International Linguistics Research

A Comparison of Rhetorical Move Analysis by GPT-4 and Humans in Abstracts of Scopus-Indexed Tourism Research Articles

2024-06-05T12:19:31+08:00

AI advancements have made ChatGPT a remarkable and versatile tool in education and linguistics, showcasing its potential to mimic human conversation and comprehend language. Scholars are intrigued by ChatGPT’s text data handling, yet its application in rhetorical move analysis remains largely unexplored. Therefore, the objective of this study is to investigate the ability of GPT-4 in the identification of rhetorical moves employed in the abstracts of tourism research articles indexed in Scopus. The essentiality of moves was also reported. Additionally, this research seeks to compare the accuracy of GPT-4’s analysis with that of humans. Adopting Hyland’s (2000) five-move model, the results indicated that GPT-4 analyzes moves more quickly but less accurately than human experts, and the four principal types of errors committed by GPT-4 include redundancy/over-count, unmatched categorization, incorrect sequence, and vague identification. The findings also revealed that Move 2 (Purpose) and Move 4 (Findings) are obligatory with a 100% essentiality rate through both GPT-4 and human analysis. Differences arise in certain steps of Move 1 (Introduction), Move 3 (Methods), and Move 5 (Conclusion), where GPT-4 often sees higher essentiality rates. This study shed light on the testament to AI’s current capabilities in move analysis in academic discourse.

Gender- and Age-related Constraints in Japanese Politeness Marking: A Statistical Analysis of the Tokyo Story Characters’ Usage of Keigo

2024-06-07T15:01:38+08:00

This quantitative study explores the relationship between three sociological factors (age, gender and possible in-law relationship) and the use of Japanese honorifics (keigo). Statistical analyses are conducted on the occurrence of Japanese politeness markers found in the script of the movie Tokyo Story directed by Yasujiro Ozu in 1953. Results notably confirm the highly significant correlation between age, gender and the use of keigo, women and younger speakers using consistently more politeness markers than men and older speakers, even though Japanese polite speech does not seem to reflect the order of magnitude derived from the age difference numeric value but only the acknowledgement of one interactant’s seniority.

The study also delves into the distinction between the mere presence of keigo in discourse and its intensity of use in actual speech (i.e. number of politeness markers), revealing complex relationships. For example, same-sex dyads exhibit different patterns of politeness, with men-to-men politeness associated more with the former and women-to-women politeness more with the latter. The interplay between age and gender in keigo use seems to defy systematic rules, highlighting the importance of considering unique gender- and age-based pairings, in other words: distinct categories of address styles that are both interrelated and individual.