Linguistic Features as Evidence for Historical Context Interpretation

• Published in: Text, Speech, and Dialogue Vol. 10415; pp. 299 - 307
• Main Authors: Liu, Jyi-Shane, Lee, Ching-Ying, Hsueh, Hua-Yuan
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2017; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Historical context; Linguistic feature
• ISBN: 3319642057; 9783319642055
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-64206-2_34

Inspired by the great potential of linguistic features in preserving and revealing writers’ state of mind and conception in certain space and time, we use linguistic features as a vehicle to extract pieces of significant information from a large set of text of known origin so as to construct a context for personal inspection on the writer(s). In this research, we choose a set of linguistic features, each of a grammatical function or a grammatical association pattern, and each represents a different perspective of contextual annotation. In particular, the selected grammatical items include personal pronoun, negation, noun chunk, and are used as text slicing tubes for extracting a certain aspect of information. The initial results show that some selected grammatical constructions are effective in extracting descriptive evidence for construing historical context. Our study has contributed to exploring an effective avenue for innovative history studies by means of examining linguistic evidence.