Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies Research Articles

Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS) on UK newspapers: an overview of the project

This edition of Corpora contains one of the first ever collections of papers pertaining to the nascent discipline of Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS). This discipline is characterised by the novelty both of its methodology and the topics it is, consequently, in a position to treat. It employs relatively large corpora of a parallel structure and content from different moments of contemporary time (in this case the SiBol corpora, see below) in order to track changes in modern language usage but also social, cultural and political changes as reflected in language.In this overview, I will attempt to give an idea of what both corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) and MD-CADS involve, to provide some information about the newspaper corpora we employ, and to outline methodologies commonly followed in this area, including those employed by the other contributors to this issue. I will also present two sets of practical analyses. The first is inductive and bottom-up, derived from a close analysis of the comparative keywords generated by comparing the lists of items from the two parallel corpora from different time periods; the aim is to uncover changes over time both in language and in what social, political and cultural issues were considered worthy of attention. The second is more intuitive and hypothesis-driven; the hypothesis is that an examination of a certain term, namely moral panic, can shed some light on which issues writers thought did not merit all the attention they were receiving. I will conclude with brief sketches of the other papers in this issue, and reflections on the relevance of MD-CADS in both language research and teaching.

Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS) on UK newspapers: an overview of the project

This edition of Corpora contains one of the first ever collections of papers pertaining to the nascent discipline of Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS). This discipline is characterised by the novelty both of its methodology and the topics it is, consequently, in a position to treat. It employs relatively large corpora of a parallel structure and content from different moments of contemporary time (in this case the SiBol corpora, see below) in order to track changes in modern language usage but also social, cultural and political changes as reflected in language. In this overview, I will attempt to give an idea of what both corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) and MD-CADS involve, to provide some information about the newspaper corpora we employ, and to outline methodologies commonly followed in this area, including those employed by the other contributors to this issue. I will also present two sets of practical analyses. The first is inductive and bottom-up, derived from a close analysis of the comparative keywords generated by comparing the lists of items from the two parallel corpora from different time periods; the aim is to uncover changes over time both in language and in what social, political and cultural issues were considered worthy of attention. The second is more intuitive and hypothesis-driven; the hypothesis is that an examination of a certain term, namely moral panic, can shed some light on which issues writers thought did not merit all the attention they were receiving. I will conclude with brief sketches of the other papers in this issue, and reflections on the relevance of MD-CADS in both language research and teaching.

‘The moral in the story’: a diachronic investigation of lexicalised morality in the UK press

In this paper, I explore the discourses surrounding whatever is explicitly identified as a moral issue in the SiBol corpora. This analysis is mainly diachronic but will combine a variety of parameters in order to access patterns of change/stability across different newspapers, within a single newspaper in time, across different news types, across topics and in the broader context of recent history. I adopt the Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS)22 See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus-assisted_discourse_studies methodology – merging, and shunting between, quantitative and qualitative approaches. The analysis investigates morality-related lexical items, their collocations, the surrounding contexts, and the news items and topics they are framed within, in an attempt to offer a general picture of the topic, while also aiming to provide an in-depth understanding of what the press means or projects by moral.

‘The moralinthe story’: a diachronic investigation of lexicalised morality in the UK press

In this paper, I explore the discourses surrounding whatever is explicitly identified as a moral issue in the SiBol corpora. This analysis is mainly diachronic but will combine a variety of parameters in order to access patterns of change/stability across different newspapers, within a single newspaper in time, across different news types, across topics and in the broader context of recent history. I adopt the Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS)22 See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus-assisted_discourse_studies methodology – merging, and shunting between, quantitative and qualitative approaches. The analysis investigates morality-related lexical items, their collocations, the surrounding contexts, and the news items and topics they are framed within, in an attempt to offer a general picture of the topic, while also aiming to provide an in-depth understanding of what the press means or projects by moral.

