Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies Research Articles

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.

Is this War?

Abstract Media discourse around particular subjects comes to shape people’s understanding of that topic. In particular, the words used to describe situations of violence and conflict may colour public perceptions. This paper identifies the main words used to describe the Russia-Ukraine conflict by three international media outlets, Al Jazeera, Euronews and CGTN, from February to May 2022. Following the methodology of corpus-assisted discourse studies, it analyses the nouns used and their most frequent collocates, showing how these reveal the different ways the war was represented in these three media. The results are discussed in the light of differing theories concerning Chinese and Western stances to the conflict, illustrating media roles in the shaping and reproduction of dominant discourses.

Taking the Road Less Travelled: How Corpus‐Assisted Discourse Studies Can Enrich Qualitative Explorations of Large Textual Datasets

AbstractHow might interpretivist qualitative researchers tackle large data sets consisting of millions or even billions of words? Corpus‐assisted discourse studies (CADS) is the approach we explore here. Specifically designed for the analysis of voluminous textual data, it offers a recognized empirical approach for making sense of such data. But it does so within an epistemology that understands language to be central in shaping our understanding of the world around us, so that CADS can assist researchers in revealing the social dynamics of the text – including the ideology and power that is latent in many such corpora. Bringing together the training of applied linguists and a management scholar, we discuss the background to CADS and its differences from text‐mining approaches such as topic modelling, which have been more widely used in management studies to date. Focusing on the needs of people who are new to the approach, we then offer a worked example to show CADS’ potential in exploring a management‐related corpus. Our paper concludes with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the approach and its potential for future discursively orientated management research – especially in the context of the rise of ‘big data’.

U.S. administration’s press communications on Tunisia after the July 25, 2021 ‘state of exception’: The shaping of urgency discourse

July 25, 2021 was an exceptional day in Tunisia, ushering in a new chapter in its contemporary political history and triggering a wave of global responses to the declared ‘state of exception’. This research examines the U.S. administration’s press communications on Tunisia following this event. Specifically, it explores (i) the dominant crisis frames permeating these communications and their underlying political agenda and (ii) the extent to which the discourse they imparted signals a change in U.S. foreign policy towards Tunisia in crisis situations. To meet these research objectives, a corpus-based investigation was undertaken using an integrative framework combining qualitative (frames) and quantitative (keyness and collocations) approaches. Results revealed changing discourses around the theme of crisis, moving from a sense of togetherness to urgency. This may echo the cautious attitude of the American government and its heightened concern about Kais Saied’s transitional measures. In broad terms, the exploration offered a glimpse of how the dynamics of global politics unfold discursively. Importantly, the Biden administration’s construction of Tunisia’s political-democratic crisis in terms of urgency can have real-life consequences for international perceptions of the country’s future. Theoretically, the study’s implications touch primarily upon Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS, henceforth), particularly the evolving corpus linguistics concepts of keyness and collocation networks.

Sense-Making/Giving during the COVID-19 Crisis: A Multi-Method Study of Health Podcasting in Australia and the U.S.

Abstract Sense-making and sense-giving represent an issue of communication (Weick et al. 2005). The former is associated with emotional processes of crisisassessment and cognitive processes of justifying and seeking social acceptance for decisions (Søderberg and Vaara 2003), while the latter is the framework communicated to the public to facilitate their understanding and subsequently motivate certain actions (Maitlis and Christianson 2014). The medium used to communicate this framework varies depending on the relationship an authority figure has with their audience. Analysis of this communication and its medium has focused primarily on political leaders through the lens of the Charismatic, Ideological and Pragmatic (CIP) model (Crayne and Medeiros 2020), and of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) (Wodak 2021). This study uses both the CIP model and the DHA via Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) to examine influential physicians communicating the COVID-19 crisis in health podcasts in the U.S. and Australia. It therefore interprets the healthrelated information they disseminate, and how this information is framed and given meaning, to develop a perspective on how and why these podcasters differ in how they make sense of the crisis and, consequently, appeal to a broader audience.

