Addicted to socialising and still lonely: A comparative, corpus-driven analysis of problematic social networking site use

Background and Aims

Problematic Social Networking Site Use (PSNSU) is not a formally recognised addiction, but it is increasingly discussed as such in academic research and online. Taking a quantitative, exploratory approach, this study aims to (1) determine whether PSNSU is presented like clinically defined addictions by the affected community and (2) address how well measurements of PSNSU fit with the thematic content found within the associated discourse.

Methods

Four corpora were created for this study: a corpus concerning PSNSU and three control corpora concerning established addictions, including Alcohol Use Disorder, Tobacco Use Disorder and Gaming Disorder. Keywords were identified, collocates and concordances were explored, and shared themes were compared.

Results

Findings show broad thematic similarities between PSNSU and the three control addictions as well as prominent interdiscursive references, which indicate possible confirmation bias among speakers.

Conclusions

Scales based upon the components model of addiction are suggested as the most appropriate measure of this emerging disorder.

Perceptions of the Agency and Responsibility of the NHS COVID-19 App on Twitter: Critical Discourse Analysis

BACKGROUND

Since September 2020, the National Health Service (NHS) COVID-19 contact-tracing app has been used to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom. Since its launch, this app has been a part of the discussion regarding the perceived social agency of decision-making algorithms. On the social media website Twitter, a plethora of views about the app have been found but only analyzed for sentiment and topic trajectories thus far, leaving the perceived social agency of the app underexplored.

OBJECTIVE

We aimed to examine the discussion of social agency in social media public discourse regarding algorithm-operated decisions, particularly when the artificial intelligence agency responsible for specific information systems is not openly disclosed in an example such as the COVID-19 contact-tracing app. To do this, we analyzed the presentation of the NHS COVID-19 App on Twitter, focusing on the portrayal of social agency and the impact of its deployment on society. We also aimed to discover what the presentation of social agents communicates about the perceived responsibility of the app.

METHODS

Using corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, underpinned by social actor representation, we used the link between grammatical and social agency and analyzed a corpus of 118,316 tweets from September 2020 to July 2021 to see whether the app was portrayed as a social actor.

RESULTS

We found that active presentations of the app-seen mainly through personalization and agency metaphor-dominated the discourse. The app was presented as a social actor in 96% of the cases considered and grew in proportion to passive presentations over time. These active presentations showed the app to be a social actor in 5 main ways: informing, instructing, providing permission, disrupting, and functioning. We found a small number of occasions on which the app was presented passively through backgrounding and exclusion.

CONCLUSIONS

Twitter users presented the NHS COVID-19 App as an active social actor with a clear sense of social agency. The study also revealed that Twitter users perceived the app as responsible for their welfare, particularly when it provided instructions or permission, and this perception remained consistent throughout the discourse, particularly during significant events. Overall, this study contributes to understanding how social agency is discussed in social media discourse related to algorithmic-operated decisions This research offers valuable insights into public perceptions of decision-making digital contact-tracing health care technologies and their perceptions on the web, which, even in a postpandemic world, may shed light on how the public might respond to forthcoming interventions.

Grammatical cues to subjecthood are redundant in a majority of simple clauses across languages

Grammatical cues are sometimes redundant with word meanings in natural language. For instance, English word order rules constrain the word order of a sentence like "The dog chewed the bone" even though the status of "dog" as subject and "bone" as object can be inferred from world knowledge and plausibility. Quantifying how often this redundancy occurs, and how the level of redundancy varies across typologically diverse languages, can shed light on the function and evolution of grammar. To that end, we performed a behavioral experiment in English and Russian and a cross-linguistic computational analysis measuring the redundancy of grammatical cues in transitive clauses extracted from corpus text. English and Russian speakers (n = 484) were presented with subjects, verbs, and objects (in random order and with morphological markings removed) extracted from naturally occurring sentences and were asked to identify which noun is the subject of the action. Accuracy was high in both languages (∼89% in English, ∼87% in Russian). Next, we trained a neural network machine classifier on a similar task: predicting which nominal in a subject-verb-object triad is the subject. Across 30 languages from eight language families, performance was consistently high: a median accuracy of 87%, comparable to the accuracy observed in the human experiments. The conclusion is that grammatical cues such as word order are necessary to convey subjecthood and objecthood in a minority of naturally occurring transitive clauses; nevertheless, they can (a) provide an important source of redundancy and (b) are crucial for conveying intended meaning that cannot be inferred from the words alone, including descriptions of human interactions, where roles are often reversible (e.g., Ray helped Lu/Lu helped Ray), and expressing non-prototypical meanings (e.g., "The bone chewed the dog.").

How People With a Bipolar Disorder Diagnosis Talk About Personal Recovery in Peer Online Support Forums: Corpus Framework Analysis Using the POETIC Framework

Background

Personal recovery is of particular value in bipolar disorder, where symptoms often persist despite treatment. We previously defined the POETIC (Purpose and Meaning, Optimism and Hope, Empowerment, Tensions, Identity, Connectedness) framework for personal recovery in bipolar disorder. So far, personal recovery has only been studied in researcher-constructed environments (eg, interviews and focus groups). Support forum posts can serve as a complementary naturalistic data resource to understand the lived experience of personal recovery.

Objective

This study aimed to answer the question "What can online support forum posts reveal about the experience of personal recovery in bipolar disorder in relation to the POETIC framework?"

Methods

By integrating natural language processing, corpus linguistics, and health research methods, this study analyzed public, bipolar disorder support forum posts relevant to the lived experience of personal recovery. By comparing 4462 personal recovery-relevant posts by 1982 users to 25,197 posts not relevant to personal recovery, we identified 130 significantly overused key lemmas. Key lemmas were coded according to the POETIC framework.

Results

Personal recovery-related discussions primarily focused on 3 domains: "Purpose and meaning" (particularly reproductive decisions and work), "Connectedness" (romantic relationships and social support), and "Empowerment" (self-management and personal responsibility). This study confirmed the validity of the POETIC framework to capture personal recovery experiences shared on the web and highlighted new aspects beyond previous studies using interviews and focus groups.

Conclusions

This study is the first to analyze naturalistic data on personal recovery in bipolar disorder. By indicating the key areas that people focus on in personal recovery when posting freely and the language they use, this study provides helpful starting points for formal and informal carers to understand the concerns of people diagnosed with a bipolar disorder and to consider how to best offer support.

