Discourse Corpus Research Articles

MORPHOSYNTACTIC FEATURES OF ADVERBIAL CLAUSES IN ROMANCE LANGUAGES -CONSEQUENCES OF LANGUAGE CONTACT OR LATIN INHERITANCE?

The starting point of the present paper is a simple question: To what extent do linguistic facts encountered in Romanian exist in other Romance varieties? In order to answer this question, I put forward a cross-linguistic study of the Romance languages that aims at an interdisciplinary effort, a perspective that is going to add new and useful information to the literature, especially at the international level, that lacks, in many cases, examples from Romanian. On the basis of an original media discourse corpus, collected from three Romance varieties (Romanian, Italian and French), I advance a comparative perspective, focused on the connectors of the complex sentences. Since the aim of this paper is neither to defend/to contradict some linguistic theory of the syntactic variation, nor to develop a new grammatical theory, the focus will be on the description of the identified linguistic data, and on the motivation of their existence/absence in the three related languages.

“Arab women’s Spring” revisited: media attitudes and public opinion in Germany

ABSTRACT This study is part of a project investigating the impact of Arab women’s representation in Western news discourse during the Arab Spring on changing their stereotypes in media and on public opinion in Germany. We focus on relating the themes associated with them and reflected in articles published by German, British, and American news media to German university students’ attitudes towards them. We adopted discourse analysis and corpus linguistic approaches in examining the effects of lexical choices in the news on changing their recurrent images in media and on their perception in Germany. Our results show that the relevant expressions reflect two sets of themes: one is connected to the uprisings highlighting their rebellion and activism, while the other is linked to their portrayal in Western media as oppressed victims. These themes were indicated in the students’ responses in addition to others that are not visible in the news. While our findings confirm a shift in Arab women’s established stereotypes in the news as well as in our participants’ perception of them, they provide further evidence for the effect of news on public opinion. For our students, this impact is clearly balanced out by their critical reading and thinking skills.

El pensamiento posmoderno en los discursos sobre la práctica del diseño

This paper aims to demonstrate the influence of postmodern discourses on new discourses on the practice of design. By understanding the design as a product of modernity, we assume that the crisis of this cultural construction also breaks down the corpus of discourses on the practice of design, giving rise to new positions and arguments which, at the same time, modify the practice itself and determine the expansion of its field. Taking philosophy as a starting point to understand the debate on modernity-postmodernity, we analyze its influences and shades according to the most influential authors in the field of design.

Retrieving the specialised substance from a corpus of professional discourse in the field of Records and Information Management

Cet article vise a approfondir notre connaissance des discours professionnels dans le domaine de la gestion de l’information et de la documentation, a partir d’un corpus specialise. Apres un bref resume de la longue tradition des travaux en analyse des discours professionnels, nous presentons une methode de compilation et d’analyse d’un corpus dans le domaine de la gestion de l’information, notamment dans le but d’identifier sa « matiere specialisee ». Cette matiere est mise en evidence par trois micro-analyses : celle du processus de specialisation des categories semantiques generales de l’anglais, celle de la coherence semantique, et celle de dimensions semantiques specifiques. Nos resultats montrent tout d’abord que la gestion de l’information peut etre consideree comme un registre specialise de l’anglais. Ils montrent ensuite que la comparaison d’une variete professionnelle avec l’usage general fournit une vue partielle du specialise-professionnel et qu’il convient d’envisager la creation de dimensions semantiques ad hoc.

Tale Of A Pariah: Zoroastrian Worldview In Cyrus Mistry’s Chronicle Of A Corpse Bearer

The contribution of Parsee writers to the corpus of postcolonial discourse is singular. They are akin to the Jewish writers like Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud who sought to express their ethnic identity in artistic terms. The Zoroastrian worldview, which is life – affirming, provides sustenance to the Parsee community. The Parsee system of the disposal of the dead is unique. This paper attempts to study Cyrus Mistry`s novel Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer which deals with the trauma of a nussesalar, a corpse bearer. Phiroze, the centre of consciousness represents the khandhias, the ostracized among the marginalized Parsee community. His tale gives us a peep into the abysmal and turbulent psyche of the khandhias. It is the account of a pariah who rejects the Zoroastrian worldview and leads a life of his volition.