Strategies of Justification in Resolving Conflicts of Values and Interests. A Comparative Analysis of Constitutional Argumentation in Cases of Animal Sacrifice

Understood as reasons and rationale given by courts in rendering their decisions (DiMatteo 2015; Gudowski 2015), justification is of great importance when resolving morally sensitive issues. In such cases, judges are tasked with finding solutions to fundamental conflicts of incommensurable constitutional principles, which are inherently open-ended, general and in need of interpretation. Constitutional courts rely on different models of constitutional review depending on a given legal system and culture. However, their overarching goal is to consider ways of resolving conflicts and their justifications arising from a clash between constitutionally protected rights and interests and other values deemed worthy of protection by legislatures. The question addressed in this paper is how a constitutional court can resolve conflicts and communicate motives behind its decision in morally sensitive issues and how evaluative language is instrumental in achieving this strategic goal. Two cases are compared in which judges resolve a conflict between freedom to exercise religion and the animal welfare. In Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, the US Supreme Court addressed the constitutionality of animal sacrifice for religious purposes. In Poland, the Constitutional Tribunal in its decision (K52/13) ruled for the admissibility of ritual slaughter. Adopting the methodology of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS), this paper demonstrates that while the argumentation in the Polish decision is heavily axiological, with Polish judges using value-based language to engage in fundamental values and principles, the US Supreme Court judges avoid broad, abstract reasoning by resting the argumentation on low-level and medium-level principles (Sunstein 2018) translated into concrete rules and standards.

Locating the ‘Age of Prescriptivism’ in Late Modern periodical reviews: a corpus-assisted discourse analytic approach

Abstract This paper reports the findings of a corpus-based study of prescriptive and normative discourses in Late Modern English review periodicals, using a purpose-built diachronic corpus of review articles published during the period 1750–1899. Drawing on established protocols from Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies and systematic comparison of 15 sub-corpora, it identifies decades during which prescriptive discourses were most frequent. This distributional pattern provides empirical evidence of an ‘Age of Prescriptivism’ in periodical reviewing, during which prescriptive discourses reached their zenith. Whilst the label ‘Age of Prescriptivism’ has been applied to a number of periods of English in recent decades, the findings reported here show clearly that the eighteenth century was the locus of prescriptive activity in the review periodical genre. The innovative application of corpus-based discourse-analytic methodologies for the identification of normative trends reported in this paper also has potential implications for studying prescriptivism as a sociohistorical linguistic phenomenon in other diachronic contexts.

Engaging the public: English local government organisations’ social media communications during the COVID‐19 pandemic

Communication has played a critical role during the initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and communicators have had a particularly difficult task in persuading different types of audience to comply with ever-changing regulations. Local government organisations play a crucial role in recontextualising the national messaging for a local audience and encouraging the public to comply with regulations.This paper investigates local government organisations’ (henceforth LGOs) engagement strategies in COVID-related posts on social media. In collaboration with LGOs in England, we examined their communication strategies on Twitter and Facebook during the second UK national lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic in November-December 2020. Using methods from corpus-assisted discourse studies, the paper analyses the occurrence and functions of selected interactive engagement markers, in this case personal pronouns, questions and hashtags. We find that such linguistic features function to encourage engagement by (a) helping to foster relatedness through ambiguity; (b) creating autonomy-supporting communication; and (c) making messages ‘stand out’.Based on our corpus analysis, we discuss the initial response of the participating councils to our findings and outline future directions including the integration of multimodal approaches to studying the role of localised social media in national crisis management. We argue for more attention to be paid to the many local communicators who play an invaluable role in encouraging the public to comply with national measures in times of crisis.