Sociolinguistic Variation in Mouthings in British Sign Language: A Corpus-Based Study

Mouth activity forms a key component of all sign languages. This can be divided into mouthings, which originate from words in the ambient spoken language, and mouth gestures, which do not. This study examines the relationship between the distribution of mouthings co-occurring with verb signs in British Sign Language (BSL) and various linguistic and social factors, using the BSL Corpus. We find considerable variation between participants and a lack of homogeneity in mouth actions with particular signs. This accords with previous theories that mouthings constitute code-blending between spoken and signed languages-similar to code-switching or code-mixing in spoken languages-rather than being a phonologically or lexically compulsory part of the sign. We also find a strong association between production of plain verbs (which are body-anchored and cannot be modified spatially) and increased mouthing. In addition, we observe significant effects of region (signers from the south of the United Kingdom mouth more than those from the north), gender (women mouth more than men), and age (signers aged 16-35 years produce fewer mouthings than older participants). We find no significant effect of language background (deaf vs. hearing family). Based on these findings, we argue that the multimodal, multilingual, and simultaneous nature of code-blending in sign languages fits well within the paradigm of translanguaging. We discuss implications of this for concepts of translanguaging, code-switching, code-mixing, and related phenomena, highlighting the need to consider not just modality and linguistic codes but also sequential versus simultaneous patterning.

Gender bias in video game dialogue

Gender biases in fictional dialogue are well documented in many media. In film, television and books, female characters tend to talk less than male characters, talk to each other less than male characters talk to each other, and have a more limited range of things to say. Identifying these biases is an important step towards addressing them. However, there is a lack of solid data for video games, now one of the major mass media which has the ability to shape conceptions of gender and gender roles. We present the Video Game Dialogue Corpus, the first large-scale, consistently coded corpus of video game dialogue, which makes it possible for the first time to measure and monitor gender representation in video game dialogue. It demonstrates that there is half as much dialogue from female characters as from male characters. Some of this is due to a lack of female characters, but there are also biases in who female characters speak to, and what they say. We make suggestions for how game developers can avoid these biases to make more inclusive games.

Head and dependent marking and dependency length in possessive noun phrases: a typological study of morphological and syntactic complexity

The interaction of morphosyntactic features has been of great interest in research on linguistic complexity. In this paper we approach such interactions in possessive noun phrases. First, we study the interaction of head marking and dependent marking in this domain with typological feature data and with multilingual corpus data. The data suggest that there is a clear inverse relationship between head and dependent marking in possessive noun phrases in terms of complexity. The result points to evidence on complexity trade-offs and to productive integration of typological and corpus-based approaches. Second, we explore whether zero versus overt morphological marking as a measure of morphological complexity affects dependency length as a measure of syntactic complexity. Data from multilingual corpora suggest that there is no cross-linguistic trend between these measures in possessive noun phrases.

Predictive keywords: Using machine learning to explain document characteristics

When exploring the characteristics of a discourse domain associated with texts, keyword analysis is widely used in corpus linguistics. However, one of the challenges facing this method is the evaluation of the quality of the keywords. Here, we propose casting keyword analysis as a prediction problem with the goal of discriminating the texts associated with the target corpus from the reference corpus. We demonstrate that, when using linear support vector machines, this approach can be used not only to quantify the discrimination between the two corpora, but also extract keywords. To evaluate the keywords, we develop a systematic and rigorous approach anchored to the concepts of usefulness and relevance used in machine learning. The extracted keywords are compared with the recently proposed text dispersion keyness measure. We demonstrate that that our approach extracts keywords that are highly useful and linguistically relevant, capturing the characteristics of their discourse domain.

Part of speech tagging of grammatical features related to L2 Chinese development: A case analysis of Stanza in the L2 writing context

Grammatical complexity has received extensive attention in second language acquisition. Although computational tools have been developed to analyze grammatical complexity, most relevant studies investigated this construct in the context of English as a second language. In response to an increasing number of L2 Chinese learners, it is important to extend the investigation of grammatical complexity in L2 Chinese. To promote relevant research, we evaluated the new computational tool, Stanza, on its accuracy of part-of-speech tagging for L2 Chinese writing. We particularly focused on eight grammatical features closely related to L2 Chinese development. Then, we reported the precisions, recalls, and F-scores for the individual grammatical features and offered a qualitative analysis of systematic tagging errors. In terms of the precision, three features have high rates, over 90% (i.e., ba and bei markers, classifiers, -de as noun modifier marker). For recall, four features have high rates, over 90% (i.e., aspect markers, ba and bei markers, classifiers, -de as noun modifier marker). Overall, based on the F-scores, Stanza has a good tagging performance on ba and bei markers, classifiers, and -de as a noun modifier marker. This evaluation provides research implications for scholars who plan to use this computational tool to study L2 Chinese development in second language acquisition or applied linguistics in general.

Mourning the lost: A social actor analysis of gender representation in the @FacesofCovid's tweets

When COVID-19 swept the world at the end of 2019, it changed life as we knew it. With about 600 million positive cases (both recovered and active) and approximately 6.5 million deaths due to the disease, people worldwide have been affected physically, psychologically, economically, and socially by the pandemic. Amid such difficult times, @FacesofCovid-a Twitter account with more than 150,000 followers-was launched in March 2020 with the mission of honoring the lives of those lost to COVID-19 instead of presenting them as mere statistics. The account is a demonstrative example of the mourning genre as primarily exhibited through concise tweets grieving the deceased. As such, it offers a novel case of a public online mourning platform through microblogging, an understudied research area that merits further examination. A self-built corpus of 280,536 words was built from more than 7,000 tweets on the public account. The analysis presented in this paper focused on how people are constructed in the language of their loved ones as they are mourned through these tweets. Drawing on insight from van Leeuwen's social actor representation and corpus linguistics, the analysis was conducted using the #LancsBox corpus processing software package. The findings indicated that gender asymmetry persists within this corpus. Therefore, this paper adds to the rich body of literature documenting gender imbalance across different genres and domains. Men are far more present than women and are constructed through functionalization for the most part, whereas women are less functionalized and represented primarily through relational identification. In light of this, it is argued that while sometimes, gender asymmetry can intentionally be ideologically loaded and may serve hidden agendas, at other times, it may inherently and subconsciously be passed on through spontaneous language use.

