Analysing aggression of social actors in political protests: combining corpus and cognitive approaches to discourse analysis

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the newspaper representations of the aggressive behaviour of social actors in political protests and explore the benefits of integrating corpus linguistics and cognitive approaches to a critical discourse analysis in analysing press reports.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses methods from corpus linguistics and theoretical constructs from cognitive linguistics to examine patterns of representation around Occupy Central, a recent political protest in Hong Kong, in two corpora of English-language newspaper articles published in China Daily and the South China Morning Post (SCMP).FindingsAn analysis of the ten most frequent collocates of the word police showed that the China Daily corpus articles typically index the presentation of police as vulnerable yet professional in their handling of violent protesters, whereas in SCMP, police officers are often presented as aggressors. The analysis subsequently considered three discursive strategies, namely structural configuration, framing and identification that are mediated through conceptualisations that representations in text evoke.Research limitations/implicationsIn the proposed integrated approach, quantitative investigations of corpus examples could be focussed and contextualised in such a way that particular linguistic instantiations in discourse which are proved statistically salient can be further analysed in relation to conceptual phenomena which serve specific ideological purposes.Originality/valueHopefully, the study could serve as the first ever attempt to adopt an integrative analytical framework in the study of aggression and conflict in news discourse.