The lexico-grammar of partnerships: corpus patterns of facilitated agency

Abstract

This article contributes to the growing body of research that joins critical discourse analysis with corpus analysis. I investigate a one million-word special corpus on US urban redevelopment in an attempt to illustrate that partnerships as popular collaborative coalitions in new capitalism can be identified in representations of social actors at the lexico-grammatical level. Focusing on two recurrent patterns in a Hallidayan framework, I argue that these representations break with the traditional binary of activation–passivation that is frequently used to discuss how key participants are portrayed in discourse. I suggest the category of facilitated agency in order to accommodate representational patterns where actors are depicted as jointly though not necessarily equally contributing to the completion of a process. The analysis further highlights the potential of corpus methods to uncover patterns of language use that may lead to a refinement of CDA's existing analytic repertoire.