Stance and style: A corpus-driven perspective on television coverage of the 2OO9 South African general election

Abstract

This exploratory study is concerned with the extent to which corpus-driven analyses of two generically very similar corpora, namely television coverage of the South African general election of 2009 by a state-owned public broadcasting channel (SABC3) and by a commercial channel (e.tv), can nevertheless reveal interesting differences between them. The focus is mostly on those differences that relate to the channels' political stances, but stylistic contrasts in the coverage are also considered, some of which prove to be of indirect political relevance. Central to the research approach here is the notion of ‘keyness’ (a statistically significant higher density of an item in one corpus when compared to another), and this study takes its cue from Rayson (2008) by using his Wmatrix corpus analysis and comparison tool to examine differences not only at word level, but also at part-of-speech and semantic domain levels.