Inaugural lecture

The impact of linguistics: assessing the value of research on language

Dan McIntyre

Q300

Q302

The value of research

The value of research

The GuardianFriday 9 May, 2003

The value of researchCharles Clarke, the education secretary, has continued his assault on the great subjects of academe by revealing that he regards medieval history as ‘ornamental’ and a waste of public money. Not long after expressing the view that he didn't think much of classics and regarded the idea of education for its own sake as ‘a bit dodgy’, Mr Clarke, who read maths and economics at King's College, Cambridge, went one further.

‘I don't mind there being some medievalists around for ornamental purposes, but there is no reason for the state to pay for them,’ he said on a visit to University College, Worcester. He only wanted the state to pay for subjects of ‘clear usefulness’, according to today’s Times Higher Educational Supplement.

The GuardianFriday 9 May, 2003

The value of researchCharles Clarke, the education secretary, has continued his assault on the great subjects of academe by revealing that he regards medieval history as ‘ornamental’ and a waste of public money. Not long after expressing the view that he didn't think much of classics and regarded the idea of education for its own sake as ‘a bit dodgy’, Mr Clarke, who read maths and economics at King's College, Cambridge, went one further.

‘I don't mind there being some medievalists around for ornamental purposes, but there is no reason for the state to pay for them,’ he said on a visit to University College, Worcester. He only wanted the state to pay for subjects of ‘clear usefulness’, according to today’s Times Higher Educational Supplement.

The GuardianFriday 9 May, 2003

In the REF there will be an explicit element to assess the ‘impact’ arising from excellent research, alongside the ‘outputs’ and ‘environment’ elements.

The assessment of impact will be based on expert review of case studies submitted by higher education institutions. Case studies may include any social, economic or cultural impact or benefit beyond academia that has taken place during the assessment period, and was underpinned by excellent research produced by the submitting institution within a given timeframe.

(REF 01.2011)

What counts as impact?• Andrew Wakefield• Wakefield, A. J. et al. (1998) ‘Ileal-

lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children’, The Lancet 351(9103): 637-41.

• Claimed a causal link between MMR vaccine and autism

• Decline in vaccination rates and increase and increase in measles outbreaks

• Paper retracted in 2010

What counts as impact?

• Ibrahim Al-Marashi• Al-Marashi, I. (2002) ‘Iraq’s

security and intelligence network: a guide and analysis’, Middle East Review of International Affairs 6(3)

• Plagiarised by the British Government in a briefing document to the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair

• Used as part of the justification for the Iraq War

Impact and the Research Councils

Impact and the Research Councils

Why is there an increasing emphasis on demonstrating the impact of research?

Public bodies such as the AHRC need to demonstrate the value of the research they fund. It is necessary to show public value from public funding.

Impact and the Research Councils

In recent years, the government has placed increasing emphasis on the need for evidence of economic and social returns from its investment in research.By ensuring that ESRC-funded research makes the biggest possible impact on policy and practice, and improving how we measure and capture this, we are better able to support the case for research funding.

Why is there an increasing emphasis on demonstrating the impact of research?

Public bodies such as the AHRC need to demonstrate the value of the research they fund. It is necessary to show public value from public funding.

Impact-focused projects inLinguistics and Modern Languages at Huddersfield

Impact-focused projects inLinguistics and Modern Languages at Huddersfield

A project aimed at enhancing the linguistic skills and understanding of mediators and international negotiators in conflict situations

Impact-focused projects inLinguistics and Modern Languages at Huddersfield

A language consultancy aimed at using critical, cognitive and corpus linguistic techniques to help large organisations understand better how they are represented in the media

A project aimed at enhancing the linguistic skills and understanding of mediators and international negotiators in conflict situations

Impact-focused projects inLinguistics and Modern Languages at Huddersfield

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An example of a current impact-focused project