Using a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies Approach to Analyse Gender: A Case Study of German Radiology Reports

This paper explores how a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) approach can be utilised to investigate representations of gender as well as potential gender bias in radiology reporting, which constitutes a form of professional, medical discourse. The database collected for this purpose consists of three specialised German sub-corpora (332,901 cranial, thoracic, and whole-body computed tomographies, with more than 61 million tokens), which were extracted from a larger medical corpus called MedCorpInn that was built as part of an interdisciplinary project conducted jointly by the University of Innsbruck and Innsbruck Medical University. As a basic premise, CTs are assumed discursive, linguistic events, which are influenced by social and institutional factors. They represent an essential everyday communicative practice among radiologists and referring doctors and they function both as documentation and as a legal record of imaging procedures. To investigate whether there are differences and/or subtle similarities (Taylor 2018; Brezina 2018) in the largely standardised reports on female vs on male patients, a CADS-approach focusing on gender is applied. Keywords, collocation, and concordance techniques will be introduced and used to explore how male and female patients are discussed in the medical discourse studied here. Research into internal clinical communicative practices could also be of interest from the perspective of gender medicine.

ОБРАЗ РОССИЙСКОЙ ЭКОНОМИКИ В БРИТАНСКИХ СМИ: КОРПУСНО-ОРИЕНТИРОВАННЫЙ ДИСКУРСИВНЫЙ ПОДХОД К РЕКОНСТРУКЦИИ НОВОСТНЫХ ФРЕЙМОВ

The major objective of this case study is to discursively assess the UK press coverage of the economic climate in Russia in the early stages of the geopolitical crisis of 2014-15. The empirical material constituting a 730-thousand-word corpus derives from UK national newspapers and the Financial Times online archive. Applying techniques of corpus-assisted discourse studies, an inductive framing analysis seeks to detect the underlying cultural frames employed by British journalists to construct news content about Russian economy and invite readers to interpret the news in a particular way. The methodological approach consists of successive analytical stages that involve moving back and forth between quantitative and qualitative techniques of analysis that lead to the emergence of conceptual categories, or frames. The analysis produced four dominant frames and two alternative counter-frames, all of which are logically formed in clusters of framing and reasoning devices and integrated in a frame matrix. Each cluster in the matrix conveys a coherent overarching idea that represents the frame. The inventory is represented through a broader cultural scenario of a classic fairy tale in which a villain, victim, hero, friends and foes interact in the context of crime and punishment. The dominant scenario reinforces the negative image of Russian economy by portraying Russia as a villain bearing moral and financial responsibility for its aggressive behavior. The alternative scenario invalidates the dominant frames by crediting Russia with political and economic virtues. It is then suggested that a more resolute use of counter-frames in communication about the Russian case might mitigate the negative image of Russia in the British news media. The findings also demonstrate that corpus linguistic techniques integrated in a qualitative framing analysis can lead to a more reliable identification of loci for both privileged and unprivileged discourses, thereby providing evidence for both popular and unpopular forms of understanding the issue or topic covered in the media.

"Snake flu," "killer bug," and "Chinese virus": A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of lexical choices in early UK press coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now mostly known as "COVID-19" (or simply "Covid"), early discourse around the pandemic was characterized by a particularly large variation in naming choices (ranging from "new coronavirus" and "new respiratory disease" to "killer bug" and the racist term "Chinese virus"). The current study is situated within corpus-assisted discourse studies and analyses these naming choices in UK newspaper coverage (January-March 2020), focusing on terminology deemed "inappropriate" as per WHO guidelines on naming infectious diseases. The results show that 9% of all terms referring to COVID-19 or the virus causing it are "inappropriate" overall, with "inappropriate" naming being more prevalent (1) in tabloids than broadsheets and (2) in the period before compared to the period after the virus was officially named on 11th February, 2020. Selected examples within each of the categories of "inappropriate" names are explored in more detail [terms (1) inciting undue fear, (2) containing geographic locations, and (3) containing species of animals], and the findings are discussed with regard to the contribution of lexical choices to the reproduction of (racist and otherwise problematic) ideologies in mainstream media.