"Snake flu," "killer bug," and "Chinese virus": A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of lexical choices in early UK press coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic

Now mostly known as "COVID-19" (or simply "Covid"), early discourse around the pandemic was characterized by a particularly large variation in naming choices (ranging from "new coronavirus" and "new respiratory disease" to "killer bug" and the racist term "Chinese virus"). The current study is situated within corpus-assisted discourse studies and analyses these naming choices in UK newspaper coverage (January-March 2020), focusing on terminology deemed "inappropriate" as per WHO guidelines on naming infectious diseases. The results show that 9% of all terms referring to COVID-19 or the virus causing it are "inappropriate" overall, with "inappropriate" naming being more prevalent (1) in tabloids than broadsheets and (2) in the period before compared to the period after the virus was officially named on 11th February, 2020. Selected examples within each of the categories of "inappropriate" names are explored in more detail [terms (1) inciting undue fear, (2) containing geographic locations, and (3) containing species of animals], and the findings are discussed with regard to the contribution of lexical choices to the reproduction of (racist and otherwise problematic) ideologies in mainstream media.

Children's use of demonstrative words: spatial deictics beyond infancy

Demonstrative words are one of the most important ways of establishing reference in conversation. This work describes Spanish-speaking children's demonstrative production between ages 2 to 10 using data from the CHILDES corpora. Results indicate that children feature all demonstratives in their lexicon - however, the distal term is scarce throughout development. Moreover, patterns of demonstrative use are not adult-like at age 10. We compare adult and child data to conclude that children's development of demonstrative production is largely protracted. Adult use of the distal demonstrative is higher than in young children, although both older children and adults use the medial term ese more than any other demonstratives. In contrast, younger children use proximals relatively more frequently than older children and adults. Suggestions for future research and theoretical implications for the Spanish demonstrative system are discussed.

Examining the language demands of informed consent documents in patient recruitment to cancer trials using tools from corpus and computational linguistics

Obtaining informed consent (IC) is an ethical imperative, signifying participants' understanding of the conditions and implications of research participation. One setting where the stakes for understanding are high is randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which test the effectiveness and safety of medical interventions. However, the use of legalese and medicalese in ethical forms coupled with the need to explain RCT-related concepts (e.g. randomization) can increase patients' cognitive load when reading text. There is a need to systematically examine the language demands of IC documents, including whether the processes intended to safeguard patients by providing clear information might do the opposite through complex, inaccessible language. Therefore, the goal of this study is to build an open-access corpus of patient information sheets (PIS) and consent forms (CF) and analyze each genre using an interdisciplinary approach to capture multidimensional measures of language quality beyond traditional readability measures. A search of publicly-available online IC documents for UK-based cancer RCTs (2000-17) yielded corpora of 27 PIS and 23 CF. Textual analysis using the computational tool, Coh-Metrix, revealed different linguistic dimensions relating to the complexity of IC documents, particularly low word concreteness for PIS and low referential and deep cohesion for CF, although both had high narrativity. Key part-of-speech analyses using Wmatrix corpus software revealed a contrast between the overrepresentation of the pronoun 'you' plus modal verbs in PIS and 'I' in CF, exposing the contradiction inherent in conveying uncertainty to patients using tentative language in PIS while making them affirm certainty in their understanding in CF.

Simulating Speech Error Patterns Across Languages and Different Datasets

Children's speech acquisition is influenced by universal and language-specific forces. Some speech error patterns (or phonological processes) in children's speech are observed in many languages, but the same error pattern may have different effects in different languages. We aimed to explore phonological effects of the same speech error patterns across different languages, target audiences and discourse modes, using a novel method for large-scale corpus investigation. As an additional aim, we investigated the face validity of five different phonological effect measures by relating them to subjective ratings of assumed effects on intelligibility, as provided by practicing speech-language pathologists. Six frequently attested speech error patterns were simulated in authentic corpus data: backing, fronting, stopping, /r/-weakening, cluster reduction and weak syllable deletion-each simulation resulting in a "misarticulated" version of the original corpus. Phonological effects were quantified using five separate metrics of phonological complexity and distance from expected target forms. Using Swedish child-speech data as a reference, phonological effects were compared between this reference and a) child speech in Norwegian and English, and b) data representing different modes of discourse (spoken/written) and target audiences (adults/children) in Swedish. Of the speech error patterns, backing-the one atypical pattern of those included-was found to cause the most detrimental effects, across languages as well as across modes and speaker ages. However, none of the measures reflects intuitive rankings as provided by clinicians regarding effects on intelligibility, thus corroborating earlier reports that phonological competence is not translatable into levels of intelligibility.

Big Things Often Have Small Beginnings: A Review on the Development, Use and Value of Small and Big Corpora for Flemish Sign Language Linguistic Research

In 1990, Vermeerbergen started the first larger-scale corpus study with (semi)spontaneous language data from adult signers on the morpho-syntactic aspects of Flemish Sign Language (VGT). After this, a number of lexicographic projects, including the collection of a 90-h corpus, led to the launch of the first online bilingual Dutch/VGT—VGT/Dutch dictionary in 2004. Since then, researchers have developed several corpora of variable sizes, with the greatest realization being the VGT Corpus. The main focus of this chapter is twofold. On the one hand the run-up to, the development and the use of the VGT Corpus will be discussed, while on the other hand smaller specific research corpora will be highlighted such as the corpus on early parent-child interaction and the multifocal eye-tracking corpus. The current chapter will discuss the research and community value of the corpora and future directions. Finally, it will elaborate on the need for corpus research, the associated advantages and disadvantages, and the obstacles faced in smaller deaf communities.

A Corpus Linguistics Approach to the Representation of Western Religious Beliefs in Ten Series of Chinese University English Language Teaching Textbooks

The early Sino-Western contact was through the way in which religion and language interact to produce language contact. However, research on this contact is relatively limited to date, particularly in the realm of English language materials. In fact, there is a paucity of research on Western religions in English Language Teaching (ELT) textbooks. By applying corpus linguistics as a tool and the Critical Discourse Analysis as the theoretical framework, this manuscript critically investigates the significant semantic domains in ten English language textbook series that are officially approved and are widely used in Chinese universities. The findings suggest that various Western religious beliefs, which are the highly unusual topics in previous Chinese ELT textbooks, are represented in the textbook corpus. The results also show that when presenting the views and attitudes toward Western religious beliefs, these textbooks have adopted an eclectic approach to the material selection. Surprisingly, positive semantic prosody surrounding the concept of religion is evident and no consistent negative authorial stance toward religion is captured. Atheism has been assumed to be in the center of Chinese intellectual traditions and the essence of the Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party. Interestingly, the findings from this study provide a new understanding of Chinese foreign language textbooks in the new era, and its addition to the literature on the study of ELT textbooks, as well as its development worldwide.