Investigating anti and some reflections on Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS)

In this study, I use WordSmith Tools 5.0 ( Scott, 2008 ) and Xaira to examine the prefix anti, its collocates, contexts and quantitative profile in the SiBol corpus. 2 2 The two corpora are named after the universities (Siena and Bologna) working on the project and are called SiBol 93 and SiBol 05. See Partington (2010) for further details. The first corpus contains around 100 million words (about twenty-seven million from the Guardian, thirty-four million from the Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, and thirty-nine million from the Times and Sunday Times). The second, contains about 145 million (forty-one million from the Guardian, thirty-seven million from the Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, and sixty-seven million from the Times and Sunday Times). First, I discuss the problem involved in investigating a prefix, and I follow this with an examination of the prefix itself. Although the overall proportion of anti prefixing has remained fairly similar over time, (unlike pro which has decreased), there are key changes in the stems or ‘targets’ of the prefix which reflect changes in social and political concerns. Among the findings are changes in the way that antibiotics are talked about, and an increase in the discourse about products designed to deal with age-related problems. The study also examines co-texts and contexts of anti terms expressing opposition to groups distinguished by their nationality, religion or ethnic origins, and differences in the ways such opposition is constructed. The analysis illustrates how modern diachronic corpus-assisted discourse studies (MD-CADS) can contribute to research into socio-cultural and political language and highlights the value of investigating prefixes.

Investigating anti and some reflections on Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS)

In this study, I use WordSmith Tools 5.0 (Scott, 2008) and Xaira to examine the prefix anti, its collocates, contexts and quantitative profile in the SiBol corpus.22 The two corpora are named after the universities (Siena and Bologna) working on the project and are called SiBol 93 and SiBol 05. See Partington (2010) for further details. The first corpus contains around 100 million words (about twenty-seven million from the Guardian, thirty-four million from the Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, and thirty-nine million from the Times and Sunday Times). The second, contains about 145 million (forty-one million from the Guardian, thirty-seven million from the Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, and sixty-seven million from the Times and Sunday Times). First, I discuss the problem involved in investigating a prefix, and I follow this with an examination of the prefix itself. Although the overall proportion of anti prefixing has remained fairly similar over time, (unlike pro which has decreased), there are key changes in the stems or ‘targets’ of the prefix which reflect changes in social and political concerns. Among the findings are changes in the way that antibiotics are talked about, and an increase in the discourse about products designed to deal with age-related problems. The study also examines co-texts and contexts of anti terms expressing opposition to groups distinguished by their nationality, religion or ethnic origins, and differences in the ways such opposition is constructed. The analysis illustrates how modern diachronic corpus-assisted discourse studies (MD-CADS) can contribute to research into socio-cultural and political language and highlights the value of investigating prefixes.

Teasing at the White House: A corpus-assisted study of face work in performing and responding to teases

In this article, I examine teasing in the laughter-talk of two transcribed spoken corpora of press briefings held at the White House, one from the Democrat and one from the Republican administrations. Categorizations are developed, firstly, of types and functions of teases and, secondly, of types and functions of responses to teases, as produced by both the podium and the assembled press. Important implications for face/(im)politeness theory become apparent. Speakers appear to have two different kinds of face, competence and affective. The problem for any given individual is that the two types of face work are frequently incompatible. Bolstering the one type of face may well diminish the other, and careful considerations are necessary when indulging in teasing of others (or indeed oneself) and in calibrating how to respond to being teased. The article is intended as a contribution to the nascent interdisciplinary field of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS).

Irony and reversal of evaluation

This paper outlines a corpus-assisted investigation into the nature and functions of irony in both spoken interaction and written texts. We begin with a review of some of the principal current debates in irony studies, which have until recently often been conducted with little recourse to authentic examples of use in interactive discourse types. We go on to consider, from an examination of corpus-based real-life data, firstly, how explicit irony operates and then whether there might be a more objective way of identifying and defining episodes of implicit irony than simple reliance on the researcher's unsupported intuition. Potential sites of implicit irony are then examined in the data to see how and why speakers and writers employ it and how hearers and audiences respond. The data analyses afford strong evidence that the principal mechanism driving all irony is an implied reversal of the evaluative meaning of the utterance (rather than of the propositional/ideational meaning, as argued in many traditional theories of irony). In addition, they reveal how irony in discourse always has a strategic argumentative point. Three corpora were employed, the first of semi-spontaneous interactive spoken discourse ( WHB: circa 6 million words of White House press briefings in transcription [1998–2004]), the second of spoken interviews ( Ints: 250,000 words of transcribed televised UK political interviews) and the third of written texts ( Papers: 100 million words of UK broadsheet texts). Techniques from Corpus Linguistics, principally concordancing, were employed. Most of the corpus interrogation was conducted using the WordSmith Tools suite of programs. Corpora have only rarely been used to investigate participants’ interaction in discourse and this paper is intended as a contribution to the nascent interdisciplinary field of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS).