1,720,999 research outputs found
Investigating anti and some reflections on Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS)
No full textIn 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
2The 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
Insistent voices - government messages
No full textThis chapter investigates some patterns in the way speakers represent
speech, thought, and writing across the CorDis Corpus with particular reference
to varieties of voices in the texts. Many frequently occurring lexical
items in the word lists of the corpus belong to the semantic fi elds of speech,
thought, and writing (e.g., talking, conversation, thought, writes, dossier,
page, line). In order to investigate how discourse representation is carried
out in the corpus, a number of these were chosen and examined for the way
they exemplify different text voices. These words often need lexicalization,
as do general nouns such as point, thing, way, and, also like general nouns,
they have a discourse organizing function (see Francis 1994). There are differences
in their distribution and use in the subcorpora which make up the
CorDis Corpus. Such differences refl ect not just the varieties of discourse
type but also diverse interests in the representation of voice and different
levels of take-up of these insistent messages from government and administration
voices. The methodology of corpus-assisted discourse studies is
used, as set out in the introduction to this volume.
I will fi rst deal with questions of speech and thought representation and
corpus methodology, with a short overview of previous research. Using
Thompson’s (1996) framework for my description I will give some examples
of the key features of the data related to the representation of thought, speech,
and writing to be found in the CorDis Corpus. Finally I will go on to a consideration
of language awareness and language management in politics, and the
way in which the relationship between politicians and the media is sometimes
played out via the manipulation of speech and thought representation.
Loud signatures: Comparing evaluative discourse styles –patterns in rants and riffs
No full textThis paper is intended as a contribution to the investigation of evaluation in texts and in particular as a contribution to Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (or CADS), defined as a meeting of two disciplines, that of corpus linguistics and that of discourse analysis. One of the main points of CADS lies in the importance given to the systematic observation of naturally occurring data over and above the study of isolated data picked out from individual texts. This approach is particularly useful in the investigation of particular discourse types, text types or genres, to confirm intuitions which are part of the competent native speaker’s knowledge, but it can also help to reveal underlying attitudes and make explicit persuasive devices. Here, two small subcorpora are compared in order to identify the differences in evaluative styles with particular reference to textual interaction, priming, and the resources of engagement
Absence. You don't know what you're missing. Or do you?
No full textSince the inception of corpus linguistics (CL) the issue of absence has preoccupied both its practitioners and its detractors. To the latter it is self-evident, a truism, that a corpus can yield no information about phenomena it does not contain, a criticism which we hope to demonstrate is based on a failure to grasp the complexity of the notion of absences and an underestimation of the flexibility of corpus techniques. However the former, the exponents of CL, have also worried greatly about the significance of not finding something, say, a particular set of lexical items or a certain syntactic structure in their corpus. Is this (non) discovery telling me something about the discourse type(s) under study or about what is usually termed the ‘representativity’ of the corpus (i.e. how typical of the discourse type is the subset of it contained in the corpus)? And the CL literature is replete with warnings ‘not confuse corpus data with language itself’ (McEnery & +-ètHardie 2012: 26), to which we would add that observations arising from corpus data can only be generalised with the utmost care. Following Plato and Kant , we must not confuse the tangible, the phenomenal (corpus) with the intangible noumenal (language).
In this chapter we will discuss, on the basis of a number of case studies, what can reasonably be inferred about discourses from corpus analysis, with regards to absences. Along with Scott, we maintain that ‘much can be inferred from what is absent’ (2004) and, following Taylor (2012), we will argue that corpus tools provide an ‘armoury’ for locating and verifying absence. In particular, the comparison and contrast across different corpora can firstly reveal absences, both those being searched for and others accidentally stumbled upon, and then allow the analyst to track the appearance and disappearance of linguistic elements or discoursal notions once they have come in some way to the analyst’s attention
Forced lexical primings in transdiscoursive political messaging How they are produced and how they are received
No full textLexical priming is a term for the processes by which listeners, by repeated exposure, first internalise and then reproduce the constituent elements of language, their combinatorial possibilities and the semantic and pragmatic meanings associated with them (Hoey 2005). Forced priming (Duguid 2009), on the other hand, describes a process whereby speakers or authors frequently repeat a certain form of words to deliberately ‘flood’ the discourse with messages for a particular strategic purpose. There are many fields where primings can be forced for particular effect, such as education, particularly in the primary school, for example through exercises in rote learning, or advertisements, as in slogans coined to be memorable and repeatable. Advertising combines with politics in the periods around general elections and referendums where professional campaigns are run, employing advertising agencies to put over political messages in a simple way. Here, however, we are not interested in campaign posters or brief messages clearly created to express a party position, but in the linguistic discipline of day to day political communication, where there is the careful studied and strategic preference of a particular form with an associated evaluation, positive for the speaker’s side or negative for the opponents
Patterns and meanings in discourse: theory and practice in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS)
No full textThis work is designed, firstly, to both provoke theoretical discussion and serve as a practical guide for researchers and students in the field of corpus linguistics and, secondly, to offer a wide-ranging introduction to corpus techniques for practitioners of discourse studies. It delves into a wide variety of language topics and areas including metaphor, irony, evaluation, (im)politeness, stylistics, language change and sociopolitical issues. Each chapter begins with an outline of an area, followed by case studies which attempt both to shed light on particular themes in this area and to demonstrate the methodologies which might be fruitfully employed to investigate them. The chapters conclude with suggestions on activities which the readers may wish to undertake themselves. An Appendix contains a list of currently available resources for corpus research which were used or mentioned in the book
A deliberative bridge over the mass-elite rift: effects of online deliberation on support for european integration
No full text
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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