Information Density and the Extraposition of German Relative Clauses

This paper aims to find a correlation between Information Density (ID) and extraposition of Relative Clauses (RC) in Early New High German. Since surprisal is connected to perceiving difficulties, the impact on the working memory is lower for frequent combinations with low surprisal-values than it is for rare combinations with higher surprisal-values. To improve text comprehension, producers therefore distribute information as evenly as possible across a discourse. Extraposed RC are expected to have a higher surprisal-value than embedded RC. We intend to find evidence for this idea in RC taken from scientific texts from the 17th to 19th century. We built a corpus of tokenized, lemmatized and normalized papers about medicine from the 17th and 19th century, manually determined the RC-variants and calculated a skipgram-Language Model to compute the 2-Skip-bigram surprisal of every word of the relevant sentences. A logistic regression over the summed up surprisal values shows a significant result, which indicates a correlation between surprisal values and extraposition. So, for these periods it can be said that RC are more likely to be extraposed when they have a high total surprisal value. The influence of surprisal values also seems to be stable across time. The comparison of the analyzed language periods shows no significant change.

Priming of Frames and Slots in Bilingual Children's Code-Mixing: A Usage-Based Approach

This article investigates the role of direct input in the code-mixing of three bilingual children aged 2–4 years acquiring English as one language, and either German, Polish, or Finnish as the other. From a usage-based perspective, it is assumed that early children’s utterances are item-based and that they contain many lexically fixed patterns. To account for such patterns, the traceback method has been developed to test the hypothesis that children’s utterances are constructed on the basis of a limited inventory of chunks and frame-and-slot patterns. We apply this method to the code-mixed utterances, suggesting that much of the code-mixing occurs within frame-and-slot patterns, such as Was ist X? as in Was ist breakfast muesli? “What is breakfast muesli?” We further analyzed each code-mixed utterance in terms of priming. Our findings suggest that much of the early code-mixing is based on concrete lexically fixed patterns which are subject to input occurring in immediately prior speech, either the child’s own or that of her caregivers.

The Language of Pandemic Leaderships: Mapping Political Rhetoric During the COVID-19 Outbreak

This article maps political rhetoric by national leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify and characterize global variations in major rhetorical storylines invoked in publicly available speeches (N = 1201) across a sample of 26 countries. Employing a text analytics or corpus linguistics approach, we show that state heads rhetorically lead their nations by: enforcing systemic interventions, upholding global unity, encouraging communal cooperation, stoking national fervor, and assuring responsive governance. Principal component analysis further shows that country-level rhetoric is organized along emergent dimensions of cultural cognition: an agency-structure axis to define the loci of pandemic interventions and a hierarchy-egalitarianism axis which distinguishes top-down enforcement from bottom-up calls for cooperation. Furthermore, we detect a striking contrast between countries featuring populist versus cosmopolitan rhetoric, which diverged in terms of their collective meaning making around leading over versus leading with, as well as their experienced pandemic severity. We conclude with implications for understanding global pandemic leadership in an unequal world and the contributions of mixed-methods approaches to a generative political psychology in times of crisis.

'It reminds me that I should stop for the little moments': Exploring emotions in experiences of UK Covid-19 lockdown

In this study, we explore how participants articulate experiences of emotions during Covid-19 lockdown in the UK. We posit that emotions fulfil experiential and interpersonal functions, which are construed and conveyed through language choices. An online narrative survey was carried out. About 88 responses were analysed. Participants were from England and Wales. The mean age was 48.9 years old (SD = 62). A mixed-method approach was used. This combined quantitative Corpus Linguistics analysis and qualitative Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis with linguistic analysis. The findings show similarities to the public health and medical literature that highlight negative emotions, such as fear, distrust and anger in participants. However, we also found positive emotions not considered elsewhere, including happiness, relaxation, safety, optimism for the future and connectedness arising from the thematic IPA analysis. Emotions were construed using language explicitly labelling emotions and language implicitly signalling emotions. Our study highlights implications for managing risk behaviours associated with transmission in public health practices such as social distancing, as indicated by negative emotions. We also bring to light implications with perceived benefits of engaging in protective behaviours and social support central to public health measures, as suggested by the communication of positive emotions.

The Building Blocks of Child Bilingual Code-Mixing: A Cross-Corpus Traceback Approach

This paper offers an inductive, exploratory study on the role of input and individual differences in the early code-mixing of bilingual children. Drawing on data from two German-English bilingual children, aged 2–4, we use the traceback method to check whether their code-mixed utterances can be accounted for with the help of constructional patterns that can be found in their monolingual data and/or in their caregivers' input. In addition, we apply the traceback method to check whether the patterns used by one child can also be found in the input of the other child. Results show that patterns found in the code-mixed utterances could be traced back to the input the children receive, suggesting that children extract lexical knowledge from their environment. Additionally, tracing back patterns within each child was more successful than tracing back to the other child's corpus, indicating that each child has their own set of patterns which depends very much on their individual input. As such, these findings can shed new light on the interplay of the two developing grammars in bilingual children and their individual differences.

Linguistic and Personological Features of the Doka and Martin Grieving Style Continuum

While there is extensive research on the adaptive grief styles developed by Doka and Martin, this study is the first of its kind to explore the language used among each style of grief. This study used clinical vignettes from a variety of sources on instrumental and intuitive grieving in an attempt to decipher the language use across various linguistic and psychological processes. Following this analysis, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) was used fitting a two-topic model to analyze differences between topics while additionally performing a supervised LDA analysis. The strongest data from this study relate to intuitive grief, which found a higher use of present-tense language in comparison to the instrumental grief style. In addition, results found that the language used by intuitive grievers is slightly more distinguishable than that of its instrumental counterpart. Several implications for counseling and research were developed in response to these findings.