Meek as milk and large as logic: A corpus study of the non-standard poetic simile

A novel distinction is proposed between two types of closed similes: the standard and the non-standard. While the standard simile presents a ground that is a salient feature of the source term (e.g. meek as a lamb), the non-standard simile somewhat enigmatically supplies a non-salient ground (e.g. meek as milk). The latter thus violates a deep-seated norm of similes and presents interpreters with unexpected difficulty, whereby the concept set up to be an exemplar of a quality is actually less than ideal to fulfil this role. The main question addressed here is how these two simile types are relatively distributed across poetic and non-poetic corpora. We elaborate the criteria for what constitutes the non-standard simile, including separating it out from adjacent phenomena like the ironic simile (e.g. brave as a mouse), and go on to explain our operational criteria for salience. Then, we report culling 329 closed similes from an anthology of poetry and 350 closed similes from two corpora of non-poetic discourse, the Corpus of Historical American English and the British National Corpus. An independent judge rated the salience of each ground-and-source pair of each of the similes, presented in randomized order. Results show that while the standard simile is found in both types of discourse, the non-standard kind is only marginally present in the non-poetic corpora but makes up over 40% of the similes in the poetic corpus. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for theories of poetic language and literariness.

Understanding idioms and idiomatic expressions in context: a look at idioms found in an Irish soap opera

This paper looks at idioms drawn from a corpus of soap opera and compares their communicative functions to those performed by idioms in corpora of naturally-occurring conversation. In this study soap opera data is validated as a suitable tool for demonstrating the role that idioms play in spoken interaction. Soap operas, as well as other media genres, try to convey a believable linguistic world, exploiting idioms and providing contexts in which the pragmatic functions of idioms can be understood and analysed. This paper suggests that the analysis of idioms found in soap opera can contribute to the increase of knowledge and understanding concerning the communicative functions that idioms have in conversation. The data used in this study is drawn from the corpora of naturally-occurring conversation --- the Limerick Corpus of Irish English (LCIE) and the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English (CANCODE) --- and a corpus of the Irish soap opera, Fair City.

The rules of the game: discursive norms and limits in the field of online art magazines

ABSTRACT This article employs methods of discourse analysis and corpus linguistics within a Bourdieusian theoretical framework to examine the discursive norms and limits regulating the construction of reputation by online contemporary art magazines. Moving between quantitative and qualitative analysis of the websites of online contemporary art magazines, the article identifies salient patterns surrounding the use of modifiers and links these patterns to the normative principles of the artworld. Its findings suggest that positive evaluation is a norm but that the use of explicitly evaluative modifiers is prohibited, that artists are predominantly classified according to nationality and that these classifications can construct reputational value by performing agents’ possession of cosmopolitan capital. These findings contribute to our understanding of the discursive means by which artworld hierarchies and systems of classification are reproduced and transformed. Thus, this study aims to contribute to our understanding of the role of discourse in the artworld’s reputational economy.

English versions of corporate websites. A linguacultural contrastive study of Germany and Spain

If local companies in Europe target international visitors as well as national ones, they generally set up an English version of their corporate websites alongside the version in their native language. In their attempt to portray themselves in ways that are engaging to visitors, companies address topics such as corporate history, values and practices on their websites. However, the relevance given to the various topics and the style used may vary across cultures. The present study aims, first, to unveil whether discursive differences exist in website versions in English which were set up by European local companies. Second, it is investigated whether the differences may be explained with reference to Hofstede’s model. Because of its importance in Europe, the companies belong to the dairy sector. The countries chosen for the present investigation are Germany and Spain, the cultural differences of which, with reference to Hofstede’s model (Hofstede et al. 2010), are less marked when contrasted with the countries in previous linguistic studies on corporate websites (Cucchi 2010a, 2012, 2015, 2016). Methodologically, the study, based on a corpus of self-representative discourse from the websites of 12 German and 12 Spanish companies, draws on the Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies tradition (Partington 2004; Baker 2006), so as to verify the extent to which the findings are compatible with those obtained, within linguistics, from other countries and/or other genres, and with those in other disciplinary domains. The study relies on Wmatrix (Rayson 2009) for content analysis and on WordSmith Tools (Scott 2012) for the analysis of dispersion plots. Results show that German websites are more informal and give more prominence to data, while Spanish websites rely more on ‘self-celebratory’ discourse, emphasising tradition, quality and awards. Overall, the findings show that Hofstede’s model is helpful for the study of the English versions of websites of European local companies, even in countries where cultural differences are less marked. Since cross-cultural differences still exist among the websites of European companies, future research should address the issue of what content and style are appropriate when targeting international customers in English used as a lingua franca.

