aspect.

I think Akande's article (2002) may be of help to you. Check this: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c90d/5f0a3445b90c4695ca60f8df5b910a4787aa.pdf

I'm assuming that you already have a framework for classifying 'contextual meaning'. If your goal is to catalogue every 'contextual meaning' type, I think you will need to go through your examples until you find at least one of each type. If, on the other hand, it is to look at the distribution of the different 'contextual meaning' types, a practical solution is to randomly sample a manageable amount and classify each instance by its 'contextual meaning' and then get on with counting the frequency of the types.

Anastasia, please be aware of Leonard Talmy's important new book: The Targeting System of Language (2018). It is a major contribution to the field of determiner grammar. — As to the qualitative aspect you want to foreground: looking at the variation definite/indefinite/zero (article), there is a statistical preference of unspecified nouns that mean abstract entities for the definite [ex.: le monde vs. un monde fou]; — of nouns that mean concrete things for the indefinite [un chien vs. le chien de Pierre]; and nouns that mean masses or elements, for the zero-determiner […pour hommes; …sur terre], mostly with prepositions in the Romance languages.

So, determiners are basically still a sort of classifiers (in the sense of G. Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things). Even if we don't notice it.

Dear Ms Khain, you didn't explain what you will be looking for in the "corpora for study of determiners". If you had, the answers would have been more helpful. If you are interested in the raison d'être of the articles (a, the), you can have a look at my publications. This one (link below) explains my position concisely and clearly. If you find it appealing, go on with my book (2000) and the grammar (2017) -

Conference Paper On the article and aspect in English in view of their interp...