Lessons From the UK's Lockdown: Discourse on Behavioural Science in Times of COVID-19

In recent years behavioural science has quickly become embedded in national level governance. As the contributions of behavioural science to the UK's COVID-19 response policies in early 2020 became apparent, a debate emerged in the British media about its involvement. This served as a unique opportunity to capture public discourse and representation of behavioural science in a fast-track, high-stake context. We aimed at identifying elements which foster and detract from trust and credibility in emergent scientific contributions to policy making. With this in mind, in Study 1 we use corpus linguistics and network analysis to map the narrative around the key behavioural science actors and concepts which were discussed in the 647 news articles extracted from the 15 most read British newspapers over the 12-week period surrounding the first hard UK lockdown of 2020. We report and discuss (1) the salience of key concepts and actors as the debate unfolded, (2) quantified changes in the polarity of the sentiment expressed toward them and their policy application contexts, and (3) patterns of co-occurrence via network analyses. To establish public discourse surrounding identified themes, in Study 2 we investigate how salience and sentiment of key themes and relations to policy were discussed in original Twitter chatter (N = 2,187). In Study 3, we complement these findings with a qualitative analysis of the subset of news articles which contained the most extreme sentiments (N = 111), providing an in-depth perspective of sentiments and discourse developed around keywords, as either promoting or undermining their credibility in, and trust toward behaviourally informed policy. We discuss our findings in light of the integration of behavioural science in national policy making under emergency constraints.

Gender Bias in the News: A Scalable Topic Modelling and Visualization Framework

We present a topic modelling and data visualization methodology to examine gender-based disparities in news articles by topic. Existing research in topic modelling is largely focused on the text mining of closed corpora, i.e., those that include a fixed collection of composite texts. We showcase a methodology to discover topics via Latent Dirichlet Allocation, which can reliably produce human-interpretable topics over an open news corpus that continually grows with time. Our system generates topics, or distributions of keywords, for news articles on a monthly basis, to consistently detect key events and trends aligned with events in the real world. Findings from 2 years worth of news articles in mainstream English-language Canadian media indicate that certain topics feature either women or men more prominently and exhibit different types of language. Perhaps unsurprisingly, topics such as lifestyle, entertainment, and healthcare tend to be prominent in articles that quote more women than men. Topics such as sports, politics, and business are characteristic of articles that quote more men than women. The data shows a self-reinforcing gendered division of duties and representation in society. Quoting female sources more frequently in a caregiving role and quoting male sources more frequently in political and business roles enshrines women’s status as caregivers and men’s status as leaders and breadwinners. Our results can help journalists and policy makers better understand the unequal gender representation of those quoted in the news and facilitate news organizations’ efforts to achieve gender parity in their sources. The proposed methodology is robust, reproducible, and scalable to very large corpora, and can be used for similar studies involving unsupervised topic modelling and language analyses.

Characterising Online News Comments: A Multi-Dimensional Cruise Through Online Registers

News organisations often allow public comments at the bottom of their news stories. These comments constitute a fruitful source of data to investigate linguistic variation online; their characteristics, however, are rather understudied. This paper thus contributes to the description of online news comments and online language in English. In this spirit, we apply multi-dimensional analysis to a large dataset of online news comments and compare them to a corpus of online registers, thus placing online comments in the space of register variation online. We find that online news comments are involved-evaluative and informational at the same time, but mostly argumentative in nature, with such argumentation taking an informal shape. Our analyses lead us to conclude that online registers are a different mode of communication, neither spoken nor written, with individual variation across different types of online registers.

Using General-purpose Sentiment Lexicons for Suicide Risk Assessment in Electronic Health Records: Corpus-Based Analysis

Background

Suicide is a serious public health issue, accounting for 1.4% of all deaths worldwide. Current risk assessment tools are reported as performing little better than chance in predicting suicide. New methods for studying dynamic features in electronic health records (EHRs) are being increasingly explored. One avenue of research involves using sentiment analysis to examine clinicians’ subjective judgments when reporting on patients. Several recent studies have used general-purpose sentiment analysis tools to automatically identify negative and positive words within EHRs to test correlations between sentiment extracted from the texts and specific medical outcomes (eg, risk of suicide or in-hospital mortality). However, little attention has been paid to analyzing the specific words identified by general-purpose sentiment lexicons when applied to EHR corpora.

Objective

This study aims to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the coverage of six general-purpose sentiment lexicons against a corpus of EHR texts to ascertain the extent to which such lexical resources are fit for use in suicide risk assessment.

Methods

The data for this study were a corpus of 198,451 EHR texts made up of two subcorpora drawn from a 1:4 case-control study comparing clinical notes written over the period leading up to a suicide attempt (cases, n=2913) with those not preceding such an attempt (controls, n=14,727). We calculated word frequency distributions within each subcorpus to identify representative keywords for both the case and control subcorpora. We quantified the relative coverage of the 6 lexicons with respect to this list of representative keywords in terms of weighted precision, recall, and F score.

Results

The six lexicons achieved reasonable precision (0.53-0.68) but very low recall (0.04-0.36). Many of the most representative keywords in the suicide-related (case) subcorpus were not identified by any of the lexicons. The sentiment-bearing status of these keywords for this use case is thus doubtful.

Conclusions

Our findings indicate that these 6 sentiment lexicons are not optimal for use in suicide risk assessment. We propose a set of guidelines for the creation of more suitable lexical resources for distinguishing suicide-related from non–suicide-related EHR texts.

Linguistic Analysis of Online Communication About a Novel Persecutory Belief System (Gangstalking): Mixed Methods Study

Background

Gangstalking is a novel persecutory belief system whereby those affected believe they are being followed, stalked, and harassed by a large number of people, often numbering in the thousands. The harassment is experienced as an accretion of innumerable individually benign acts such as people clearing their throat, muttering under their breath, or giving dirty looks as they pass on the street. Individuals affected by this belief system congregate in online fora to seek support, share experiences, and interact with other like-minded individuals. Such people identify themselves as targeted individuals.

Objective

The objective of the study was to characterize the linguistic and rhetorical practices used by contributors to the gangstalking forum to construct, develop, and contest the gangstalking belief system.

Methods

This mixed methods study employed corpus linguistics, which involves using computational techniques to examine recurring linguistic patterns in large, digitized bodies of authentic language data. Discourse analysis is an approach to text analysis which focuses on the ways in which linguistic choices made by text creators contribute to particular functions and representations. We assembled a 225,000-word corpus of postings on a gangstalking support forum. We analyzed these data using keyword analysis, collocation analysis, and manual examination of concordances to identify discursive and rhetorical practices among self-identified targeted individuals.

