Whodunit... and to Whom? Subjects, Objects, and Actions in Research Articles on American Labor Unions

摘要

This paper investigates whether sentence structure analysis-examining who appears in subject versus object position-can illuminate who academic articles portray as having agency in labor relations. We extract subjects and objects from a corpus of 3,800 academic articles, and compare both the relative occurrence of different groups (workers, women, employers) in each position and the verbs that most commonly attach to each group. We conclude that agency, while elusive, can potentially be modeled by sentence structure analysis.