The discursive positioning of the Falkland Islands (las Islas Malvinas): A corpus-based collocational analysis of British and Argentinian websites

Abstract

Considering discursive positioning to be form of placement, this study examines how the or las , place which has long been politically controversial, are positioned on British and Argentinian websites. The data came from two reference corpora: namely the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) and the Corpus del Espanol: Web/Dialects. The 388-million-word British section of the former and the 183-million-word Argentinian section of the latter were selected for analysis. Attention was paid to the 20 most frequent collocates of Falkland Islands/ . Semantic prosody, collocation networks and word clusters were also investigated. It was found that the are positioned differently in the two corpora. While the collocates of Falkland Islands in the British corpus (e.g., government and population) position the as territory with self-determination, the collocates of Islas Malvinas in the Argentinian corpus (e.g., nuestras [our (feminine plural)], territorio [territory] and recuperacion [recovery], together with the 5-gram las son argentinas [the are Argentinian]) subsume the under the ownership of Argentina. Not only are the discursively positioned, Britain and Argentina are also subject to positioning. For instance, in the British corpus, Argentina is construed as an invader (as suggested by the collocates invasion and 1982) whereas in the Argentinian corpus, Britain is given this demonized role (via the collocates militar [military] and britanica [British (feminine singular)]). Such findings add strength to van Dijk's (2011) discussion of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation. As an example of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), the current research also offers solid evidence on the social phenomenon of classification proposed by Bourdieu (1990)—i.e., a vision of the world is division of the world.