Corpus-assisted Discourse Analysis Research Articles

The discursive representation of male sex workers in Thai newspapers

The objective of this study is to examine how male sex workers are represented in Thai newspapers. The analysis is contingent upon Reisigl and Wodak’s concept of discursive strategy in conjunction with Machin and Mayr’s compilation of transitivity analysis. Methodologically, this study employs corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The 45,769-word corpus consists of news articles retrieved from the websites of 11 Thai newspapers. They were published in English between the period of 2000 and 2019. Findings reveal that the media pursue the nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivization together with intensification and mitigation strategies to portray male sex workers in a non-threatening fashion. Possible contributing factors behind such portrayal are discussed.

Libya, the media and the language of violence: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis

The Arab revolution euphoria of 2011 was covered around the clock by different media sites, engaging millions of followers around the world, and eventually turning into discontent in some affected countries. This study examines the outcomes of the Libyan uprising (2011–2015), specifically the topics of civil-war and terrorism, through the lenses of the Arab written media in Arabic (Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya), the Arab written media in English (Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya), and the Western written media in English (BBC and CNN). Through Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis (CADS), integrating discursive news values analysis (DNVA), this study highlights the ideological representations of these media, and examines their similarities and differences in terms of frequency distribution and story content. The findings indicate that the media coverage of the outcomes of the Libyan Revolution, when reporting on the topics of war and terrorism, follow similar directions in the story content and the frequency distribution, with some differences in the latter between the analysed media sites. Also, the collocations, concordances, and DNVA results, especially NEGATIVITY, IMPACT and ELITENESS, prove the emphasis of the media on violent language, making terrorism appear the norm, and thus manipulating the audience and affecting their understanding of the news.

ICERD in Malaysian online news reports: Analysis of rhetoric and public opinion

In late 2018, the International Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) became one of the most discussed issues in Malaysian cyberspace. To date, 179 countries in the world have ratified ICERD excluding Malaysia. This research examined the representation of ICERD in news reports of four English online newspapers in Malaysia - The Star Online, Malay Mail, Malaysiakini , and Free Malaysia Today . A corpus-assisted discourse analysis was firstly conducted to investigate how ICERD was depicted in these selected news portals from 15 November until December 15, 2018. Corpus analysis found that all English online news portals were inclined to represent ICERD in a negative light. Methodologically, this study has demonstrated the synergy of corpus techniques (CADS), illustrate the complexity of racial issues, especially ones related to the Malay group and how their opinions are closely associated with Islam.

Gender-based Violence in Ghanaian Parliamentary Discourse: A Corpus-assisted Discourse Analysis

Studying gender-based violence (GBV) in country-specific parliamentary discourses can provide legislative perspectives and global understanding of the experience of GBV and the fight against it. In Ghana, for instance, men are mostly seen as the default perpetrators of GBV, even though research shows that men also suffer from GBV. Thus, using a corpusassisted discourse studies (CADS) approach, this study investigates the discursive construction of GBV in parliamentary debates in Ghana, a leading democracy in West Africa. The study uses parliamentary debates as primary data and legislation on domestic violence and other related instruments as secondary data. Through concordances and collocation, we identify and examine how GBV is constructed in the parliamentary debates and how such GBV constructions relate to the expression of domestic violence in legislation. The study shows that the discourse around GBV centres on three main issues, namely: the forms of GBV, victims and perpetrators of GBV, and the fight against it. The analysis indicates that when MPs talk about GBV, they refer predominantly to violence against women and children, including domestic violence, wife beating, sexual violence, defilement, rape, physical assault, teenage pregnancy, child prostitution, child marriage and violence against women in politics; they are silent on violence against men. The MPs think that collective activism, education, achieving gender parity and a strong legal regime that severely punishes offenders are critical antidotes to GBV.