The stylistics of subtitling

Constraints on subtitling• Average reading speed of adults is approximately 66% of the

average speaking speed (De Linde and Kay 1999: 11)– each subtitle must be reduced by around one third (De Linde and Kay 1999:

11)– subtitles contain an average of 43% less text than the original dialogue (De

Linde and Kay 1999: 11)• Subtitles are bound by space and time

– screen width dictates 40 characters per line maximum– reading speeds limit the amount of dialogue that can be shown in a given time

frame (Luyken 1991: 43)• Subtitles kept on-screen during a shot change can distract

viewers– ‘overlapping’ is generally avoided– changes in shot dictate subtitle display times (Luyken 1991: 44)– fast-paced scenes with multiple shot changes are even more limited in the

amount of dialogue they can display

DHOH subtitling• DHOH (deaf and hard-of-hearing) subtitles are more

restricted in the amount of dialogue they can represent on the screen

• Need to specify non-verbal auditory information, such as prosodic detail, sound effects, music and speaker identity

• Need to make extra time and space for this information• Translated (i.e. interlingual) subtitles do not have to attend to these

details• Greater need for omission of dialogue and other features

Views on current practice

The shortening of the text for subtitling purposes is nothing more than deciding what is padding and what is vital information.

(Reid 1987)

Views on current practice

All non-essential information must be omitted yet extreme condensation is also undesirable [...] It is evident that adaptation requires a considerable degree of linguistic skill.

(Luyken 1991: 55)

McIntyre (2010) ‘Dialogue and characterisation in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs’, in McIntyre, B. and Busse, B. (eds) Language and Style: In Honour of Mick Short. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Reservoir Dogs, 1992

A cognitive model of characterisation

• Culpeper (2001)• Characterisation occurs through a

combination of top-down and bottom-up processing

• Top-down processing– Practice of applying schematic knowledge

about character• Bottom-up processing

– Practice of taking characterisation cues from linguistic triggers in the text

• Rip subtitles from DVDs using SubRip• Compare subtitles against audio file• Identify subtitling strategies (addition, condensation, deletion

[Gottlieb 1992] and swap [Lugea 2013]) and annotate file for this information

• Identify form of change (i.e. lexical, syntactic, morphological, etc.• Check whether change constitutes a textual trigger for

characterisation using Culpeper’s (2001) model• Conversational structure, conversational implicature, (im)politeness,

lexis (Germanic vs. Latinate; lexical richness; surge features; social markers; keywords), syntactic features, accent and dialect, verse and prose, paralinguistic features, visual features (kinesic, appearance), context

• Assess likely functional effect of change

Method

Change strategy Frequency %

AdditionWhat the hell [do you think] are you[’re] doing?

11 3.9

Deletion[I mean] I don't wanna kill anybody

243 86.2

CondensationI [will] ’ll put…bullets through your heart

5 1.8

Swap[whom] who you already know

23 8.2

Total changes 282 [in 1630] 17.3

Results

What gets deleted?Whole clausesBut [you don’t care] they're counting on your tips to live[?].[The alarm went off OK?]

Parallel structuresI don't know who's dead, [I don’t know] who's alive.I don't know who's caught, [I don’t know] who's not.

Vocatives[Joe] Joe, I don't know what you think you know, but you're wrong.Wait, wait [wait man].

Surge features[Oh,] At that point, it was every man for himself. We ain't got the slightest [fuckin’] idea

Discourse markers[You know] I used to work minimum wage[I mean er you know]

378 Mr Pink00:21:08,287 --> 00:21:09,720[I mean] I don't wanna kill anybody,

286 Mr Pink00:15:13,367 --> 00:15:15,437I don't think we got set up,I know we got set up.

287 Mr Pink00:15:15,487 --> 00:15:17,364[I mean really, seriously] Where did all those cops come from, huh?

346 Mr Pink00:19:03,727 --> 00:19:06,958- Come on, Mr White, [I mean you can] you can see that.

Some conclusions…• Advice to subtitlers?