Representing and re-defining expert knowledge for the layman. Self-help medical manuals in late 19th century America

This paper analyses a corpus (over 1 million words) of three self-help medical handbooks published in the US in the latter quarter of the 19th century, R.V. Pierce’s The People’s Common Sense Medical Adviser (1883), M.L. Byrn’s The Mystery of Medicine Explained (1887), and Gunn and Jordan’s Newest Revised Physician (1887). It aims to explore the discursive construction of medical knowledge and of the medical profession in the period, combining discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. The popularity of these manuals has to be seen within the context of medical care at a time when, in spite of the advances made in the course of the 19th century, the status of the medical profession was still unstable. Initially the focus of the study is on the representation of the medical profession. In this respect, the analysis testifies to an approach to traditional medical expertise which is essentially ambivalent, taking its distance from abstract medicine and quackery alike, while at the same time promoting a new approach based on different, more modern principles. The focus then shifts to the episteme of the medical science as represented in the works under investigation. The construction of selected epistemically relevant notions – knowledge, theory/ies, experience, evidence, and observation – is discussed relying on concordance lines in order to retrieve and examine all the contexts where they occur. The results of the analysis indicate a shift in the epistemological approach to knowledge, with theory and suppositions being complemented by experience, evidence and facts, and a representation of knowledge as a tool for empowerment, in line with the increasing democratisation of medicine characterising the period.

Google Talks as a new knowledge dissemination genre

This study explores the new knowledge dissemination (KD) online genre of Google Talks, in both qualitative and quantitative terms. In particular, the study combines two complementary strands of linguistic investigation – discourse analysis and corpus analysis – to inspect and describe the features that characterise Google Talks as popularisation discourse, as compared to both traditional and new web-based genres. The qualitative analysis of three case studies belonging to the fields of economics, political science, and medicine shows both a continuity between Google Talks and other forms of popularisation, such as TED Talks, and a departure from more traditional genres in academic and institutional settings addressed at non-experts (academic lectures) or colleagues (conference presentations). A quantitative corpus-based analysis of evaluative adjectives shows that Google speakers frequently use aesthetic and emotion adjectives to encourage audience participation and create intimacy and proximity with hearers. In general, Google Talks imposes not only a simplification but also a reformulation and recontextualisation of specialised knowledge in a more interactive and dynamic web-based context.

Organizational identity construction of the world’s top universities: A discourse analysis of university prospectuses

A prospectus, as a kind of self-description of the organization, is specified as one of the attributes of an organization. A university, as a type of organization, makes its prospectus accordingly. A prospectus – as a genre of organizational discourse – has a constructive mechanism. With the synergy of the discoursehistorical approach (DHA) and the corpus discourse approach, this article will analyze – using WordSmith – the discursive strategies involved in the construction of the organizational identity of the world’s top universities. The analysis reveals that the prospectuses of the world’s top 100 universities mainly employ the referential/nomination strategy and predication strategy to construct an identity for themselves as world-renowned, diversified, reputable leading universities which will participate positively in the global market.

Upper Kuskokwim (Athabaskan, Alaska): Elementary Discourse Units and Other Aspects of Local Discourse Structure

I investigate local discourse structure in Upper Kuskokwim (Athabaskan, Alaska), drawing on a corpus of discourses that includes a variety of genres. Local discourse structure consists of minimal steps in speech production, so-called elementary discourse units (EDUs). As in other languages, prosodically identified EDUs correlate strongly with clauses; subclausal EDUs (e.g., increments to a preceding clause) and superclausal EDUs (e.g., matrix clause plus complement) occur. Larger units are spoken sentences, identifiable on prosodic grounds; sentence-final and sentence-medial prosodic patterns can be distinguished. The approach is extended to conversation, which shows shorter EDUs and pervasive code mixing. I also report an experimental study in which minimally trained participants were rather reliably able to identify EDUs in an unfamiliar language, relying exclusively on prosodic cues.

