Catherine Smith

Dickens, the suspended quotation and the corpus

This article presents a computer-assisted approach to the study of character discourse in Dickens. It focuses on the concept of the ‘suspended quotation’ – the interruption of a character’s speech by at least five words of narrator text. After an outline of the concept of the suspended quotation as introduced by Lambert (1981), the article compares manually derived counts for suspensions in Dickens with automatically generated figures. This comparison shows how corpus methods can help to increase the scale at which the phenomenon is studied. It highlights that quantitative information for selected sections of a novel does not necessarily represent the patterns that are found across the whole text. The article also includes a qualitative analysis of suspensions. With the help of the new tool CLiC, it investigates interruptions of the speech of Mrs Sparsit in Hard Times and illustrates how suspensions can be useful places for the presentation of character information. CLiC is further used to find patterns of the word pause that provide insights into how suspensions contribute to the representation of pauses in character speech.

Don't worry about metaphor: affect detection for conversational agents

We demonstrate one aspect of an affect-extraction system for use in intelligent conversational agents. This aspect performs a degree of affective interpretation of some types of metaphorical utterance.

Affect and Metaphor in an ICA: Further Developments

We describe a computational treatment of certain sorts of affect-conveying metaphorical utterances. This is part of an affect detection system used by intelligent conversational agents (ICAs) operating in an edrama system.

‘Am I anorexic?’ Weight, eating and discourses of the body in online adolescent health communication

This article explores the communicative choices of adolescents seeking advice from an internet-based health forum run by medical professionals. Techniques from the disciplines of sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics are integrated to examine the strategies used in adolescents’ health questions. We focus on the emergent theme of Weight and Eating, a concern which features prominently in adolescents’ requests to medical practitioners. The majority of advice requests are authored by adolescent girls, with queries peaking at age 12. A combined quantitative and qualitative analysis provides detailed insights into adolescents’ communicative strategies. Examinations of question types, register and a discourse-based analysis draw attention to dominant discourses of the body, including a ‘discourse of slenderness’ and a ‘discourse of normality’, which exercise negative influences on adolescents’ dietary behaviours. The findings are of applied linguistic relevance to health practitioners and educators, as they provide them with access to adolescents’ health queries in their own language.

Metaphor and Affect Detection in an ICA

We discuss an aspect of an affect-detection system used in edrama by intelligent conversational agents, namely affective interpretation of limited sorts of metaphorical utterance. We discuss how these metaphorical utterances are recognized and how they are analysed and their affective content determined.