Analysis of Quantitative Trends

Abstract

This chapter sets out to examine the textual environment of the loanwords in order to obtain a closer picture of the associations they form with words in their context. The objective is to find recurrent patterns for each loanword and determine whether they have patterns in common. CDA studies rely on lexical co-occurrence when identifying evaluation in texts and making assumptions about discursive strategies of text producers, but lack a systematic procedure for identifying co-occurrences across the whole sample. Corpus linguistic techniques provide such reliable description of regularities¹ that can then be interpreted against the theories of discourse. In the analysis below I treat my corpora as a repository of evidence on the following aspects: (1) lexical and grammatical realisations of the loanwords; (2) semantic field in which each loanword is realised; (3) discourse realisations of the loanwords.