Corpus-assisted Discourse Analysis Research Articles

Contrasting discourses: Digital precariat or flexible entrepreneurship? A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of platform work in German and Finnish business newspapers

Platform work as a new form of work is a globally discussed research topic in various research fields, such as social sciences, economics and labour law. Previous research identifies the significant impact platforms have on work, labour market and society. This article brings a linguistic approach to the topic, analyzing and comparing the discussion on platform work in German and Finnish business newspapers in 2017–2021. The corpus-assisted discourse analysis shows that platform work is discussed in both media partly in same contexts, such as in platform work’s effect on labour market and society, the unclear employment status and the need for stronger regulation. However, the analysis is able to tease out aspects and distinctions of platform work in the media not shown previously. Findings show that the German Handelsblatt represents platform work as a challenge to society with strong regulation requests, whereas the Finnish Kauppalehti highlights the possibilities platform work provides to entrepreneurship and labour market.

Getting into bed with embeddings? A comparison of collocations and word embeddings for corpus-assisted discourse analysis

Getting into bed with embeddings? A comparison of collocations and word embeddings for corpus-assisted discourse analysis

Moralization of law, heavy-penaltyism, and retributive justice: A corpus-assisted study of legal consciousness on Chinese social media

Previous studies on legal consciousness have primarily focused on individual-level interactions with legal institutions or personnel. However, this perspective may overlook the indirect experiences that citizens gain through social media and the social normative consensus behind individual experiences. To address this gap, this study examined the shared legal consciousness expressed by citizens on a social media platform. Using corpus-assisted discourse analysis and sentiment analysis, we analyzed 284,792 danmu comments from the most popular legal channel on Bilibili in China. Our findings provide a contemporary perspective on legal consciousness in Chinese social media, uncovering three prevailing ideologies: moralization of law, heavy-penaltyism, and a predilection for retributive justice over restorative justice. Through our mixed-methods approach using big data, we demonstrate the potential for expanding research on legal consciousness. Our findings enable a deeper understanding of how legal consciousness is expressed and shared among citizens in the digital age.

Image restoration strategies in pandemic crisis communication: a comparative analysis of Chinese and American COVID-19 political speeches

This study explores the effectiveness of image restoration strategies in pandemic crisis communication at the highest levels of administration. By integrating corpus-assisted discourse analysis with Image Repair Theory, it aims to uncover the prevailing strategies adopted by Chinese and American leaders to restore or enhance a positive national image in the post-COVID era. Lancsbox 6.0 was utilized to extract excerpts and analyze linguistic devices from a self-built corpus of 144 political speeches delivered by top leaders in China and the United States. The results reveal that Chinese leaders, through the use of shared image restoration strategies such as bolstering and transcendence, shape a positive national image of a responsible country. In contrast, American leaders construct a confident and ambitious national image, projecting a leading geopolitical role in the world. These strategies have distinct features that contribute to the image restoration process. Apart from contributing significantly to the comparative research on Chinese and American pandemic-related political speeches, the research findings carry implications for the practice and promotion of national ideologies. The study also highlights the diverse ways in which credible and accurate crisis messages are employed, providing valuable insights for handling pandemics or other crises in the foreseeable or distant future.

From other-representation to self-representation: exploring identity and activism in historical news media writing

This study addresses a significant gap in our understanding of self-representation in historical news media reporting. It focusses on one significant historical publication: the first nationally distributed Indigenous Australian newspaper written and edited by First Nations people – The Australian Abo Call: The Voice of the Aborigines (hereafter The AAC). The AAC was published in six editions in 1938, the year of the 150th anniversary of invasion of the continent now known as Australia. The corpus consists of all (non-fiction) articles from all six editions of this newspaper, which was founded, edited and largely written by Yorta Yorta man J.T. (Jack) Patten. As such, the study offers a synchronic ‘snapshot’ of a particular moment in Australian history. The study uses corpus-assisted discourse analysis to explore the linguistic construction of self-representation – how First Nations people write about themselves and the communities they represent. I proceed from inductively identifying group-based identity labels to categorising these labels in terms of their positionality in relation to ‘self’ and ‘other’. Using concordances, the study also qualitatively examines these identity labels through transitivity analysis. The results suggest that The AAC was a site of political awakening directed at both Indigenous and white Australians, calling on the former to mobilise, on the latter to listen, and on both to act. The analysis also shows that this activism sits very much within the dominant Western/Colonial frame, reflecting the historical settler-colonial context of the period in which this newspaper was published. The study has broader implications for corpus-assisted discourse analysis, by indicating the insights we gain by shifting our gaze away from ‘other’-representation in mainstream newspapers towards ‘self’-representation in community-led publications.