Are ‘we’ European? We and us in British EU-related newspaper articles in 1975–2015

This study contributes to current research on the representation of the European Union in British public discourses. Employing the methods of corpus-assisted discourse studies, the paper examines the use of the pronouns we and us in British EU-related newspaper articles and aims at finding out in which contexts the EU has been included in or excluded from ‘us’. The data consist of 940 EU-related newspaper articles published in the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mirror and Daily Mail in the years 1975, 1985, 1995, 2005 and 2015. The findings suggest that, in the left-wing papers, EU-related issues were more often reported from the European perspective than in the right-wing papers, especially in 2005 and 2015. In addition, when EU-related issues were reported from the national perspective, the tone was usually more evaluative and critical of the EU, whereas with the European perspective more focus was given to the EU’s future and processes.

Old patients in mental health research

The present study takes a diachronic corpus-assisted discourse studies approach (Partington et al. 2013) to examine the representation of mentally-ill elderly patients in medical research articles, in the fields of psychology and psychiatry, published between 1950 and 2019. Despite evidence of the expanding scope of mental health research in more recent years, nihilistic views about mental health assessment and intervention underpin the discourse around mentally-ill older adults across the time span under consideration. In the literature, ageing is variously constructed as a process leading to deprivation, resignation and physical decay, increasing the chances of the onset of mental illnesses. The perpetuation of these discourses, which confirm and propagate discriminatory age-bias positioning on the part of medical researchers, specialists and the health community at large, may constitute a significant obstacle to an improvement in the quality of mental and physical health care provided for the older population, both currently, and without substantial intervention, for the foreseeable future. Overall, it is hoped that this article has not only made a valuable contribution to the understanding of ageing from a historical discourse analysis perspective, but may be of interest to mental health scholars and professionals alike inspiring them to question their knowledge and practices about and for older patients.

Media reverberations on the ‘red line’: Syria, metaphor and narrative in news media

This study uses a CADS (Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies) approach to identify a series of axes around which degrees of persuasion can be mapped in debates about international affairs. The author investigates how US and UK news media reported Obama’s use of the term ‘red line’ to describe the potential transgression if Syrian leader Assad used chemical weapons on civilians, which Assad then did. The article examines the connotational, argumentational and rhetorical behaviour of ‘red line’ across news media in the period 4–28 September 2013. In a corpus-assisted analysis of ‘red line’, six discoursal factors emerged as persuasive axes at work: (1) leader’s image; (2) ideological positioning, even in mutual intervention; (3) persuasion consistency; (4) factual investigation; (5) factual interpretation reporting; and (6) evaluated metaphor development. These axes proactively work at the crossroads of metaphor and narrative as transformative and mutually interactive agents in discoursal change. The analysis also identified other subcategories of research potential, plus correlated lexis and concepts such as ‘weakness’ vs ‘strength’. The study’s significance is to ground reflection on the function of metaphor and narrative in steering sense-making in diplomatic practice and to highlight their pragmatic force and dynamics – here in the news genre.

Community College Leadership Discourses in Dissertation Abstracts, 1980 to 2020

ABSTRACT Researchers have criticized the professional and academic literature on community colleges for its gendered construals of leaders and leadership. Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods associated with corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), I identified discourses of leaders and leadership in abstracts of 9,863 dissertations about community colleges. All abstracts were published between 1980 and 2020. Findings suggest that discourses of community college leadership have evolved across five dimensions: (a) leadership models, (b) socially constructed categories, (c) roles and hierarchies, (d) leadership development, and (e) leadership crisis. Discourses related to the first three dimensions appear consistently throughout the 40-year period. Discourses related to the latter two dimensions emerge in the mid-2000s. I hypothesize a leadership imaginary in which the survival of the community college depends on a mythical, hero-president whose outstanding competencies and undivided commitment uniquely qualify him to defy organizational norms and lead transformation. The article concludes with a critique of this gendered imaginary and a call to reimagine the structure of leadership work.

