Critical Discourse Analysis: Methods and Applications
What is Critical Discourse Analysis?
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a research approach dedicated to the analysis of language and communication from a critical viewpoint. It goes beyond merely describing linguistic features to investigate how language is actively used to shape and maintain power relations, ideologies, and social structures.
CDA systematically explores the often opaque relationships of causality and determination between discursive practices, events, texts, and wider social and
Read MoreMastering English Language Skills: Roots, Structure, and Speech
Unit I: Word Formation and Roots
The Process of Word Formation
English expands its vocabulary through several mechanical processes:
- Derivation: Adding affixes (prefixes or suffixes) to a root word to change its meaning or grammatical category.
Example: Adding “-ness” to the adjective “happy” creates the noun “happiness.” - Compounding: Joining two or more complete words to create a new concept.
Example: “Sun” + “flower” = “Sunflower”; “Notebook.” - Blending: Taking parts of two different words and merging
Morphological Analysis and Syntactic Parsing in NLP
Word Structure and Morphological Components
The structure of a word is studied under morphology, which analyzes how words are formed and organized using smaller meaningful units. A word consists of morphemes, the smallest units of meaning. These morphemes are classified into two main types:
- Free morphemes: These can stand alone as words, such as “book” or “run.”
- Bound morphemes: These must attach to other morphemes, such as prefixes and suffixes like “un-” or “-ing.”
Words can also be
Read MoreEssential NLP Concepts and Terminology Explained
Fundamental NLP Concepts
- Parsing: The process of analyzing sentence structure using grammar rules to determine syntactic relationships between words.
- N-gram: A contiguous sequence of N words used to predict next-word probabilities in language models.
- Cohesion vs. Coherence: Cohesion refers to the grammatical linking of words, while coherence refers to the logical and meaningful connection across sentences.
- Smoothing: A technique used to adjust probabilities in language models to handle unseen words
Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Reasoning Principles
Language Fundamentals
- Morpheme: Smallest unit of meaning in language (e.g., “cat,” “un-“).
- Phonemes: Smallest sound units that change meaning (e.g., /p/ vs /b/).
- Semantic content: The meaning of each word.
- Prescriptive rules of grammar: Rules regarding how language should be used.
- Generativity: The ability to produce and understand unlimited new sentences from finite rules and words.
- Phrase-structure: Rules that specify how phrases and sentences are built.
- Categorical perception: Variations in a sound
Fundamentals of NLP: From Tokenization to Semantics
Part-of-Speech Tagging in NLP
Part-of-Speech (POS) Tagging is the process of assigning a specific grammatical category (such as noun, verb, adjective, or adverb) to each word in a text, based on its definition and context. Since many words function as different parts of speech depending on usage (e.g., “book” as a noun vs. a verb), POS tagging is essential for disambiguation.
The Need for POS Tagging
POS tagging serves as a foundational preprocessing step for complex language tasks:
- Word Sense Disambiguation: