Corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis Research Articles

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Sexual Violence Narratives in <em>The Jakarta Post</em>

This study examines the representation of sexual assault survivors in 67 articles from The Jakarta Post (2016-2023) using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. Employing concordance analysis and sentiment evaluation, the research highlights a notable focus on the ages of victims, particularly teenagers, advocating for victim-centered language in public discourse. The findings reveal shortcomings in sexual and reproductive health services, legal issues faced by teenage victims, and gaps in assistance programs. The study calls for comprehensive support structures and legal reforms to address persistent challenges. Sentiment analysis underscores the deliberate use of negative language, emphasizing the need for objective reporting. Overall, the research emphasizes the importance of unbiased reporting, robust support mechanisms, and legal reforms to address the multifaceted challenges faced by rape victims.

Corpus-assisted CDA of George Floyd’s Murder Reports on CNN and Aljazeera

In 2020, one news that shook the world was the murder of an Afro-American named George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. This study focuses on the media coverage of George Floyd’s murder case by two news outlets, CNN and Aljazeera. We used a Corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis (CACDA) technique to compare how each news outlet portrayed the social actors involved in the incident and to identify if any social actors were excluded from the reporting, eventually revealing which side each media was inclined to. The analysis was based on Theo Van Leeuwen’s theory and utilized the Antconc application. The data used in this study consists of ten news articles, five from CNN and Aljazeera, published between May and July 2020. A literature study was conducted to collect the data. The Antconc corpus-processing application was then used to process the large amount of data collected, enabling quick, extensive, and comprehensive analysis. We uploaded all ten articles to the Antconc application and used the frequency feature to identify the five most used words in the ten news articles. The top five words were further analyzed using van Leeuwen’s critical discourse analysis, excluding irrelevant particles. The result shows that CNN aligned with the police and Aljazeera aligned with Floyd. By the ideological stances of CNN and Aljazeera, readers can become more aware of potential biases in news articles concerning George Floyd’s murder.

Media representations of China's inclusive education: A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis.

The Chinese government aspires for inclusive education to serve as an exemplary model in addressing educational inequity issues and establishing a responsible global image as a major power. Nevertheless, there has been limited focus on China's news media coverage concerning its inclusive education initiatives aimed at international audiences. To bridge this gap, this study employed a corpus-assisted critical discourse analytic approach to examine China's self-image in relation to its inclusive education endeavours. Seventy-three English-language news articles from the official channel were retrieved for meticulous line-by-line concordance analysis. The results indicate that out of the 520 co-occurring instances, they can be broadly categorised into four groups: efforts to develop inclusive education (65.4%); consensus on benefits of inclusive education (24.5%); challenges faced by inclusive education (4.8%); and others (5.4%). This study illuminates the effective utilisation of official media in the image construction of inclusive education in China.

Representations of gender in conspiracy theories: a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis

ABSTRACT This paper examines how gender is represented within conspiracy theories by drawing on data from a corpus composed of conspiracy theory documents. It presents an analysis of the collocates of gendered nouns, highlighting the ways that conspiracy theorists use language to reinforce connections between religiosity and masculinity and understandings of femininity that rely on biological gender essentialism. Further, this paper highlights the overlap in values between religious masculinity and hegemonic masculinity that occur within this discourse. It also argues that the ways in which gender is represented in conspiracy theory discourse shares links to far-right ideology, even when the conspiracies in question do not have direct or overt connections to the far-right.

Representations of 5G in the Chinese and British press: a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis

This study employs a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis to demystify the dominant patterns of representations around 5G in the Chinese and British press. Keyword analyses identify four thematic categories around the representation of 5G: the nature of 5G, social actors in 5G discourse, actions around 5G and timing in 5G discourse. Findings suggest that the Chinese press tends to use positive evaluative expressions to depict 5G as a trustworthy and beneficial issue and stress China’s strong support for 5G development. In contrast, the British press prefers to frame 5G as a product of geopolitical rivalry and an issue with scientific uncertainties and controversies by repeatedly employing negative language patterns related to 5G risks and conspiracy theories. Besides, a subtle but varying “self versus other” schema is constructed by the two presses. The Chinese press is inclined to use positive predication strategies to construct a positive self-representation, whereas the British press tends to adopt negative predication strategies to portray China as an outgroup and meanwhile use scapegoating strategies to profile Britain as a positive self by using recurrent patterns denoting the pressure exerted on Britain by the United States. Such differences could result from their journalistic ideologies and values and the contrasting socio-political contexts where the two presses are situated.

