Abstract
At the center of this research is an analysis of negation usage in the Croatian Parliament. Research shows that psychologically speaking, it is much harder to process a negative word followed by a positive adjective (e.g., he is not happy) than an adjective with a negative prefix (e.g., he is unhappy). We investigate how negation is used among Croatian politicians during parliamentary sessions and whether its usage is dependent on the speaker’s gender and party preference, but also the time when the session was held.
Transcripts of the Croatian Parliament’s sessions have been available since 2003. Each transcript includes information on the date of the session, the speaker, and his/her party followed by the speech. We have made a selection of 4 points in time per each year since 2003 (January, May, September, December) for which the data exists in order to test if the time period of the session (just before and after the recess) has an impact on the usage of negation. This corpus is over 9 million tokens in size. Additionally, from this data, we were able to sort out different sub-corpora according to the gender of each speaker and their party.
For this experiment, a syntactic grammar was designed to annotate different types of negation on the sentence level: (a) negative verb + positive adjective; (b) positive verb + negative adjective; and (c) negative verb + negative adjective.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The archive of Parliamentary sessions is maintained by the Information and Documentation Department and the Parliamentary transcripts are freely available at https://edoc.sabor.hr/Fonogrami.aspx.
References
Amador-Moreno, C.P.: How can corpora be used to explore literary speech representation? In: O’Keeffe, A., McCarthy, M. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, pp. 531–544. Routldge Taylor & Francis Group, London (2010)
Bayley, P.: Introduction: the whys and wherefores of analyzing parliamentary discourse. In: Bayley, P. (ed.) Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Parliamentary Discourse, pp. 1–44. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia (2004)
Bucholtz, M.: Theories of discourse as theories of gender: discourse analysis in language and gender studies. In: Holmes, J., Meyerhoff, M. (eds.) The Handbook of Language and Gender, pp. 43–68. UC Santa Barbara (2003). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/583711gp. Accessed 01 July 2021
Calzada-Perez, M.: Researching the European parliament with corpus-assisted studies: institutional dimensions. In: Specialised Translation in Spain, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 465–490 (2017)
Chilton, P.: Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. Routledge, London (2004)
Dunmire, P.L.: Political discourse analysis: exploring the language of politics and the politics of language. Lang. Linguist. Compass 6(11), 735–751 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1002/lnc3.365
He, A.W.: Discourse analysis. In: Aronoff, M., Rees-Miller, J. (eds.) The Handbook of Linguistics, pp. 445–462. Wiley, Hoboken (2017)
Kirvalidze, N., Samnidze, N.: Political discourse as a subject of interdisciplinary studies. J. Teach. Educ. 05(01), 161–170 (2016)
Levshina, N.: Corpus-based typology: applications, challenges and some solutions. In: Linguistic Typology, Advance online publication (2021). https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2020-0118
Rao, P., Taboada, M.: Gender bias in the news: a scalable topic modelling and visualization framework. Front. Artif. Intell.: Lang. Comput. 4, 664737 (2021). https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2021.664737
Romaine, S.: Variation in language and gender. In: Holmes, J., Meyerhoff, M. (eds.) The Handbook of Language and Gender, pp. 98–119. Blackwell, Oxford (2003)
Silberztein, M.: Formalizing Natural Languages: The NooJ Approach. Cognitive Science Series, Wiley-ISTE, London (2016)
Van Dijk, T.A.: What is political discourse analysis? In: Bloomaert, J., Bulcaen, Ch. (eds.) Political Linguistics, pp. 11–52, Amsterdam (1997)
Van Dijk, T.A.: Discourse, context and cognition. Discourse Stud. 8(1), 159–177 (2006). Special Issue: Discourse interaction and cognition
Wilson, J.: Political discourse. In: Tannen, D., Hamilton, H.E., Schiffrin, D. (eds.) The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, pp. 398–415. Blackwel, Oxford (2015). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118584194.ch36
Žanpera, N., Kocijan, K., Šojat, K.: Negation of Croatian nouns. In: Fehri, H., Mesfar, S., Silberztein, M. (eds.) NooJ 2019. CCIS, vol. 1153, pp. 52–64. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38833-1_5
Žanpera, N.: Računalno prepoznavanje i označavanje negacije u hrvatskom. MA thesis, Sveučilište u Zagrebu, Filozofski fakultet (2020). https://urn.nsk.hr/urn:nbn:hr:131:050307. Accessed 07 July 2021
Acknowledgements
The research reported here was supported by the European Commission in the CEF Telecom Programme: Action No. 2019-EU-IA-0034, CURLICAT.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kocijan, K., Šojat, K. (2021). Negation Usage in the Croatian Parliament. In: Bigey, M., Richeton, A., Silberztein, M., Thomas, I. (eds) Formalizing Natural Languages: Applications to Natural Language Processing and Digital Humanities. NooJ 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1520. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92861-2_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92861-2_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-92860-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-92861-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)