Changes in Metaphor Use in Media Discourse: A Corpus-Assisted Diachronic Study (2007-2018)

Media reports are often analyzed as a specialized variety of discourse that may reflect the social and cultural values of a nation, and metaphors always function to enhance the effectiveness of media discourse. Metaphors in news have long been explored by sociolinguistic researchers, but diachronic studies that examine how metaphor use changes over time are still limited. Following a corpus-assisted discourse analysis, this study examined the metaphorical characterizations of corruption-related concepts in three English-language news media of China (Global Times, China Daily, and People’s Daily) over 12 years from 2007 to 2018. The findings can be summarized into the following four aspects: (1) The types of source domains were largely stable over time, i.e., WAR, POISON and DISEASE, DIRT, PLANT, and ANIMAL; (2) The mapping within a source domain changed diachronically; (3) Increased use of creative metaphors and enriched metaphorical depictions were found in the more recent years; and (4) The metaphors appeared to evoke more Chinese cultural schemas across time, which in turn provided contexts for further understandings of these metaphors. It is thus argued that the news discourse in China has been experiencing an ongoing process to employ more creative metaphors to express Chinese worldviews and cultural beliefs. It has also shown that a qualitative discourse analysis combined with quantitative corpus-assisted methods can provide effective research framework for an in-depth diachronic understanding of the changes in metaphor use. This study may be of assistance to researchers who are interested in media studies, sociolinguistics, and news writing.

Turkish President’s Address to The Joint Session of Pakistan’s Parliament: A Corpus Assisted Positive Discourse Analysis

Formal visits to friendly regions have grown in popularity worldwide in recent years. Heads of state addresses are analysed from a unique perspective. Positive discourse analysis of speeches by international leaders has garnered attention, particularly in Pakistan, following Turkey's president's four visits to the country over the last decade. For the fourth time, he was given the opportunity to address the joint session of parliament. Since their independence, Turkey and Pakistan have had a friendly relationship, and even before that, the people of the region fought to defend the Ottoman Empire during World War II. The people of the subcontinent were active participants in the process, pleading with the British government to maintain the Khilafat system. Very little research has been conducted on presidential speeches, particularly those delivered by Turkish leaders. As a result, the focus of this research paper is on President Erdogan's speeches to the Pakistani Parliament, delivered on November 17, 2016, and February 14, 2020. This study employs a corpus-assisted positive discourse analysis approach in which the concordance patterns obtained from the corpora have been explained in the light of positive discourse analysis. The findings of the study indicate that President Erdogan's speeches are brimming with optimistic language. He tries to establish a brotherly bond with his listeners through mutual equality, respect, love, and strategic collaboration. He seems to be convinced that it is necessary to emphasize the Islamic bond that exists between the two brotherly states. The current paper is noteworthy because it applies positive discourse analysis to Turkish leaders' speeches, broadening its application scope and enriching the research content of positive discourse analysis through a corpus-informed approach.

Náisiúin Gaelach: Questions of Identity and Nationalism in the Irish Language

The current paper investigates the construction of nationhood in the Irish language through the use of a Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis (CADA) looking at terms coding identity in the Irish language. Using the New Corpus for Ireland the terms Gael, Gaelach and Éireannach were analysed for frequency of occurrence, semantic prosody and semantic preference in the corpus. Furthermore a collocation analysis of each of the terms was carried out. Through the use of these analytical techniques insight was gathered into the contextual usage of these terms. These insights were analysed through the prism of Kolakowski’s (1995) criteria for the establishment of a nation in order to ascertain whether the usage of these terms reflected the conceptualisation of speakers’ nationhood in terms of a separate and unique national identity. Findings showed evidence of a distinct national spirit, historical memory and a national body among Irish-language speakers, three of Kolakowski’s criteria. While evidence surrounding Kolakowski’s other criteria of a nameable beginning and an orientation to, and consciousness of, the future may be drawn from the findings, ultimately more work is needed to more rigorously establish that these criteria have been met.