Masculinity crisis or gender reconciliation: A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of the effeminate Chinese masculinity debate on social media

Sexism and gender controversies often occur on the internet in contemporary China. The prevalence of male effeminacy is a part of the growing diversity of gender representations. This article investigates the dominant discourses surrounding the debate on male feminization, and netizens’ stance in Chinese social media discourse. By employing corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, the study identifies four dominant discourses: resistance discourse, anti-discrimination discourse, patriarchal discourse, and nationalistic discourse. These discourses are constructed using various strategies, such as abstraction, authorization, categorization, and morality strategies, and are inextricably intertwined with China’s sociocultural background and broader social contexts. This study offers insights into the clash between conventional and liberal views on ‘soft masculinity’ and exemplifies how Chinese netizens actively leverage social media platforms to express views on gender issues.

Concepts of translators and translation in online social media: construal and contestation

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the conceptual representation of ‘the translator’ and ‘translation’ in online social media. It constructs a theoretical framework for the analysis by drawing on two bodies of work: (a) existing theorizations of conceptualizations of ‘the translator’ and ‘translation’, and (b) research on social media as a computational, discursive, and performative space in which people construct identity configurations in relation to broader social and ideological discourses. The article focuses on how concepts of translators and translation are enlisted in these processes, and the theoretical framework developed is illustrated by a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of a sample of 2,639 tweets relating to the 2021 debate on Amanda Gorman’s translators, focusing on how discourses from the traditional news media are invoked by the sharing of links, and how the tweets themselves discursively construct translation and translators.

Constructing Attractiveness: Chinese Diplomatic Actors’ Cultural Soft-power Discursive Practices through the British Press

ABSTRACT Based on a critical review of Nye’s conceptualization of soft power, this paper extends the literature by examining how Chinese diplomatic actors deploy cultural soft-power discursive practices when publishing opinion pieces in the British press to construct the attractiveness of China. It conducts a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. Findings show that they strategically deploy charm offensive, defensive denial and Othering offensive to construct a distinctively positive Chinese Self and a positive Us as inclusive as possible under the influence of ideological square. The identified major topoi are characterized by imbuing China’s foreign policies and its world vision with Chinese traditional cultural and moral values, hopefully to justify China’s extensive use of the economic prowess to gain soft power, and justify its ability and incentive to play a more important role in global governance. It sheds some light on understanding Chinese diplomatic actors’ distinctive cultural soft-power mediated discursive practices in the general context of a non-Western government communicating and engaging with Western audiences. It also contributes to the understanding of China’s strategic thinking and its world vision in the Xi Jinping era.

A culturally relevant education?

This article contributes to ongoing discussions on education for migrants as a form of integration policy and practice. It does so by investigating whether the initiative Civic Orientation for Newly Arrived Migrants in Sweden constitutes an example of culturally relevant education. Drawing on a mixed-method and multi-level analysis, we hone in on “values” as a discursive construction in order to see how particular principles are linked to Swedishness. Specifically, we show how values are discursively constructed on multiple levels through 1) a qualitative analysis of policy documents instrumental to the implementation of civic orientation; 2) a quantitative corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of media articles; 3) individual interviews with 14 persons involved in organizing the civic orientation courses; and 4) ethnographic classroom observations from six such courses. Our results show how, on the one hand, Sweden is constructed as the most developed country in the world in terms of values and, on the other hand, migrants are portrayed as antithetical to such an ideal imagination. Furthermore, we show how a specific set of values – human rights and democracy – changes meaning from being universal to becoming particularized and nationalized as “Swedish”.

A Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis of the Iranian People in the Corpus of Donald Trump’s Social Media Texts

Social media has provided many opportunities for people to express, obtain, and reproduce their views, thoughts, ideologies, and even their daily routines. Perhaps the most famous person to successfully take advantage of these opportunities and become a constant trending topic around the world is former American President Donald J. Trump. The style of language he uses on social media helps spread his ideology so that he has become known as the first president of America to use social media to get his ideas across. To evaluate the keywords in the corpus of Trump’s social media that dominated the topics of social media in Iran, a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis was used as the methodology for this study. The results show that the keywords “people”, “real”, “brave”, “suffering”, and “killed” are closely related to the oppressive conditions of the Iranian people. The results also show that people who are talked about as brave figures always get help and love from Trump.

Support group or transgender lobby? Representing Mermaids in the British press

ABSTRACT This article examines representations of Mermaids, a charity that supports trans young people and their families, in the British press. Using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, we identify and chart patterns in reporting between Mermaids’ inception as a charity in 2015, and 2022, a turbulent year for both the charity and trans people in the UK more generally. The findings show that, in the early years, there is relatively little attention to Mermaids in the press. Where they are mentioned, the charity is represented as a useful source of advice and support, and their service users as happy and united. However, 2018 represents a turning point, with increasingly negative and misleading portrayals of Mermaids coinciding with a rise in public interest and funding. By 2019, media interest in the charity has surged and the impression of Mermaids as a support group for families is supplanted by the image of a powerful, dangerous and controversial organisation. We argue that the increasingly excessive, negative and polarised reporting around Mermaids is a strategy for indirectly delegitimising and attacking the lives of trans young people themselves. In a burgeoning culture war, Mermaids is used as a weapon against the very people they seek to support.