Results

The gangstalking forum served as a site of discursive contest between 2 opposing worldviews. One is that gangstalking is a widespread, insidious, and centrally coordinated system of persecution employing community members, figures of authority, and state actors. This was the dominant discourse in the study corpus. The opposing view is a medicalized discourse supporting gangstalking as a form of mental disorder. Contributors used linguistic practices such as presupposition, nominalization, and the use of specialized jargon to construct gangstalking as real and external to the individual affected. Although contributors generally rejected the notion that they were affected by mental disorder, in some instances, they did label others in the forum as impacted/affected by mental illness if their accounts if their accounts were deemed to be too extreme or bizarre. Those affected demonstrated a concern with accumulating evidence to prove their position to incredulous others.

Conclusions

The study found that contributors to the study corpus accomplished a number of tasks. They used linguistic practices to co-construct an internally coherent and systematized persecutory belief system. They advanced a position that gangstalking is real and contested the medicalizing discourse that gangstalking is a form of mental disorder. They supported one another by sharing similar experiences and providing encouragement and advice. Finally, they commiserated over the challenges of proving the existence of gangstalking.

Part Meat and Part Plant: Are Hybrid Meat Products Fad or Future?

There is a growing interest in flexitarian diets, which has resulted in the commercialisation of new hybrid meat products, containing both meat and plant-based ingredients. Consumer attitudes towards hybrid meat products have not been explored, and it is not clear which factors could affect the success of such products. This study is the first to overview of the UK hybrid meat product market and to explore consumer's attitudes towards hybrid meat products in 201 online reviews, using tools and techniques of corpus linguistics (language analysis). In the positive reviews, consumers emphasised the taste dimension of the hybrid meat products, seeing them as healthier options with good texture and easy to prepare. The negative reviews related to the poor sensory quality and not to the concept of hybridity itself. Using a multidisciplinary approach, our findings revealed valuable insights into consumer attitudes and highlighted factors to consider to market new hybrid meat products effectively.

Articulation Rate in American English in a Corpus of YouTube Videos

Previous studies of the temporal organization of speech in American English have found differences in speaking or articulation rate according to speaker dialect or location, but small sample sizes and incomplete geographic coverage have limited the generalizability of the findings. In this study, articulation rates in American English are calculated from the automatic speech-to-text transcripts of more than 29,000 hours of video from local government and civic organization channels on YouTube from the 48 contiguous US states, containing more than 230 million individual word timings. Two questions are considered: are there regional differences in articulation rate? And do urban speakers articulate faster than rural speakers? The study presents several methodological innovations: first, it identifies a genre of regional speech suitable for interregional comparisons (meetings of local governments or civic organizations). Second, it introduces a new method for the calculation of articulation rate using cue and word timestamps from caption files. Third, it leverages US Census data to correlate the articulation rate with population for a large number of localities. The study shows that, in line with previous studies, Southerners articulate slower, and Americans from the Upper Midwest more quickly. In addition, there is a small but positive correlation between population size and articulation rate. Articulation rates are mapped using a measure of local autocorrelation.

A linguistic approach to the psychosis continuum: (dis)similarities and (dis)continuities in how clinical and non-clinical voice-hearers talk about their voices

Introduction: "Continuum" approaches to psychosis have generated reports of similarities and differences in voice-hearing in clinical and non-clinical populations at the cohort level, but not typically examined overlap or degrees of difference between groups. Methods: We used a computer-aided linguistic approach to explore reports of voice-hearing by a clinical group (Early Intervention in Psychosis service-users; N = 40) and a non-clinical group (spiritualists; N = 27). We identify semantic categories of terms statistically overused by one group compared with the other, and by each group compared to a control sample of non-voice-hearing interview data (log likelihood (LL) value 6.63+=p < .01; effect size measure: log ratio 1.0+). We consider whether individual values support a continuum model. Results: Notwithstanding significant cohort-level differences, there was considerable continuity in language use. Reports of negative affect were prominent in both groups (p < .01, log ratio: 1.12+). Challenges of cognitive control were also evident in both cohorts, with references to "disengagement" accentuated in service-users (p < .01, log ratio: 1.14+). Conclusion: A corpus linguistic approach to voice-hearing provides new evidence of differences between clinical and non-clinical groups. Variability at the individual level provides substantial evidence of continuity with implications for cognitive mechanisms underlying voice-hearing.

Acquisition of Demonstratives in English and Spanish

The present work re-evaluates the long-standing claim that demonstratives are among infants’ earliest and most common words. Although demonstratives are deictic words important for joint attention, deictic gestures and non-word vocalizations could serve this function in early language development; the role of demonstratives may have been overestimated. Using extensive data from the CHILDES corpora (Study 1, N = 66, 265 transcripts) and McArthur-Bates CDI database (Study 2, N = 950), the language production of 18- to 24-month-old Spanish- and English-speaking children was analyzed to determine the age and order of acquisition, and frequency of demonstratives. Results indicate that demonstratives do not typically appear before the 50th word and only become frequent from the two-word utterance stage. Corpus data show few differences between Spanish and English, whereas parental report data suggest much later acquisition for demonstratives in English. These findings expand our knowledge of the foundations of deictic communication, and of the methodological challenges of assessing early production of function words.

Real-Life Language Use Across Different Interlocutors: A Naturalistic Observation Study of Adults Varying in Age

Amid the growing interest in studying language use in real life, this study, for the first time, examined age effects on real-life language use, as well as within-person variations across different interlocutors. We examined speech samples collected via the Electronically Activated Recorder (i.e., portable audio recorder that periodically records ambient sounds) for a larger project. This existing dataset included more than 18,000 sound snippets (50-s long) from 53 American couples (breast cancer patients and their spouses; aged 24 to 94 years) in their natural environments. Sound snippets that included participant speech were coded for different interlocutors and given scores on three linguistic measures that are associated with age-related cognitive changes: usage of unique words, usage of uncommon words, and grammatical complexity. Multilevel models showed that there were no age effects on the three linguistic measures when interlocutors were not taken into account. We found that interlocutors influenced usage of unique words and grammatical complexity. More specifically, compared to talking with their spouse, participants used fewer unique words with children and friends; and used simpler grammatical structures with children, strangers, and in multiparty conversations. Next, we found that interlocutors influenced the associations between age and language use. More specifically, young adults used more unique words and more uncommon words with children than older adults. They used more uncommon words with friends and uttered more complex grammatical structures with strangers than older adults. Our results offer preliminary evidence for a new perspective to understand real-life language use: focusing not only on individual characteristics (i.e., age), but also context (i.e., interlocutors). This perspective should be useful to researchers who are interested in collecting "big data" and understanding cognitive activities in real life.