The role of modals in policies: The US opioid crisis as a case study

The present study uses corpus-assisted discourse analysis to examine the role of modality in policy verb phrases, using California opioid policies as a case study. By tracking the behavior of permissive and restrictive modals across time, this study highlights two potential discourse functions of modals in policy drafting: (i) to reflect the gravity of the issues on the ground, and (ii) to express permission and restriction by highlighting and deemphasizing a policy's suggestive intent, respectively. This study shows that the increased use of restrictive modality has significant positive correlations with California's worsening opioid crisis and its rising fatalities. A closer examination of state policy amendments reveals that altering policy modals has the potential to either broaden or limit the terms of existing policies. Informed by Van Dijk's “context models,” this study provides a cogent applied corpus linguistics framework for analyzing policy text and offers both political and linguistic perspectives into our understanding of modals and how communities address epidemics, respectively.

The pragmatic functions of ‘respect’ in lawyers' courtroom discourse: A case study of Brexit hearings

This paper is a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the use of the word respect by the main advocates in the High Court and Supreme Court hearings of R v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (the ‘Brexit case’). Courtroom discourse has received substantial research attention in pragmatics, and previous work has largely focused on notions of face and im/politeness exhibited in power-asymmetric encounters between lawyers and witnesses in hostile cross-examination. In contrast, this paper focuses on lawyer–judge interaction in appellate hearings and explores the ways in which advocates negotiate the task of making face-threats that are inherent to the discourse situation, while maintaining the levels of professional courtesy demanded by the institution. The word respect has a particular role in managing this balance, and has attached to it well-established implicit, indexical and professional meanings within the legal profession. The corpus analysis here shows that, although the advocates in question use respect in seemingly formulaic and ritualised ways, it is used to achieve multiple facework and interactional goals. Throughout the analysis we see advocates use respect when (dis)agreeing with judges, challenging opposing counsel and making recommendations to the court.

Serving the Public Good?—A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of Private Prisons and For-Profit Incarceration in the United States

It is a well-known fact that the United States has a very high prison population compared to other countries, and that it is particularly the private prison industry that has been thriving. This industry is based on a for-profit ideology that aims to save money by cutting costs wherever possible, and that, based on their profit-orientation, has no interest in rehabilitating offenders, since they make money with every incarcerated person. This paper investigates these issues from a linguistic perspective and takes a corpus of texts collected from the websites of the two largest private prison corporations in the United States (CoreCivic and The GEO Group) as a starting point for a corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The corpus comprises a total of 25,386 words and the analyses reveal that while both companies discursively background issues of violence, recidivism, and costs, they place a focus on the safety and security of their facilities and on their reentry programs for inmates. Thus, it is argued that the investigated corporations shift the discursive focus away from a negative discourse centering on violence and recidivism to a positive discourse centering on reentry and safety, which actively counters the findings that several researchers and journalists alike have revealed.

Separatism: a cross-linguistic corpus-assisted study of word-meaning development in a time of conflict

This paper considers the role of historical context in initiating shifts in word meaning. The study focusses on two words – the translation equivalents separatist and separatism – in the discourses of Russian and Ukrainian parliamentary debates before and during the Russian–Ukrainian conflict which emerged at the beginning of 2014. The paper employs a cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse analysis to investigate the way wider socio-political context affects word usage and meaning. To allow a comparison of discourses around separatism between two parliaments, four corpora were compiled covering the debates in both parliaments before and during the conflict. Keywords, collocations and n-grams were studied and compared, and this was followed by qualitative analysis of concordance lines, co-text and the larger context in which these words occurred. The results show how originally close meanings of translation equivalents began to diverge and manifest noticeable changes in their connotative, affective and, to an extent, denotative meanings at a time of conflict in line with the dominant ideologies of the parliaments as well as the political affiliations of individuals.

Sex Work and Professional Risk Communication: Keeping Safe on the Streets

Risk communication is traditionally authored by institutions and addressed to the potentially affected publics for whom they are responsible. This study expands the scope of risk communication by analyzing safety guides produced by a hypermarginalized group for whom institutions show no responsibility: full-contact, street-level sex workers. Using corpus-assisted discourse analysis and keyword analysis to reveal patterns of word choices, the authors argue that the safety guides exhibit characteristics and qualities of professional communication: audience adaptation, social responsibility, and ethical awareness. This area of inquiry—the DIY, peer-to-peer, extrainstitutional risk communication produced by marginalized people—widens technical and professional communication's approach to risk communication.