Analyse Des Specificites Du Discours Journalistique En Algerie : Exploration Automatique D’un Corpus Sur Les Elections Presidentielles De 2014

The objective of our communication is to suggest an automatic approach, relatively unknown in Algeria, for the analysis of media discourse. This method is called Lexicometrics or research on corpus. By applying a computer- assisted analysis, we built a large corpus of media discourse in Algeria during the Arab Spring period (2011-2015) to analyze the behavior of journalists vis-a-vis the memory of war of Algeria. The Lexicometric exploration of this corpus proved to be interesting in the identification of the linguistic, typographical and ideological specificities of the speech of the French press during the presidential elections of 2014. Through statistical programmes including the calculation of the specificities developed by the Saint Cloud Laboratory, we have identified significant (discursive) regularities that can inform us about the positions of the press and the major Themes characterizing his speech during the elections.The identification of contrasts and repetitions between different sub-corpuses have highlighted the specificities of each organ's discourse and its ideological universe, thus revealing the (conciliatory, consensual, discreet)positions of the press vis-a-vis the four terms.

Creativity in Metaphor Interpretation

This paper looks at corpus- and survey-based evidence of innovative interpretative metaphor use that changes the default meaning of well-established figurative constructions. Specifically, we look at interpretation induced changes in the meaning of corporeal metaphors, on the basis of a corpus of British political discourse and a questionnaire survey of more than 1000 respondents from 31 linguistic backgrounds in 10 countries. The corpus-based evidence consists of metaphor-production data that show how situational variation in metaphor use can over time create a semantic-pragmatic drift that changes the dominant meaning of a conventional metaphor expression. The questionnaire survey reveals four distinct models for BODY focused readings (i.e. NATION AS GEOBODY, AS HIERARCHICAL FUNCTIONAL WHOLE, AS PART OF SPEAKER’S BODY, AS PART OF LARGER BODY), plus a further set PERSON-focused readings. The two most frequent BODY-focused interpretations, i.e. NATION AS GEOBODY and NATION AS HIERARCHICAL FUNCTIONAL WHOLE, as well as the PERSON-stereotypes versions show divergent frequency and elaboration patterns across the Chinese- vs. English-L1 respondent groups, which may be linked to specific cultural conceptual and discursive traditions. Both data sets indicate a strong creative element in metaphor interpretation, which accounts for a significant degree of variation in the creation of new metaphorical concepts.

Английский разделительный вопрос как лингвоэкологичный феномен межличностного общения

The article considers the functional properties of English tag questions from the perspective of a relatively new linguistic paradigm - linguistic ecology. The novelty of the research is seen in the fact that up to now these syntactic units have not received proper coverage in the linguo-ecological key. Tag questions in the discursive segments selected from the English corpus of modern fiction and film discourse were the material for the analysis. The authors present a tag question with its pre-defined and discursive meanings as a stereotypical linguistic model, designed to support the harmony of speech communication of representatives of the English linguistic culture. During the discourse analysis the following characteristics of linguoecological compatability of a tag question were highlighted: non-categoricalness, tolerance, addressee centricity, empathy, mitigation. Particular attention is paid to the strategies of communicative defocusing and hedging, adequate operation of which is the key to reducing communication risks and achieving harmonious communication. By examples of various structural and pragmatic types of tag questions, the role of assertive-evaluative, modus, deictic, directive and emotive mitigation is shown in maintaining ecological mode of communication. It is concluded that the basis of tag question ecological functioning is the syncretism of the dominant features of the English communicative style - distancing, indirectness, non-categoricalness, mitigation of directive intentions and emotive de-intensification.

Conflict in corpora

AbstractThe analysis of conflict in family discourse has often been characterised by ethnographic approaches and/or fine-grained analysis of unique conflict episodes. This article, by contrast, uses a c.175,000-word spoken corpus of Irish family discourse, in conjunction with a corpus pragmatic approach, to explore specific linguistic aspects of conflict discourse. Conflict episodes are identified and analysed in the corpus using a range of linguistic “hooks” (Rühlemann 2010) that have been previously associated with prefacing disagreement such as the markerwell, mitigators (I think, I mean, I guess) or the counterargument strategyyes but. The analysis reveals that the family members most frequently use theyeah butstrategy in conflict episodes which facilitates immediate disagreement. This strategy is often accompanied by a range of mitigators, predominantly in turn final position, some of which have not been previously identified as indexing conflict sequences.

