Combines Corpus Linguistics Research Articles

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Abstract This paper combines corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis methodologies in order to investigate the discourses and cyber activism of the British right-wing nationalist party, Britain First. A study of a corpus of texts produced by elite members of the group reveals a racist, xenophobic stance which constructs Islam and Muslims as the radical, dangerous ‘Other’. This creates a discourse of fear that threatens the way of life of the indigenous in-group of the British people. An investigation of the cyber activity of the group demonstrates that Britain First is able to achieve a significant amount of following on social media by publishing populist material that veils their true nature or ideological stance.

Emotional and Educational Consequences of (Im)politeness in Teacher–Student Interaction at Higher Education

In this article, I will explore some of the emotional and educational consequences of (im)politeness in teacher–student interaction (T–S interaction, henceforth) at higher education, with reference to their influence in motivation and learning. Politeness theory (Brown and Levinson in Questions and politeness: strategies in social interaction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1978, Politeness: some universals in language usage, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987) will be extended to include a discursive approach to the management of interpersonal relations (Spencer-Oatey in Culturally speaking: managing rapport through talk across cultures, Continuum, London, 2008), and further developments towards the expression of impoliteness. (Im)politeness and rapport management will be analysed in combination with self-determination (Deci and Ryan in J Res Personal 19:109–134, 1985) and appraisal theories (Martin in Evaluation in text: authorial stance and the construction of discourse, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000; Martin and White in The language of evaluation. Appraisal in English, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2005; Hunston and Thompson in Evaluation in text. Authorial stance and the construction of discourse, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000; Thompson and Alba-Juez in Evaluation in context, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2014) in order to examine the role of motivation and negative evaluative meanings in the construction of impoliteness in interaction. Data have been extracted from a corpus that is being compiled by the author. It contains classroom interaction, email exchanges and higher education students’ reports on their perception of (im)politeness and rapport in their academic lives. The data have been processed and analysed combining corpus linguistics, conversation analysis and systemic functional discourse analysis. Results show that the discourse of teaching typically contains many rapport sensitive discourse acts and that their face-aggravating potential increases when conveying negative evaluative language and when students present a challenging orientation to rapport due to different reasons, being lack of intrinsic motivation an important one. Other aspects which can result in face aggravation such as different expectations regarding sociality rights and obligations will be discussed. As T–S interaction has effects not only on the relations reated among teachers and students but also on the teaching–learning process, it seems essential that the involved parties become aware of the impact of rapport management and of the fact that learning is facilitated by good interpersonal rapport but can be seriously undermined by its absence.

Media Discourse on the Refugee Crisis: On what have the Greek, German and British Press Focused?

This article looks at how the Greek, German and British press have addressed the issue of the refugee crisis in Europe. Using a mixed research approach that combines corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, this article examines 1340 articles that were published online between 20 March and 31 May 2016 in Greece ( Kathimerini, To vima), Germany ( Die Welt, Süddeutsche Zeitung) and the UK ( The Guardian, The Telegraph). The results presented by this article suggest that the press in all three countries mostly presented the refugee crisis in numbers. Geographical qualifiers were also deployed in the effort to broach this thorny issue, while the managerial aspect of the refugee crisis, the critical issue of child refugees and the EU–Turkey agreement were all among the most frequent topics covered by the press.

Simplification in inter- and intralingual translation – combining corpus linguistics, key logging and eye-tracking

AbstractAs some scholars view inter-and intra-lingual translation as a parallel activity, it is vital to establish to what extent the products of these processes are alike, and whether the processes themselves differ. This paper investigates stylistic simplification, a frequently hypothesised translation universal which involves, among others, breaking up long sentences in the process of translation (

Keywords in the press

This article describes a corpus-assisted study of some socio-political keywords (in a similar sense to Raymond Williams’ ‘cultural keywords’ 1983 [1976]), of newspaper reporting between 1998 and 2007, when Tony Blair’s New Labour government was in power. We approach the discovery of socio-political keywords via the analysis of statistical keywords. Reducing a long list of statistical keywords to a shortlist of socio-politically significant keywords is inevitably complex, and the article explains the process used here. We demonstrate that certain lexemes gain currency in relatively short historical periods and take on political importance in addition to their everyday meaning. Combining corpus linguistics with critical stylistic analysis, we explore the usage of five important socio-political keywords of the New Labour period.

Applying corpus linguistics and conversation analysis in the investigation of small group teaching in higher education

AbstractIn this paper, we consider how a combined corpus linguistics and conversation analysis methodology can reveal new insights into the relationship between interaction patterns, language use, and learning. The context of the paper is higher education small group teaching sessions and our data are drawn from a one million word corpus, the Limerick-Belfast Corpus of Academic Spoken English (LI-BEL CASE). Our methodology combines corpus linguistics (CL) and applied conversation analysis (CA), enabling quantitative findings to be elaborated by more close-up qualitative analysis of sequences of interaction. Using a combined CL and CA approach (henceforth CLCA) enables us to consider more closely the relationships between, for example, interaction patterns and lexical chunks and to evaluate the extent to which tutors create or prevent opportunities for learning. Using CLCA, we offer a more detailed description of the linguistic and interactional features of turns at talk and consider how these features combine in the joint enterprise of meaning-making. Put simply, CLCA enables us to characterize seminar talk in a more systematic way. Starting at the level of turn, and using CA to move to a higher level of discourse, we can identify specific features of the spoken interaction, such as sequential organisation and topic management. Similarly, starting again at the level of turn but using CL, we can move our analysis to lower levels of discourse, such as cluster and word patterns, in order to see how words combine. This CLCA approach offers a fuller, richer description of talk in small-group teaching than would be found using either CA or CL alone. Finally, we offer an evaluation of a CLCA methodology and consider its applications in other research settings.

“‘Fully refurbished end terraced house’. A Corpus Study of Online Classified Ads”

Advertising is a versatile and dynamic genre incorporating a constellation of subgenres, most of which are short messages subject to spatial or temporal restriction. One of them is the classified ad, a form of small, local advertising that, like other forms of written communication, has found its way on to the Web. The present article, which investigates online classified ads offering properties for sale, is based on a qualitative and Quantitative analysis of a small corpus of texts downloaded from UK-based websites. The aim is to explore their main textual, discursive and linguistic features by combining corpus linguistics methodology with discourse analysis and genre analysis approaches. The study first outlines the evolution of the genre from print to the Web; then, it profiles the general features and structure of online classified ads, discusses variation across the texts in the corpus, and identifies the linguistic features by analysing frequencies and collocations of function words, verbs, nouns, adjectives, abbreviations and acronyms. The analysis also sheds some light on the phraseology of classified property advertising.

Electronic word-of-mouth: a genre approach to consumer communities

Consumer communities on the web provide people with unprecedented opportunities to articulate their opinions on products and services or read about the experiences of other consumers. This form of writing can be considered a truly digital genre, as consumers were not able to share their opinions with other consumers in a structured and written format before the advent of the internet. To identify the rules and conventions established by such a genre community, a sample of product reviews is examined using a methodology that combines corpus linguistics and qualitative textual analysis. More precisely, the analysis focuses on the text structure, content, audience appeals, sentence style and word choice. The results of this analysis may help improve the design of consumer opinion websites, thereby making these communities more useful sources of knowledge for consumers and companies alike.