Analyzing Social Meaning: How Words Matter in Social Contexts (Based on German Communicative Practice)

The paper discusses the notion of social meaning that has become a central one in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, metapragmatics. The study was informed by these research directions and the main outcomes. The term social meaning pinpoints what linguistic forms convey about the social identity of the users, about their personality, social features and ideologically, value-based orientations. We presume that this is a category of meaning that a linguistic unit (an utterance) obtains as a result of its usage in a certain context. Social meanings are fixed by social practice. It acts as an index to the context in which the linguistic unit is expected to be used and relevant. Indexical relations are open for re-evaluations that are mediated by speakers ideological views. The study is based on German socio-cultural practice and reveals how indexical relations arise between a linguistic unit and the socio-cultural environment, the social occasion of its usage. The analysis is conducted as corpus-assisted discourse analysis, based on the «Digital dictionary of the German language» / «Das Digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache»

Responsibility attribution in gender-based domestic violence: A study bridging corpus-assisted discourse analysis and readers' perception

This paper investigates how argument structure constructions (see e.g. Goldberg 1995) are used by Italian newspapers to portray gender-based violence (GBV), how their usage affects responsibility attribution to perpetrators, and how such usage is perceived by Italian readers. The assumption is that constructions critically affect meaning: constructional choices prompt different viewpoints of the same event. For the corpus study, we collected 40 articles from local newspapers and annotated 720 constructions denoting GBV events. Constructions suppressing/backgrounding the perpetrator or depicting the event as a bare happening were the most frequent. Building upon these results, for the perception study, 274 participants read an author-constructed news report portraying GBV and answered four speculative questions about the identity of the perpetrator and the victim. Respondents were divided into groups and each group was presented with a stimulus article containing different constructions of the GBV event surrounded by the same information frame. In line with previous studies, it was found that the perpetrator could be assigned less responsibility when the passive and nominal constructions were employed.

Reframing language, disrupting aging: a corpus-assisted multimodal critical discourse study

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore two channels of communication (i.e. texts and images) from a non-governmental organization website called #DisruptAging with the aim of finding how multimodal knowledge dissemination contributes to dismantling misconceptions about the aging process.Design/methodology/approachThis analysis is based on an integrated approach that combines corpus-assisted discourse analysis (cf. Semino and Short, 2004; Baker et al., 2008, Baker, 2010) and multimodal critical discourse analysis (Machin and Mayr, 2012) via the American Medical Association format (2007) and the suite of FrameWorks tools (2015, 2017), which are applied to the collection of texts and images taken from #DisruptAging.FindingsA total of 69 stories corresponding with 218 images of older adults have shown to be powerful textual and semiotic resources, designed both for educational and awareness-raising purposes, to promote the so-called “aging well discourse” (cf. Loos et al., 2017).Social implicationsThis discursive approach to the textual and visual material found in #DisruptAging hopes to influence the governing institutions that we construct, and the people who are given power to run them, with the goal of fostering fair treatment of older people within society.Originality/valueThere is a lack of studies investigating counter-discourse forms available online, which use textual and visual language to change the way society conceives the idea of aging.

A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of Taiwanese students’ sentiments toward Asianphobia on the news amid Covid-19

The anti-Chinese racist slurs and violence toward anyone who bears physical resemblance to a Chinese have escalated at the time the Coronavirus aka Covid-19 has globally spread its wrath. For Taiwanese university students who were also impacted by Covid-19 as their opportunity to travel and study abroad has been put to a halt, raising their awareness of the dangers of racism amid the pandemic has never been more important. This study draws on the students’ feedback on class activity that revolves around language and culture, conflict and resolution. The self-drawn corpus was therefore based on the collected students’ written responses. Critical discourse analysis based on corpus linguistics (Baker et al., 2008) using Voyant Tools (Sinclair & Rockwell, 2016), a web-based text analysis tool, was conducted to investigate word patterns that rose from collocations and concordance data, and the correlational impact of these linguistic devices. These results were then interpreted using critical discourse analysis (CDA) theoretical framework of van Dijk (1984, 2015), Fairclough (1995, 2001) and Wodak (2001) to evaluate the students’ attitudes and social representations that they share. The findings suggest a high frequency of the lemma “Taiwanese” and the collocation “Taiwan can help” signifying a strong sense of pride as an overwhelming majority felt that Taiwan is successfully leading the fight against Covid-19, thus disassociating themselves from the “Chinese mainlanders.” Yet underneath this bold statement lies their deepest concern–a sense of fear for their own safety.