Functions of crisis in religious education discourse since 1975. A critical corpus-assisted analysis

ABSTRACT The omnipresence of multiple crisis diagnoses in contemporary public discourse deeply affects religious education (RE). At first sight, this does not seem to be surprising, insofar as it corresponds to the pedagogical ambition to meaningfully respond to challenges in the lifeworld of learners. Yet, what happens when current phenomena are framed as crisis? Prior to asking the question how RE responds to a particular crisis, one might consider the way in which the perception of reality as crisis emerges and works. Against this background, the paper investigates the use of ‘crisis’ in RE discourse since 1975. We consider developments up to 2019 using an evenly distributed, diachronic random sample of 485 papers from English RE journals, and then compare this with a synchronic corpus of 31 papers around the emergence of the Covid pandemic. With reference to critical political theory, crises are interpreted as part of normative orders that structure the perception of the respective present. Methodologically, we follow the approach of a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. Results show how RE discourse frames its perception of the present by means of diagnosing crises. A critical examination of corresponding attributions and implications opens spaces for alternative ways of thinking and acting.

Language policy debate and the discursive construction of Tamazight in Moroccan news media: a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis

Language policy debate and the discursive construction of Tamazight in Moroccan news media: a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis

A debate between hegemonic masculinity and the rise of gender nonconformity: Media representations of the ‘niangpao’ phenomenon in China

The ‘niangpao’ phenomenon has recently elicited heated discussion in China. However, existing studies related to it mainly focus on the field of showbiz or personal care (cosmetics and beauty) rather than news discourse. To address this niche, a specialised corpus of 174 Chinese English-language news stories (156,774 words) from the years 2012 to 2022 was created to examine this phenomenon by employing corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. The findings show that the semantic preferences of ‘neologism’, ‘attributes of social actor’, and ‘social action’ with seven different semantic prosodies surrounding the node ‘niangpao’ are prominent, which indicate anti-niangpao and pro-niangpao discourses with ideological implications for nationalism and gender nonconformity. These results provide insights into the linguistic representations of the ‘niangpao’ phenomenon in Chinese English-language newspapers, the contentious ideologies that emerge from these representations, and how changing gender politics shape and are influenced by the State media in a consumption-based economy.

Heterogeneous discursive representations of the Chinese Dream in international media: a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis

The study focuses on the heterogeneous discursive representations of the Chinese Dream in three international newspapers from different geopolitical regions between 2012 and 2022. To this end, a combined method that uses the discourse-historical approach and corpus-assisted analysis was adopted. In the analysis, it identifies three salient discursive strategies (namely, nomination, perspectivisation and argumentation) that are employed to reconstruct/represent the national Dream differently in the three media. The findings suggest that the Chinese Dream is a floating discourse in media, and its portrayals strongly depend on the news institutions and their ideologies, stances and socio-political systems in which they are based and that the objective presentation of media is fragmented or an illusion, at least in the case of the mediatised Chinese Dream. The heterogeneous representations also show the features of discourse power struggle and ideological divergence in the media based in different geopolitical regions. The study contributes to the critical understanding of the Chinese Dream in the discursive world constructed by news media.

Representing the ‘Little Fresh Meat’ Phenomenon in the Chinese English-Medium News Media: A Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis

In China, the phenomenon of ‘little fresh meat’ has recently sparked a contentious debate. However, few studies have examined the thematic concepts surrounding the phenomenon of ‘little fresh meat’ in the Chinese English-medium news media. In order to fill this gap, this study used corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis to examine how the ‘little fresh meat’ phenomenon has been represented discursively in Chinese English-language news media and observe which stance the media take on this phenomenon. The findings show that four semantic domains, namely, entertainment, education, personal care, as well as gender and sexuality, are inextricably intertwined with the ‘little fresh meat’ phenomenon. The findings also show that patriarchal discourse is prominent, and resistance discourse is only subordinate in the representations. This paper sheds light on debates surrounding the ‘little fresh meat’ phenomenon and demonstrates state gender governance through China’s state media.

