Neil Millar
Biographic Data
| ID | 6701342 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Neil Millar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Neil |
| FAMILY NAME | Millar |
| SIGNATURE | MILLAR N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Tsukuba |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9326-8713 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 6 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 6 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Trends in the Expression of Epistemic Stance in NIH Research Funding Applications
We report on changes in the expression of epistemic stance in competitive funding applications—that is, applicants’ confidence and certainty towards knowledge and beliefs. We analysed abstracts describing all projects funded by the US National Institutes of Health during the period 1985–2020 for 140 stance features. Trends that we identify indicate that applicants adopt a stance less cautious and less tentative, and increasingly confident, optimi…
Hype in reports of clinical research
Adjectives, communities, and taxonomies of evaluative meaning
From a corpus consisting of free text comments submitted to the website RateMyProfessors.com, adjectives describing people have been identified and clustered using Principal Components Analysis. This follows the Meaning Extraction method used by Chung & Pennebaker (2007). The outcome is a set of seven factors, each of which is interpretable as representing a dimension of meaning along which individual professors have been evaluated. These dimensi…
‘Use the active voice whenever possible’
Medical writing is sometimes criticized for excessive use of the passive voice. The purpose of this study is twofold: (i) to provide quantitative descriptions of how the passive voice is used in medical journals and (ii) to assess the impact of style guidelines encouraging use of the active voice. From a corpus of 297 primary research articles published in the top five medical journals, we extracted 19,691 passive constructions. Analyses show tha…
The Processing of Malformed Formulaic Language
The prevalence of formulaicity in naturally occurring language use points to an important role in the way language is acquired, processed, and used. It is widely recommended that second-language instruction should ensure that learners develop a rich repertoire of formulaic sequences. If this is justified, it follows that learner failure to use formulaic sequences should present some barrier to communication. However, it seems that few researchers…
Modal verbs in Time
Between the 1960’s and 1990’s the frequency of modal verbs in the Brown family of corpora fell substantially, a decline which Leech (2003: 96) suggests is indicative of a more “general and long lasting trend”. Taking Leech’s study as a starting point, this paper investigates twentieth century changes in modal verbs using the new and relatively unexplored TIME Magazine Corpus. Results show that while certain modal verbs have fallen in frequency, t…
Modal verbs in Time
Between the 1960’s and 1990’s the frequency of modal verbs in the Brown family of corpora fell substantially, a decline which Leech (2003: 96) suggests is indicative of a more “general and long lasting trend”. Taking Leech’s study as a starting point, this paper investigates twentieth century changes in modal verbs using the new and relatively unexplored TIME Magazine Corpus. Results show that while certain modal verbs have fallen in frequency, t…
Modal verbs in Time
Between the 1960’s and 1990’s the frequency of modal verbs in the Brown family of corpora fell substantially, a decline which Leech (2003: 96) suggests is indicative of a more “general and long lasting trend”. Taking Leech’s study as a starting point, this paper investigates twentieth century changes in modal verbs using the new and relatively unexplored TIME Magazine Corpus. Results show that while certain modal verbs have fallen in frequency, t…
The Processing of Malformed Formulaic Language
The prevalence of formulaicity in naturally occurring language use points to an important role in the way language is acquired, processed, and used. It is widely recommended that second-language instruction should ensure that learners develop a rich repertoire of formulaic sequences. If this is justified, it follows that learner failure to use formulaic sequences should present some barrier to communication. However, it seems that few researchers…
‘Use the active voice whenever possible’
Medical writing is sometimes criticized for excessive use of the passive voice. The purpose of this study is twofold: (i) to provide quantitative descriptions of how the passive voice is used in medical journals and (ii) to assess the impact of style guidelines encouraging use of the active voice. From a corpus of 297 primary research articles published in the top five medical journals, we extracted 19,691 passive constructions. Analyses show tha…
Adjectives, communities, and taxonomies of evaluative meaning
From a corpus consisting of free text comments submitted to the website RateMyProfessors.com, adjectives describing people have been identified and clustered using Principal Components Analysis. This follows the Meaning Extraction method used by Chung & Pennebaker (2007). The outcome is a set of seven factors, each of which is interpretable as representing a dimension of meaning along which individual professors have been evaluated. These dimensi…
Hype in reports of clinical research
Trends in the Expression of Epistemic Stance in NIH Research Funding Applications
We report on changes in the expression of epistemic stance in competitive funding applications—that is, applicants’ confidence and certainty towards knowledge and beliefs. We analysed abstracts describing all projects funded by the US National Institutes of Health during the period 1985–2020 for 140 stance features. Trends that we identify indicate that applicants adopt a stance less cautious and less tentative, and increasingly confident, optimi…
Linguistics (6 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies (4 works) · Psychology (4 works) · Academic Writing and Publishing (2 works) · Epistemology (2 works) · History (2 works) · Modal verb (2 works) · Social Psychology (2 works)