Top-ranked U.S. and U.K.’s universities’ first responses to GenAI: key themes, emotions, and pedagogical implications for teaching and learning

The emergence of ChatGPT, a Generative AI program, has sparked discussions about its teaching and learning value, and concerns about academic integrity in higher education (HE). An extant review of the literature indicates that a scarcity of research exists on GenAI, specifically a synthesis of the official views, guidelines and articles of top-ranked universities on the use, limitations, challenges, and opportunities brought by ChatGPT in the early phase when ChatGPT was released in 2022 until early May 2023, which can offer insights into the concerns and recommendations for educators. Using the corpus assisted discourse analysis approach, this study identified the key themes and emotions elicited by evaluations of the ChatGPT situation from a self-built corpus containing 151 articles from 47 top-ranked U.S. universities and 34 U.K. ones. Our findings indicated three prominent themes discussed on official websites, including ChatGPT as a text and content generator, use of ChatGPT in teaching and learning, and potential implications and opportunities of using ChatGPT in HE. Further examination revealed that bias, concern, worry, threat, fear, and trust were the prevailing emotions relating to ChatGPT. Illustrated with examples collected from our corpus, this paper offers an in-depth discussion of universities’ first responses to the use of ChatGPT. The insights gained have some pedagogical implications for academics, researchers and educators and may inform policy and practice in HE on the use of GenAI.

Challenging Discourses of Sexual Violence on X: The Linguistic Representation of Victims and Perpetrators in Kavanaugh’s Confirmation Process

In September 2018, American Justice Brett Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford during his nomination to the US Supreme Court. The sexual allegations provoked a crisis in American society concerning the rights of female American citizens and created a heated debate among X (formerly Twitter) users, who commented on the event and expressed their (dis)affiliation. Research has shown that X is one of the most sexist and abusive social media services due to the constant spread and negotiation of different discourses relating to rape culture on the platform (Mendes et al. 2018). Consequently, the objectives of this research are to examine the linguistic patterns and discourses employed by X users to denounce patriarchal oppression and negotiate the identities of the different social actors involved in Kavanaugh’s confirmation process. To do so, two datasets of posts (previously known as ‘tweets’) containing the opposing hashtags #KavanaughConfirmation and #NoKavanaughConfirmation were analyzed and contrasted drawing on Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis tools (i.e., keywords and concordances) (Partington et al. 2013) and Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (Lazar 2005). The results revealed a high presence of keywords concerning gender and violence to construct identities of victims and perpetrators. However, not only were such identities related to sexual violence but also political and institutional violence. In addition, the analysis revealed the creation of discursive protests on X to resist patriarchal discourses and practices in American society.

Gender Order, Microcelebrities, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of the Representation of Wanghong Women in China’s English-Language Newspapers

Gender Order, Microcelebrities, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of the Representation of Wanghong Women in China’s English-Language Newspapers

Extending the rape narrative: A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the construction of rape in selected Nigerian dailies

Extending the rape narrative: A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the construction of rape in selected Nigerian dailies

Accounting for teachers: changing representations of education in The Australian Financial Review 1993–2022

ABSTRACT The work of teachers, as representative of a significant area of social policy, occupies many column inches in newspapers internationally every year. This paper takes a close, systematic look at the education coverage of one national Australian newspaper, over a 30-year period from 1993 to 2022. Focusing on representations of school teachers in the Australian Financial Review (AFR), one of two Australian national daily newspapers, it presents a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of over 1,300 articles, using the conceptual lens of “news values” to take a close look at the ideas about teachers and their work in which the AFR has invested over the past 30 years. The analysis shows that while the focus was once on issues to do with remuneration, industrial action and school funding, that the educational purview of the AFR has broadened over the past 15 years to take in a more expansive view, both reflecting and reinforcing the expansion of the privatisation of education in Australia over this period.

Framing the Polish-Belarusian Border in 2021. The Case of Public Service Television (TVP)

ABSTRACT The 2021 events at the Belarus–European Union border have had considerable political, economic, and humanitarian consequences. Combining insights from the Discourse-Historical Approach and Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis with securitization theory, the paper investigates the dominant frames identified in the coverage of the border events by the largest Polish television network (TVP). The findings suggest that TVP portrayed immigrants and refugees mostly as dangerous, relying on the stereotypical image of the Muslim Other. Utilizing quantitative methods to analyze large data samples, the study illustrates how corpus linguistics tools provide valuable insights for social science research.