A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of hate speech in German and Polish social media posts

The present paper investigates linguistic data that include hate speech motivated by the alleged or real ethnic or national identity of its addressee in German and Polish Internet-based communication. Focusing on hate speech on Facebook, this paper contributes to the studies of hate speech (e.g. Meibauer, 2013; Meibauer, 2021) in online communication (e.g. Baider & Constantinou, 2020; He et al., 2021; Founta & Specia, 2021) and, in a more general sense, to the vast area of research on the use of aggressive language. Based on a representative corpus, the predominant categories of user-generated hateful statements are teased out relative to their form and stance by means of critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics tools. In the analytical part, we discuss the discursive practices used in the posts, together with the meanings they communicate, followed by a comparative analysis of their frequencies in comparable corpora. Our findings confirm that hate speech is linguistically conditioned by its socio-cultural context. For instance, our contrastive analysis of German and Polish online data indicates that the two nationalities use different discursive practices to express their aversion to the Other, and that Polish comments are more overtly insulting than German comments.

Explaining the distribution of implicit means of misrepresentation: A case study on Italian immigration discourse

This study analyzes Fillmore's frames in a large corpus of Italian news headlines concerning migrations, dating from 2013 to 2021 and taken from newspapers of diverse ideological stances. Our goal is to assess whether, how, and why migrants' representation varies over time and across ideological stances. Our approach combines corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis with cognitive linguistics. We present a new methodology that exploits SocioFillmore, a tool integrating a novel Natural Language Processing model for automatic frame annotation into a web-based user interface for exploring frame-annotated corpora. In our corpus, the frequency distribution of frames varies over time according to detectable contextual factors. Across political stances, instead, the most frequent frames remain more constant: both right-winged and left-winged news providers contribute to reifying migrants into non-agentive entities. Further, in religious (Christian) press migrants are given a more humanizing depiction, but they still often appear in non-agentive roles. The distributions of frames can be explained by the fact that the latter act as indirect, routinized, and implicit means of (mis)representation. We suggest that framing entails inferential operations that take place unconsciously and can therefore escape the cognitive screening not only of those who receive discourse, but also of those who (re)produce it.

Talking about Migration in Times of Crisis: A Textual Analysis of Narratives by IOM and UNHCR on Migrants and Refugees

In the absence of a binding and coherent international migration regime, the global governance of migration relies on normative narratives produced by UN agencies and other intergovernmental forums, in line with the discursive legitimacy traditionally associated with international organizations. Such narratives impact migrants, asylum-seekers, and refugees because they support certain policy frameworks among member states. Yet, global migration governance remains fragmented, especially as far as the long-standing divide between the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is concerned. This article contributes to this discussion by applying corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis to the narratives produced by these two organizations. The article identifies some of the dominant worldviews in the narratives of IOM and UNHCR. Results show that IOM and UNHCR have distinct worldviews, associated with different textual patterns, and that, while IOM’s textual productions seem to influence UNHCR’s discourses, the opposite is less true. This would support the view that IOM is currently the leading actor in terms of framing migration, thereby exerting a strong influence on global migration governance.

“The Jogger and the Wolfpack”: An Analysis of the TRANSITIVITY Patterns in the Global Media Coverage of the 1989 Central Park Five Case

Common causes of wrongful conviction include eyewitness misidentification, improper forensics, or false confessions (Garrett in Convicting the innocent: where criminal prosecutions go wrong, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2011; Innocence Canada, https://www.innocencecanada.com/causes-of-wrongful-convictions/); whilst none of these factors are in question in this paper, the notion put forward is that a more implicit factor is also at play; that is, the newspaper coverage of a criminal case during the lead up to trial. According to Felton Rosulek (Text Talk 28:529–550, 2008), “[…] linguistic choices conspire together […] and create a specific interpretation of reality”. Thus, this paper explores how the accused and the (alleged) criminal events pertaining to a high-profile case of the 1980s in New York are discursively framed in a range of press coverage across the USA and further afield. The corpus comprises newspaper articles reporting on the Central Park Jogger case, which resulted in the wrongful conviction and lost freedom of five innocent young men. Using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis (CADS) (Partington and Marchi, in: Biber, Reppen (eds) The Cambridge handbook of English corpus linguistics, Cambridge University Press, 2015; Stubbs in Text and corpus analysis. Computer-assisted studies of language and culture. Blackwell, Oxford, 1996), the Transitivity patterns (Halliday and Matthiessen in Halliday’s introduction to functional grammar, Routledge, London, 2014) present in the press coverage are examined to gain insights into whether the portrayal of (1) the accused and (2) the victim at the centre of this case may have contributed to securing a wrongful conviction. Furthermore, this paper strives to (1) draw awareness to wrongful convictions more generally and (2) contribute to studies on Transitivity, which serve to highlight societal injustice and the power of printed news when determining the innocence or guilt of an accused individual. To acquire both quantitative and qualitative results, the UAM Corpus Tool (O’Donnell in UAM Corpus Tool, http://www.corpustool.com/) was also employed here.