Corpus-assisted analysis of the collocational profiles of the terms denoting elderly care workers

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the terms used in the Macmillan Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary to identify the people who are paid to provide care to the elderly and check their presence in a corpus – professional home care (PHC) – of three UK-based specialised websites.Design/methodology/approachThis study is based on the frameworks and methods of corpus-assisted Discourse Analysis (Baker, 2006). The terms were extracted from a corpus of British websites of companies providing PHC services.FindingsThis study highlights that in the PHC corpus, the words “caregiver” and “carer” are used as synonyms at the level of popular communication, whereas “care assistant” and “care worker” are used for intra-specialistic communication. The analysis also points out the variations in terminology observed in the corpora that are intended for different communication contexts, e.g. how professionals define themselves compared to how external actors identify them.Originality/valueThis paper provides insight into the terminological aspects of caregiving in the professional field through a corpus-based study on specialised terminology integrating lexicographic considerations. This methodological framework can capture the sociolinguistic attitudes of speakers.

Global responsibility: An exploratory corpus assisted discourse analysis of the Rohingya crisis in online media

This study conducts an exploratory corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the representation of the Rohingya minority group across online news media in the United Kingdom. The purpose of the study is to identify and interpret the discursive patterns employed in popular online news media when depicting the Rohingya minority and associated crises affecting the group in Myanmar and worldwide. Through the use of a combination of frequency, collocation, and concordance analysis, a synchronic study was undertaken using data collected from fifteen major online news media producers in the United Kingdom. The data was collected over a period from January 2017 – August 2020 through freely accessible digital archives. The research study found that particular discourses of security, internationalization, and power are commonly employed when reporting on the Rohingya, while equally a sympathetic viewpoint is often adopted which focuses specifically on global responsibility and failures of international society. The findings offer insight into socio-political processes of representation and discourse in the ‘new social location’ (Scholz, 2019) of online news media, while offering relevant insight into the discourses of urgent and pressing humanitarian issues.

Public responses to COVID-19 information from the public health office on Twitter and YouTube: implications for research practice

ABSTRACT We collected tweets directed at the official Twitter account of the Canadian Public Health Office as well as comments on a Canadian Public Health Office press conference posted to YouTube. We used a mixed method corpus-assisted discourse analysis approach to categorize and analyze these data. We found key differences between comments on each platform, namely differences in tone and sarcasm in YouTube comments, and more balance in Twitter mentions. Findings suggest that studying public responses to health information on one platform in isolation does not provide an accurate picture. To generate a fuller picture of misinformation, researchers should conduct studies across digital platforms using diverse methods. This research could influence how studies of health communication and public opinion are approached in the future.

Analysing the functions of online destination forums through a corpus-assisted discourse-analytic approach

AbstractPrevious research on online travel communication has paid little attention to destination forums, where thousands of travellers worldwide post and view topics related to a place. The present study examines the functions of a destination forum on TripAdvisor. Through the first large-scale corpus-assisted discourse analysis of thousands of topic-initiating posts, this study identifies the functions of the forum, analyses how these functions are realised through prominent linguistic and discursive features, and investigates how these functions are performed by members at different levels of contribution and knowledge. The findings show that destination forums are functionally distinct from closely-related online travel texts and from forums in other professional contexts. This demonstrates the need to carry out detailed analyses of actual online travel communication across the spectrum to fully grasp the richness and subtlety of a set of interrelated forms of tourism discourse both as a whole, and as part of the whole.