Language and gender in Canadian Chief Medical Officers’ tweets during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT Since January 2020, Canadian Chief Medical Officers (CMOs) have rapidly evolved into public figures. However, the gendered makeup of this role seems to map onto CMO communication: 10 CMOs are women and 7 use Twitter to communicate, as opposed to 7 men, of whom only 3 have Twitter accounts. Adopting the theoretical lens of language ideology, this paper explores language and gender dimensions of Canadian Chief Medical Officer (CMO) health discourse by analyzing pandemic tweets from CMOs (January 2020-June 2021, 21,389 tweets, 930,0883 words) using corpus-assisted discourse studies. Results suggest that male and female CMOs have not communicated to the same extent, nor have they used the same (range of) languages. Also, there are differences with regard to expressions of authority and compassion. While a paucity of male data poses methodological challenges, it also raises questions about the specific and disproportionate communication work accorded to and undertaken by women. The paper concludes by arguing that female CMOs’ adherence to stereotypically gendered ways of speaking is a strategy for navigating volatile online and offline environments, but that this raises questions about the longer-term impacts of authority in gendered discourse.

Mapping Digital Discourses of the Capital Region of Finland

This article discusses the three Finnish city names Helsinki, Espoo, and Vantaa, and the urban discourses that surround them. The study reveals patterns of socio-spatial differentiation by examining what meanings people attach to these capital region cities and investigating how these meanings are expressed in online discourses. Using the methodological approach of corpus-assisted onomastics (CAO), this study incorporates onomastics, geographical information systems (GIS), and corpus linguistics. This interdisciplinary research also examines how corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) and GIS can be combined to reveal and visualize the contextual information and discursive patterns of toponyms. For this investigation, a data set of 2.7 billion words was collected from the Suomi24 Corpus, one of the biggest discussion fora in Finland. The use of social media corpus as a data source increases the authenticity of this research, as the data was not collected specifically for this study. The analysis reveals that the most frequent digital discourses about the cities refer to places and directions, housing, and mobility. The occurrences differ quantitatively and qualitatively between each city. This paper paves the way for future onomastic studies to research actual name usage using this new methodology. Knowledge gained from such research may not only enrich the field of onomastics, but also facilitate more socially sustainable urban planning.

OCR Correction for Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies: A Case Study of Old Newspapers

OCR Correction for Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies: A Case Study of Old Newspapers

Shifting the Blame: Storm and Wildfire Dramatic Images in American News Media

Some media frames might be likely to seek to evoke a certain sentiment, and that natural disaster coverage by the media focuses on the current impact of disasters. In their coverage, American news media use polar sentiment words to create bleeding images of natural disasters, potentially counter-productive to the wisdom of dealing with the natural disaster. Identifying the sentiment words that lead to a misperception of natural disasters can help journalists adopt the wisdom that natural disasters are not a human enemy. The corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) reported in this article investigates the American media's issues for dramatic reporting and the polar sentiment words utilized in the framing. The corpus is built from 100 news articles reporting wildfires and storms by ten major online American news media published from January 1, 2018, through December 31, 2020. It uses AntConc to generate word-list and word-link from which it identifies the dominant issues. Subsequently, it compares the AntConc word-list with A List of Sentiment Words to reveal the tones and dramatic imaging. The findings show that the dominant issues in storm reporting are description, impact, and prediction, while wildfire reporting are cause, impact, action, and prediction. The negative polar words produce dramatic images of storm as a violent beast and wildfire as a vengeful invader. Such description is provocative to blaming natural disasters as a cause of human suffering rather than improving our behaviors to reduce the suffering. Thus, it is counter-productive to acquiring wisdom for dealing with natural disasters.

Networked discourses of bereavement in online COVID-19 memorials

Abstract This paper reports on study of online COVID-19 memorials posted during 2020 to the Church of England website https://www.rememberme2020.uk/. The paper employs a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) approach to analyse networks of co-occurring linguistic items (types and lemmata) and patterns (ngrams) within online memorials, and examines how these frequent items/patterns exist within networked discourses that underpin an overarching bereavement discourse. The analysis finds that bereavement discourse is underpinned by frequent reference to love, relationships and relational identification, time and temporality, loss/absence, and memory, as well as metaphors based on container and journey image schema. An analysis of these metaphorical representations of death and bereavement suggest that online memorials serve as a space for the social practice of bereavement and shows how the language used to grieve attempts to ideologically (re)present the relationships between the bereaved and decedent. All code used in this paper can be found at https://osf.io/khcj2/.