Collocational semiosis in the academic discourse of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Coca)

The case of Africa

Datos Bibliográficos

ID10739770
AutoresAmir H Y Salama (0000-0001-9320-558X, Department of English , Kafr El-Sheikh University , Kafr El-Sheikh , Egypt, autor de correspondencia)
Año2020
Volumen2020
Número235
Páginas185-227
Fecha de publicación2020-11-26
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSemiotica (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0037-1998 • E-ISSN: 1613-3692
EditorialWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/sem-2017-0103
OpenAlexW3083485375
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas33

The present study investigates the collocation-induced semiosis of the linguistic sign AFRICA as being used in the academic section of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (known as COCA) (Davies, Mark. 2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): one billion words, 1990-present. Available online at https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ ). Drawing on a hybrid theoretical framework, the study utilizes Charles Peirce’s (1931–58) semiotic model of the sign and Roman Jakobson’s theory of “markedness” (Jakobson, Roman. 1972. Verbal communication. Scientific American (Special Issue, September 1). 73–80) as well as Stuart Hall’s treatment of “code” (Hall, Stuart. 1980. Encoding/decoding. In Stuart Hall, Doothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, & Paul Willis (eds.), Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972–79, 117–127. New York: Routledge) and John Swales’ notion of “discourse community” (Swales, John M. 1990. Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The study empirically tests the hypothesis that, in a given discourse domain, the relevant interpretant can decode a linguistic sign (representamen) in the co-text of its marked collocates in a way that is collocationally used via the two modes of iconic and indexical signification. The concordance-based analysis conducted in the present study offers two findings, theoretical and practical. First, the study proposes the theoretical concept of collocational semiosis as one way of methodologically integrating the study of collocation into a structural-linguistic analytic framework that richly intersects with the genre-based notion of “discourse community.” Second, in the academic discourse community of the COCA, to the expert interpretant, the representamen AFRICA has been decoded due to its marked collocates which have been technically used in two modes of signification, viz. iconic and indexical

American English · Coca · Code (set theory) · Corpus linguistics · Indexicality · Linguistics · Markedness · Metalanguage · Semiosis · Semiotics · Sign (mathematics) · Sociology · Computer Science · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · History · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Translation Studies and Practices

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