Men and Women in Suicide Notes: A Corpus-Based Rhetorical Moves Analysis

Abstract

Research on suicide notes has always focused on proving whether the notes are genuine or simulated. There are still very few studies on suicide notes that focus on the genders of the writer and the influence of genders in this type of letter. This research aims to examine the suicide notes in two corpora—one corpus written by males and the other by females—using two different theories. Swales’ move-structure theory is used to see the pattern of occurrence of the rhetorical moves to establish a generic structure of the notes in the two corpora, and Bhatia’s communicative purpose theory is used to see what purposes of communication are dominant in the notes. The notes are analyzed based on the gender of the writers to also examine whether gender plays a role in the use of language, especially for personal communication. The study uses a mixed-method approach, in which a corpus software AntConc is used in the quantitative design to gather more comprehensive data, and linguistic theories are used in the interpretation of the data. The analysis shows that there are differences in the dominant recurring moves and communicative purposes in the two corpora, which suggests the role of gender in determining language use in personal communication. The result of this study is hoped to add to the literature of the study of gender as well as in the broader area of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.

Design of Chinese Corpus Based on Semantic Mining Algorithm

“…e core of the natural spoken language corpus is that the corpus must be a natural spoken language, that is, nonspeaking utterances that are not related to text or instant utterances. Most regional dialects exist in the form of natural discourse [18]. Judging from the spoken language corpora (including the Chinese dialects and ethnic languages) that can be seen so far, the naturalness of spoken language corpus is insufficient, the coverage of genre and language is relatively narrow, and the content of discourse tends to be predesigned or limited to the scope of script-guided themes.…”

English Syntactic Analysis and Word Sense Disambiguation Strategy of Neutral Set from the Perspective of Natural Language Processing

“…Reference [15] studied the effect of encoding based on a bidirectional long short-term memory network (BiLSTM) on the scoring step. Reference [16] studied the influence of different structural constraints in the decoding stage on the results of dependency analysis, and the results show that by global input modeling, even ignoring some output structures can get good results. Although transfer-based methods can use rich features, they all use local search strategies, which are prone to error propagation.…”