The thesis quantitatively measures the extent to which a selection of speeches of two Dutch and two UK politicians, Thierry Baudet, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, and Boris Johnson, contain lexical...Show moreThe thesis quantitatively measures the extent to which a selection of speeches of two Dutch and two UK politicians, Thierry Baudet, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, and Boris Johnson, contain lexical and grammatical indicators of a populist communication style.Show less
In his 2011 book Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, David Crystal investigated the use of biblical idioms in English popular culture. Additionally, he compiled a list of eighteen...Show moreIn his 2011 book Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, David Crystal investigated the use of biblical idioms in English popular culture. Additionally, he compiled a list of eighteen idioms that were first coined in the King James Bible. Following Crystal’s research topic, this paper investigated these eighteen idioms for frequency and variation in the TIME Magazine Corpus (1923-2006), which consists of 100 million words. The purpose of this paper was to establish the significance of these eighteen idioms in present-day American English. Idioms were searched in the corpus both in their original phrasing and variant forms. The most important conclusion that can be drawn from the results is that the extent to which a biblical idiom lends itself for variation is an important factor in its level of relevance in non-biblical contexts.Show less
Dothraki, one of the fictional languages that features in HBO’s Emmy-award winning TV series Game of Thrones, resembles a natural language in many ways. This thesis is an empirical syntactical...Show moreDothraki, one of the fictional languages that features in HBO’s Emmy-award winning TV series Game of Thrones, resembles a natural language in many ways. This thesis is an empirical syntactical investigation into one of the language’s more idiosyncratic features, namely its double marking of negation. A corpus of 46 negative Dothraki sentences was analysed to determine the position of negation with in a sentence. These results were discussed in reference to a number of theories on the syntax of negation in natural languages. This was done with the ultimate aim of discovering whether negation in Dothraki adheres to the syntactical patterns of natural languages, or whether it is constructed differently and in that way evidence of the language’s artificiality. This thesis ultimately concludes that the double marking of negation in Dothraki can be accounted for by existing theories based on negation in natural languages, arguing that Dothraki resembles languages like Berber in that NegP is the left-most phrase in the split-IP, with the subject in the specifier of TopP.Show less
The language used on Twitter is close to natural spoken language. In spoken language forms as 'you all,' 'y'all,' 'yous(e),' 'you-uns,' 'you people,' 'you lot' and other forms are used to...Show moreThe language used on Twitter is close to natural spoken language. In spoken language forms as 'you all,' 'y'all,' 'yous(e),' 'you-uns,' 'you people,' 'you lot' and other forms are used to disambiguate plural 'you'. This thesis analyses by means of a Twitter corpus to what extent new plurals such as 'you guys,' 'you all,' 'y'all' etc. replace the all-purpose 'you' in Tweets.Show less
