Abstract:

This article tests the value of corpus linguistics in analyzing nineteenth-century commissions of inquiry into British colonies. It examines and improves the capacity of a computerized text analysis tool called the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to identify word meaning, sentiment, and psycholinguistic constructs in nineteenth-century sources. By augmenting its dictionary with nineteenth-century language and cross-checking meaning, we show that the software can code with 97% accuracy. We then demonstrate the tool's potential to explore genres of colonial writing, and to locate emotive language and language relating to power differentials in commission reports, a function we argue may provide a "way in" to assessing how commissioners treated different kinds of British subjects and their testimony in the reports.

摘要：

本文检验了语料库语言学在分析 19 世纪英国殖民地调查委员会方面的价值。它检查并提高了一种称为语言查询和字数统计的计算机化文本分析工具的能力，以识别 19 世纪资料中的词义、情感和心理语言学结构。通过用 19 世纪的语言和交叉检查意义来扩充它的词典，我们表明该软件可以用97％ 准确性。然后，我们展示了该工具探索殖民写作体裁的潜力，并在委员会报告中定位与权力差异相关的情感语言和语言，我们认为这一功能可能提供一种“途径”来评估专员如何对待不同类型的英国主体和他们在报告中的证词。