Subjective ratings of age-of-acquisition: exploring issues of validity and rater reliability

This study aimed to investigate concerns of validity and reliability in subjective ratings of age-of-acquisition (AoA), through exploring characteristics of the individual rater. An additional aim was to validate the obtained AoA ratings against two corpora - one of child speech and one of adult speech - specifically exploring whether words over-represented in the child-speech corpus are rated with lower AoA than words characteristic of the adult-speech corpus. The results show that less than one-third of participating informants' ratings are valid and reliable. However, individuals with high familiarity with preschool-aged children provide more valid and reliable ratings, compared to individuals who do not work with or have children of their own. The results further show a significant, age-adjacent difference in rated AoA for words from the two different corpora, thus strengthening their validity. The study provides AoA data, of high specificity, for 100 child-specific and 100 adult-specific Swedish words.

Impact of humor-related communication elements in natural dyadic interactions on interpersonal physiological synchrony

Evidence suggests that in dyadic conversations some alignment occurs at the physiological level, but relatively little is known about the conditions that may facilitate physiological synchrony of two interlocutors. In the present interdisciplinary study, the impact of specific linguistic features of ongoing dialogues-the use of humor-related communication elements-was examined in 24 male dyads who were meeting for the first time. Heart rate synchrony was quantified using phase synchronization, which reflects the degree of moment-to-moment adjustments that occur between the two persons of a dyad. Comical hypotheticals and verbal amplifiers were identified and quantified using cognitive-linguistic methods of corpus analysis. Additionally, smiles following these communication elements were identified using the Facial Action Coding System. The data showed that the heart rate time series of the two interlocutors were to some extent synchronized in phase, and that the magnitude of this synchronization exceeded what had to be expected by chance. The strength of heart rate synchrony in a dyad was the higher the more comical hypotheticals were produced, independently from how much the two conversation partners were in sum talking to each other. A similar observation was made for verbal amplifiers, but their effect depended on whether they were perceived (and acknowledged by a smile) as humorous. The findings are in line with the more general notion that physiological synchrony may be enhanced by shared experience and suggest that the use of (reciprocated) humor may speed up the building of rapport among communication partners.

Generational Changes in Personality: The Evidence From Corpus Linguistics

According to theory, social change is interconnected with changes in mental phenomena and language. In the present study, secular change in the usage frequencies of common English personality adjectives ( n = 336) qualifying the word person was analyzed over the period 1900 to 2002. It was hypothesized that words that represent those personality traits that are advantageous in occupations typical for modern societies have increased in frequency. The results show changes in the frequencies of individual words but stability across the five major categories of trait adjectives in the Google Books English fiction corpus. A modest increase for Extraversion-, Agreeableness-, and Stability-related adjectives was observed in the Google Books English 2012 corpus. Frequency of Intellect-related words increased up to 1960 and then declined. The results suggest that (a) human nature has changed little over the 20th century, (b) generational changes in personality are not strongly reflected in language, or (c) the corpus linguistic method used is not reliable for studying generational changes in personality.

GNI Corpus Version 1.0: Annotated Full-Text Corpus of Genomics &amp; Informatics to Support Biomedical Information Extraction

Genomics & Informatics (NLM title abbreviation: Genomics Inform) is the official journal of the Korea Genome Organization. Text corpus for this journal annotated with various levels of linguistic information would be a valuable resource as the process of information extraction requires syntactic, semantic, and higher levels of natural language processing. In this study, we publish our new corpus called GNI Corpus version 1.0, extracted and annotated from full texts of Genomics & Informatics, with NLTK (Natural Language ToolKit)-based text mining script. The preliminary version of the corpus could be used as a training and testing set of a system that serves a variety of functions for future biomedical text mining.

Emotional distress with dementia: A systematic review using corpus-based analysis and meta-ethnography

OBJECTIVE

More understanding is needed about the emotional experiences of dementia from the perspective of the individual. This understanding can then inform the provision of health care to meet individual needs. This systematic review aimed to present all available descriptions of emotional distress and explanations for emotional distress experienced by individuals with dementia, articulated personally and by others.

METHODS

A systematic mixed-method review identified literature that was screened and quality appraised. Data were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively using corpus-based methods and meta-ethnography.

RESULTS

The 121 included studies showed that individuals with dementia have expressed emotional distress comprehensibly. Family, professional caregivers, clinicians, and academic writers have also observed and described extreme emotional experiences. Feeling fearful and lonely were predominant and show the importance of anxiety in dementia. Explanations for emotional distress included threats to universal, human needs for identity, belonging, hope, and predictability.

CONCLUSIONS

The variable and personal emotional experiences of individuals with dementia are well described and should not continue to be overlooked. Limitations, future research, and clinical implications are discussed.

The Emergence of an Abstract Grammatical Category in Children's Early Speech

How do children begin to use language to say things they have never heard before? The origins of linguistic productivity have been a subject of heated debate: Whereas generativist accounts posit that children's early language reflects the presence of syntactic abstractions, constructivist approaches instead emphasize gradual generalization derived from frequently heard forms. In the present research, we developed a Bayesian statistical model that measures the degree of abstraction implicit in children's early use of the determiners "a" and "the." Our work revealed that many previously used corpora are too small to allow researchers to judge between these theoretical positions. However, several data sets, including the Speechome corpus-a new ultra-dense data set for one child-showed evidence of low initial levels of productivity and higher levels later in development. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that children lack rich grammatical knowledge at the outset of language learning but rapidly begin to generalize on the basis of structural regularities in their input.

Subluxation and semantics: a corpus linguistics study

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this study was to analyze the curriculum of one chiropractic college in order to discover if there were any implicit consensus definitions of the term subluxation.

METHODS

Using the software WordSmith Tools, the corpus of an undergraduate chiropractic curriculum was analyzed by reviewing collocated terms and through discourse analysis of text blocks containing words based on the root 'sublux.'