Triangulating visual and textual corpus-assisted discourse analysis to study social actor representations: the case of Saudi women in the British and Saudi news media

Investigations of social actor representations across media present a large and important body of research in corpus-assisted discourse studies (cads). However, most studies focus exclusively on one mode, the text, whilst other modes of communication (for example, visuals) are either considered partially or not at all. Whilst insights from textual analyses are invaluable in revealing salient and nuanced patterns of social actor representations in the media, visual accompaniments can reinforce particular ‘angles’ creating lasting perceptions for readers and viewers. Though some approaches exist to study considerable numbers of images, visual media data can be complex rendering them difficult to be studied alongside textual cads. This paper uses a triangulation of visual and textual cads analysis to explore social actor representations in media texts and images. It does so by focussing on the representations of Saudi women in the UK and Saudi news media within the context of evolving women’s rights in Saudi Arabia. The study shows how such triangulation can be conducted in a doable and systematic way and how it can enrich cads research on discursive representations of social actors across contexts.

Theorizing knowledgescape as a transnational mediating force: Artificial intelligence and global flows

As a global technoscientific form involving various forces and stakeholders, research and development (R&D) in artificial intelligence (AI) transcends corporate, national and institutional boundaries. Incorporating transnational rhetorical analysis and corpus-assisted discourse analysis, this article examines the global cultural flows surrounding AI constructed in official and media discourses in the US and China. We propose a new theoretical concept of knowledgescape that expands the toolkits of global flows and provides new explanatory power about global innovation and competition. This concept sheds light on the global processes, mechanisms and power dynamics of the production, dissemination, consumption and contestation of cutting-edge knowledge.

Empathetic Solidarity: How Chinese English-Language Media Portrays Urban Community Participation

ABSTRACT This article examines how Chinese state media tries to legitimize and promote civic solidarity in its portrayal of grassroots community participation to an international audience. It performed a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of 758 articles published in major Chinese English-language newspapers between 2001 and 2022. The results reveal a message of ‘empathetic solidarity’ in which Western ideas of liberty are blended, or hybridized, with the Chinese discourse of caring to ‘serve the people’, a fusion of Confucian culture and CCP’s socialist values. This study finds that code hybridization in Chinese media coverage serves a dual purpose: to highlight the agency of individual citizens in the context of caring for others and to legitimize state interference in community issues. By centering civic solidarity in caring and service for ordinary people, the media expands and transforms the code of liberty with a mutual collaboration between the government and individuals.

Developing digital health literacy amidst the Covid-19 infodemic

Abstract During the Covid-19 pandemic, the concurrent infodemic highlighted the urgent need to develop autonomous and advanced reading skills for an increasingly complex and ambiguous world. Particularly, in this context, there appears to be a tension between people seeking clear, authoritative information and advice on the internet, and health experts giving recommendations, actively defining the boundaries of their (in)expertise by formulating (un)certainty that is such a prevalent feature of this novel virus. Our claim is that possible evidence of a creditable source online emerges when the healthcare professional describes their (in)expertise through a systematic deployment of a wide range of warranting strategies, while claiming authority in a limited field of knowledge (Richardson 2003). Our analysis addresses the expert online formulation of (un)certainty focusing on a daily coronavirus podcast, i.e., Coronacast. Through a corpus-assisted discourse analysis, this study uncovers the major types of warranting strategies used by the health hosts in a corpus containing only episodes where there is an expert guest and/or a link to scientific sources. Deeper understanding of how healthcare providers/health podcasters use warranting strategies may make a meaningful contribution to the repertoire of tools useful for identifying un/reliable messages in an increasingly digitalized world.

Between loss and restoration: The role of liminality in advancing theories of grief and bereavement