‘My almost-leggings-so-I’m-kind-of-cheating jeans’: Exploring hyphenated phrasal expressions in fashion discourse

Abstract The language of fashion was first investigated by Roland Barthes in his influential book Système de la Mode, but it has since received scant attention from linguists, perhaps due to perceptions of frivolousness associated with the fashion world. This study explores contemporary fashion discourse through a systematic analysis of hyphenated phrasal expressions as linguistic features that are analytically challenging, but with strong expressive potential. The Fashion Discourse Corpus consists of 396,125 words compiled from the traditional fashion press (Vogue, Women’s Wear Daily, Harper’s Bazaar) and two leading fashion blogs, representing both American and British English. For comparative purposes, a reference corpus was extracted from American and British benchmark corpora. The quantitative analysis revealed that hyphenated phrasal expressions were considerably more frequent in the Fashion Discourse Corpus. Follow-up qualitative analysis identified conventional, semi-conventional, and non-conventional types, along with recurring structural patterns and communicative functions used to describe and evaluate fashion phenomena. The fashion blogs in particular contained richly expressive items that seemed to reflect the writer’s unique voice and identity within the discourse community. The findings can be applied in journalism and communication courses to help aspiring writers learn to use hyphenated phrasal expressions effectively.

“Looking for more Brazilian solutions”: Rhetorical Strategies against Ethnic Quotas in Brazilian Higher Education

Since the 1990s, Brazil has experienced a growing public debate about policies of ethnic affirmative action. The arguments invoked by the opponents of affirmative action quotas, expressed in scientific publications, the mass media and even manifestos, have been the subject of study in several research projects. In their analyses, these scholars have concluded that the the anti-quota arguments suffered from logical inconsistency, theoretical and methodological flaws or simple lack of empirical evidence. However, anti-quota rhetoric appears to persist seemingly unaffected by academic counter-arguments, if not in the academic debate, at least in public opinion. This paper argues that the persuasive power of anti-quota arguments derives from the strategic use of specific rhetorical strategies, based on time-proven classical speech imagery that foreground evidence and logic even where speculation and heuristics are the actual foundation. Using methods of Critical Discourse Analysis I will analyze a representative corpus of prominent public discourses against ethnic affirmative action quotas in order to demonstrate how rhetorical strategies are deployed in these texts, showing how they broadly mirror the proposition of a “Rhetoric of Reaction” (Hirschman 1991). These rhetorics, I argue, draw heavily on the myth of “racial democracy” combined with a long-standing national master-narrative of Brazilian exceptionalism, the combination of which masks racial animosity and defers policy action to support ethnic minorities.

¿Cómo analizar discursos de 140 caracteres? Propuesta metodológica para el estudio del discurso político de campaña en Twitter a partir del análisis estratégico del discurso con una perspectiva multimodal y crítica

This article presents a methodology for the collection and analysis of corpus of political discourses published on Twitter. It has been drawn up in an ongoing doctoral research that seeks to report the persuasive discursive strategies used in the official accounts of the Argentine presidential candidates during the 2015 electoral campaign. This methodology is based on the strategic analysis of the discourse (Menendez 2000, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2012) with a multimodal perspective (Kress & Van Leeuwen 2001). This expects, in the first place, the description of the corpus from a grammatical analysis with a functional systemic base (Halliday 1970, 1985, Halliday & Matthiessen 2014, Kress & Van Leeuwen 2001, Kress & Van Leuween 2006 [1996]) and pragmatic discursive studies (Lavandera 1992, Martin & White 2005, Sperber & Wilson 1994[1986]). And, secondly, the relation between the results obtained by these analysis in order to look for recurrences that allow to rebuild the produced discursive strategies. Finally, it seeks to achieve a critical analysis (Fairclough 2003) of these strategies, which allows to understand the campaign political discourse on Twitter in terms of discursive practices and analyze its influence on current political practices.