RESULTS

It was possible to identify 3 distinct concepts which were each referred to as 'subluxation:' i) an acute or instantaneous injurious event; ii) a clinical syndrome which manifested post-injury; iii) a physical lesion, i.e. an anatomical or physiological derangement which in most instances acted as a pain generator.

CONCLUSIONS

In fact, coherent implicit definitions of subluxation exist and may enjoy broad but subconscious acceptance. However, confusion likely arises from failure to distinguish which concept an author or speaker is referring to when they employ the term subluxation.

Ethical Issues in Corpus Linguistics And Annotation: Pay Per Hit Does Not Affect Effective Hourly Rate For Linguistic Resource Development On Amazon Mechanical Turk

Ethical issues reported with paid crowdsourcing include unfairly low wages. It is assumed that such issues are under the control of the task requester. Can one control the amount that a worker earns by controlling the amount that one pays? 412 linguistic data development tasks were submitted to Amazon Mechanical Turk. The pay per HIT was manipulated through a range of values. We examined the relationship between the pay that is offered per HIT and the effective pay rate. There is no such relationship. Paying more per HIT does not cause workers to earn more: the higher the pay per HIT, the more time workers spend on them (R = 0.92). So, the effective hourly rate stays roughly the same. The finding has clear implications for language resource builders who want to behave ethically: other means must be found in order to compensate workers fairly. The findings of this paper should not be taken as an endorsement of unfairly low pay rates for crowdsourcing workers. Rather, the intention is to point out that additional measures, such as pre-calculating and communicating to the workers an average hourly, rather than per-task, rate must be found in order to ensure an ethical rate of pay.

The Concepts of Risk, Safety, and Security: Applications in Everyday Language

The concepts of risk, safety, and security have received substantial academic interest. Several assumptions exist about their nature and relation. Besides academic use, the words risk, safety, and security are frequent in ordinary language, for example, in media reporting. In this article, we analyze the concepts of risk, safety, and security, and their relation, based on empirical observation of their actual everyday use. The "behavioral profiles" of the nouns risk, safety, and security and the adjectives risky, safe, and secure are coded and compared regarding lexical and grammatical contexts. The main findings are: (1) the three nouns risk, safety, and security, and the two adjectives safe and secure, have widespread use in different senses, which will make any attempt to define them in a single unified manner extremely difficult; (2) the relationship between the central risk terms is complex and only partially confirms the distinctions commonly made between the terms in specialized terminology; (3) whereas most attempts to define risk in specialized terminology have taken the term to have a quantitative meaning, nonquantitative meanings dominate in everyday language, and numerical meanings are rare; and (4) the three adjectives safe, secure, and risky are frequently used in comparative form. This speaks against interpretations that would take them as absolute, all-or-nothing concepts.

Propositional idea density in older men's written language: findings from the HIMS study using computerised analysis

Decline in linguistic function has been associated with decline in cognitive function in previous research. This research investigated the informativeness of written language samples of Australian men from the Health in Men's Study (HIMS) aged from 76 to 93 years using the Computerised Propositional Idea Density Rater (CPIDR 5.1). In total, 60,255 words in 1147 comments were analysed using a linear-mixed model for statistical analysis. Results indicated no relationship with education level (p = 0.79). Participants for whom English was not their first learnt language showed Propositional Idea Density (PD) scores slightly lower (0.018 per 1 word). Mean PD per 1 word for those for whom English was their first language for comments below 60 words was 0.494 and above 60 words 0.526. Text length was found to have an effect (p = <0.0001). The mean PD was higher than previously reported for men and lower than previously reported for a similar cohort for Australian women.

Sublanguage Corpus Analysis Toolkit: A tool for assessing the representativeness and sublanguage characteristics of corpora

Sublanguages are varieties of language that form "subsets" of the general language, typically exhibiting particular types of lexical, semantic, and other restrictions and deviance. SubCAT, the Sublanguage Corpus Analysis Toolkit, assesses the representativeness and closure properties of corpora to analyze the extent to which they are either sublanguages, or representative samples of the general language. The current version of SubCAT contains scripts and applications for assessing lexical closure, morphological closure, sentence type closure, over-represented words, and syntactic deviance. Its operation is illustrated with three case studies concerning scientific journal articles, patents, and clinical records. Materials from two language families are analyzed-English (Germanic), and Bulgarian (Slavic). The software is available at sublanguage.sourceforge.net under a liberal Open Source license.

Diagnosing and managing anorexia nervosa in UK primary care: a focus group study

BACKGROUND

Anorexia is a leading cause of adolescent hospital admission and death from psychiatric disorder. Despite the potential role of general practitioners in diagnosis, appropriate referral and coordinating treatment, few existing studies provide fine-grained accounts of GPs' beliefs about anorexia.

OBJECTIVES

To identify GPs' understandings and experiences of diagnosing and managing patients with anorexia in primary care.

METHODS

Case-based focus groups with co-working general practitioners in the East Midlands region of England were used to explore attitudes towards issues common to patients with eating disorders. Group discussions were transcribed and analysed using corpus linguistic and discourse analytic approaches.

RESULTS

Participants' discussion focused on related issues of making hesitant diagnoses, the utility of the body mass index, making referrals and overcoming patient resistance. Therapeutic relationships with patients with anorexia are considered highly complex, with participants using diagnostic tests as rhetorical strategies to help manage communicative obstacles.

CONCLUSIONS

Overcoming patient repudiation and securing referrals are particular challenges with this patient group. Successfully negotiating these problems appears to require advanced communication skills.

A diachronic study of the language of chiropractic

This study investigates how the language of chiropractic has changed over time. A collection of material, published up until approximately 1950 and consisting of textbooks, monographs and lecture notes from Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College, was analyzed to identify commonly occurring words and phrases. The results were compared to a corpus of recent articles from the Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association. This permitted the identification of words which were over-represented in the historical literature and therefore likely have become somewhat archaic or represent themes which are of less import in the modern chiropractic literature. Words which were over-represented in the historical literature often referred to anatomical, pathological and biomechanical concepts. Conversely, words which were comparatively over-represented in the modern chiropractic literature often referred to concepts of professionalism, the clinical interaction and evidence-based care. A detailed analysis is presented of trends in the use of the conceptually important terms subluxation and adjustment.