A recent national survey of bereaved partners found high levels of complicated grief and psychological distress, with evidence that loneliness and isolation may contribute to these outcomes. However, the mechanisms of action for this have not been explored. To advance grief theory this paper reports analysis of the survey free-text data to examine the relationship between social support and emotional responses to bereavement. Individuals bereaved of a civil partner or spouse 6–10 months previously were identified through death registration data. 569/1945 (29 %) completed surveys were received. Of those, 311 participants (55 %) provided responses to two free-text questions which asked about their ‘feelings since the death of their partner or spouse’, and ‘about the support around’ them. Data were analysed using corpus-assisted discourse analysis and the discourse dynamics approach for figurative language. Participants described diverse emotional responses to the bereavement (e.g. sadness, anger, denial, acceptance), and the value of formal and informal bereavement support. Although many of the experiences described are accounted for in existing grief theory, some participants described a liminal experience not recognised within these theories. They felt trapped, unable to engage with loss or restoration, and unable to move forward as their planned future no longer existed. They sought out ‘communitas’ (solidarity in experiences), but often found support from their social networks had diminished. Metaphors were used to describe this liminality, with partner grief expressed as a dark agentic force, a monster, an abyss, and as water. The findings of this study offer original insights into experiences and trajectories of bereavement, and our understandings of prolonged or complicated grief. A novel model ‘Between Loss and Restoration’ is presented to include these experiences. Recognition of the place for liminality within the spectrum of grief experiences could enhance grief literacy and improve formal and informal bereavement support provision.

Advice seekers’ legitimation strategies in online health communities

Previous studies of different online health communities have shown the importance of examining advice seekers’ legitimation strategies. However, most research has been based on the qualitative analysis of small samples from discussion threads. Using a specialized corpus comprising 1836 advice seekers’ initiating messages (317,540 words) and a corpus-assisted discourse analysis approach, this paper first identifies the recurrent lexicogrammatical patterns that advice seekers use and then connects these patterns to particular legitimation strategies according to the specific pragmatic functions they serve across texts. In this way, three major legitimation strategies are structurally classified with the identification of their typical lexicogrammatical realizations: justification of presence, amplification of details and evocation of feelings and emotions. Empirically, this corpus-based investigation complements previous qualitative research, extending prior findings drawn from small samples. Methodologically, this study demonstrates the potential value of investigating lexicogrammatical realization patterns using a corpus approach for exploring (online) health discourse.

Corpus-assisted Discourse Analysis of Attitudes Towards Huawei in American and British 5G News Discourse

In recent years, the fifth-generation wireless technology (henceforth 5G) has emerged and gradually occupied an essential position in the development plans of some countries around the globe. The Chinese telecom company Huawei is a prominent participant in this sector and receives much media attention. However, how the company is represented and appraised in Western newspapers is not well investigated. This study probes into 709 American news articles collected from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and 697 British ones from The Times and The Guardian from January 2018 to June 2020. A corpus-assisted comparative analysis is conducted from the perspective of Appraisal Theory. The study aims to identify specific attitudinal resources used in two countries’ news discourses, investigate possible similarities and differences between their attitudes towards Huawei, and finally provide some interpretations and explanations regarding relevant socio-political contexts.

Displays of anger in Turkish political discourse: a hard choice between cultural norms and political performance of anger

Abstract This paper examines the influence of cultural display rules on how high-status individuals, such as political leaders, publicly express anger. Specifically, it focuses on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been the Turkish leader since 2003. The study aims to understand the extent to which Erdoğan’s expression of anger is influenced by cultural display rules, the religious context stemming from his conservative electoral support, and his position as a long-term populist political leader. Using extended conceptual metaphor theory (ECMT) supported by corpus-assisted discourse analysis, the paper seeks to identify the contextual factors that shape anger expressions (both direct and metaphorical) in the political discourse of a populist leader in a collectivist culture. By comparing the conceptualization of ascribed anger and inscribed anger expressions, the analysis reveals that Erdoğan’s discourse presents two distinct scenarios for expressing anger toward ‘us’ and ‘others’. Additionally, it demonstrates how anger is strategically employed in culture-specific ways to navigate the challenges posed by conflicting contextual factors.

Constructions and representations of Chinese identity through England’s curatorial imagination: A corpus-assisted analysis

This article explores the linguistic representation of Chinese identity in art exhibitions across England in the period immediately following the Umbrella Revolution. It focuses on publicly funded institutions through an analysis of press releases from Art Council England’s National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) between 2014 and 2020. By employing corpus-assisted methods of analysis (Baker et al. 2008; Partington et al. 2013; Gillings et al. 2023) and drawing on Karen Barad’s (2007) notion of ‘diffraction’ to read through linguistic and artistic practices, we identify five key areas of interest that run throughout the press releases: namely, colonial history, the foregrounding of ethnicity, the media, fantasy, and green issues. This analysis allows us to speculate on how the creative actions of these publicly funded institutions might have contributed to the socio-political Zeitgeist surrounding a racialised population in England, raising important questions for NPOs and other institutions on the role of the curatorial in the forming of social realities, and the extent of their practice in discourse on decolonisation, language, race, and politics. On a theoretical and methodological level, it also allows us to explore potential synergies between corpus-assisted discourse analysis and the arts.