The Behaviour of Key Words (KWs) Mike Scott University of Liverpool

Key Words and Keyness “… strong, difficult and persuasive words in everyday usage … [and words] common in descriptions of wider areas of thought and experience … they are significant, binding words in certain activities and their interpretation; they are significant, indicative words in certain forms of thought.” (Williams, 1983: 14-15)

Aims Keyness Different Reference Corpora Where KWs appear in a text Linkage between KWs KWs and part of speech

Starting Points… Words in Texts sentences paragraphs sections key words etc. Words in the Brain memory e.g. tip-of-the-tongue word associations enjoyment priming Words in the Language lexicography terminology, phraseology, etc. patterns of “standard English” Words in Culture cultural key words, indicators of class and stance, bias, etc.

Keyness  Words are not key in a language but in a given text  Words can be key to a culture (Stubbs 2002, Williams 1976) Keyness:  Importance  “Aboutness” (Phillips, 1989)

Related Work Stubbs (2002) Cultural KWs; Williams (1979) updated Kintsch & van Dijk (1978) EastEnders star Steve McFadden was 'stable' in St Thomas's Hospital, London, last night after being stabbed in the back, arm and hand under Waterloo Bridge, central London, on Friday. 1S. McF. is a star 2S. McF. is in EastEnders 3S. McF. was stable 4someone said that [3] 5S. McF. is in hospital 6The hospital is called St. Thomas’s 7The hospital is in London 8[3] was so last night

Hoey (1991) Links between sentences Bonds Sentential units v. Kintsch & van Dijk’s propositional units Repetition, not verbatim but of concepts

WordSmith KWs Simple verbatim repetition Comparison with reference corpus Dunning’s 1993 Log Likelihood statistic

Do KWs show Keyness? Some are “important” and reflect “aboutness” love, lips, light, night, banished, death, poison Names of characters in the play Others are style markers O, Ah, thou,art, wilt, she

Exclamations in Romeo & Juliet 21 occurrences of “Ah”, mostly negative prosody Ah, well a’day he’s dead, Ah, what an unkind hour 148 occurrences of “O” as exclamation  “Ah” more male than female  more female exclamations than male, especially Nurse

Choice of Reference Corpus Does it make a difference?  Elizabethan English in general  Shakespeare’s complete works  Shakespeare’s plays  Shakespeare’s tragedies

Choice of Reference Corpus: BNC Complete Works Tragedies Robust core of KWs whatever the corpus but extra style indicator KWs too

Patterns of Linkage (Jones, 1971:56 adapted) Strings Stars Cliques Clumps

…linked together in a network … A

Global KWs in R&J

Local KWs in BNC A8H

Linkage between KWs KWs share keyness, therefore are “co- key” in the same text Size of co-(n)text Linkedness <> frequency but they are related Linkedness & phraseology: “ Lady Capulet”, “Friar Lawrence”, “County Paris ”

Linkage with word span is similar to 5-word span, but phraseology linkages disappear

Co-keyness explored further Co-keyness: shared keyness in the same text E.g. dead, love, lips, poison, Romeo Associates: the set of words which are co- key with a KW-node across a range of texts

KWs and Part of Speech 1000 randomly selected BNC texts Nearly 50% of KWs were nouns KW-types v. KW-tokens  10 thousand KW noun types  1.8 million KW noun tokens

POS most likely to be key Interjection Pronoun Alphabetical symbol Proper noun Possessive –s Verb BE Noun