Keymorph analysis, or how morphosyntax informs discourse

Abstract

Abstract This paper introduces keymorph analysis (KMA), a new extension of the discourse-probing technique of keyword analysis (KWA). While KWA focuses on lexicon and provides a key predominantly to textual topics and their semantic associations, KMA focuses on morphosyntactic features and captures more general characteristics of texts as wholes. Speeches by Czech(oslovak) presidents and corpus of contemporary written Czech SYN2015 are used to illustrate readers’ perception of situations and their participants in these texts. The paper also shows that different levels of morphosyntax facilitate interpretation of discourse: ideological differences can be observed with higher-level morphosyntactic features (parts of speech), while differences in speaker style are observable with lower-level morphosyntactic features (case, number, person, and their combinations).