– Stylistics offers reflection on practice and insights into the function of particular stylistic choices

• Broad spectrum of reading abilities amongst DHOH viewers– Viewers who have had hearing and lost it more likely to read at a ‘normal’ adult

speed (De Linde and Kay 1999: 667)– Some research suggests little difference in the reading speeds of hearing and

DHOH viewers (Downey 2008: 654)• What to do about this?

– Understand impact of stylistic choices to avoid unnecessary omissions and condensations; creative subtitling (e.g. McClarty, forthcoming 2013)

• Future directions– Work with subtitlers to gain insights into professional practice– Consult DHOH viewers to better understand viewing experience– Eye-tracking of DHOH and hearing viewers– Experiments with repositioning of subtitles

• Impact-focused research – but underpinned by research for which there was no intended impact

Principles underpinning good research

• Rigour– Take account of all the data in the

data set– Don’t pick and choose to suit your

argument• Objectivity

– Be clear, open and ready to change your mind if the evidence demands it

• Replicability and falsifiability– Make your work and your claims clear

enough to be challenged

Conclusions

• Impact is desirable but difficult to predict or assess• Assessing the quality of the underpinning research is

much more feasible• Principles of rigour, objectivity, replicability and

falsifiability: the only way to determine what counts as valuable research

• Onus should not be on academics to justify what they do but how they do it

Finally, of what use is linguistics? […] it is evident, for instance, that linguistic questions interest all who work with texts – historians, philologists, etc. Still more obvious is the importance of linguistics to general culture: in the lives of individuals and societies, speech is more important than anything else. That linguistics should continue to be the prerogative of a few specialists would be unthinkable – everyone is concerned with it in one way or another. But – and this is a paradoxical consequence of the interest that is fixed on linguistics – there is no other field in which so many absurd notions, prejudices, mirages, and fictions have sprung up. From the psychological viewpoint these errors are of interest, but the task of the linguist is, above all else, to condemn them and to dispel them as best he [sic] can.

(Saussure 1974 [1916]: 7)

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

References• Al-Marashi, I. (2002) ‘Iraq’s security and intelligence network: a guide and analysis’, Middle East Review of

International Affairs 6(3): http://www.gloria-center.org/2002/09/al-marashi-2002-09-01/• Anielski, M. (2007) The Economics of Happiness: Building Genuine Wealth. Canada: New Society

Publishers.• Culpeper, J. (2001) Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts. London: Longman.• De Linde, Z. and Kay, N. (1999) The Semiotics of Subtitling. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing.• Gottlieb, H. (1994) ‘Subtitling: people translating people’, in Dollerup, C. and Lindegaard, A. (eds) Teaching

Translation and Interpreting 2: Insights, Aims, Visions , pp. 261-74. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.• Lugea, J. (2013) ‘The socio-stylistics of The Wire’s subtitles: ‘the game done changed’’,33rd conference of

the international Poetics and Linguistics Assocation. Heidelberg University, Germany.• McIntyre (2010) ‘Dialogue and characterisation in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs’, in McIntyre, B. and

Busse, B. (eds) Language and Style: In Honour of Mick Short. Basingstoke: Palgrave• Poland, G. A. and Jacobson, R. M. (2011) ‘The age-old struggle against the antivaccinationists’, New

England Journal of Medicine 364: 97-99.• Reid, H. (1987) 'The semiotics of subtitling, or why don't you translate what it says? European Broadcasting

Union (EBU) Review 38:28-30.• Saussure, F. (1974) [1916] Course in General Linguistics. Glasgow: Fontana.• Wakefield, A. J., Murch, S. H., Anthony, A., Linnell, J., Casson , D. M., Malik, M., Berelowitz, M., Dhillon, A.

P., Thomson, M. A., Harvey, P., Valentine, A., Davies, S. E. and Walker-Smith, J. A. (1998) ‘Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children’, The Lancet 351(9103): 637-41. [Retracted]