1,721,095 research outputs found
The evaluative prosody of forms of government and power: '-cracy' and '-archy', is this prosody inheritable and what are the implications for translation?
Full text linkIn the first part I discuss the methods used and observations which emerged from a couple of lessons I taught at the Scuola Superiore per Interpreti e Traduttori of the University of Bologna (SSLMIT), in which my students and I examined the evaluative prosodies of a number of items relating to forms of power, namely items which end in the word particles -cracy, -cratic, -archy, -archic. I then describe some of the further research and teaching I carried out on these topics. I investigated in particular whether new, ad hoc formations based on these particles, for example liberalocracy, in some way inherited the – generally negative - evaluative tendency. I
hypothesise that this semi-hidden critical connotation may be the very reason for such items being coined. Finally I look at the potential for irony in the invention and use of such items, and speculate that research into the use of lookalike particles to the ones discussed here in other languages could be of interest to translators
Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS) on UK newspapers: an overview of the project.
No full textThis 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 inmodern 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 corpusassisted
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
Welcome to the first issue of the Journal of Corpora and Discourse
Full text linkThe rationale behind the launch of the online open-access Journal of Corpora and Discourse
Studies (JCaDS) is partly to meet the need for a discourse journal dedicated to research in
which corpora play a significant role and partly to create a new corpus linguistics journal
with a particular focus on discourse. Discourse is here defined as language in use as a
vehicle of communication, as language doing things, as speakers and writers attempting
to influence the beliefs and actions of their interlocutors using language.
But the rationale was also the realization that corpus-based, corpus-driven, corpusassisted
discourse analysis, corpus approaches to discourse, however we wish to name it,
definable as ‘that set of studies into the form and/or function of language as
communicative discourse which incorporate the use of corpora’ (Partington, Duguid and
Taylor, 2013, p. 10), has for some considerable time matured into a field of study in its
own right. It already has for instance, a biannual conference, and several volumes with
‘corpora’ and ‘discourse’ in their titles are on library bookshelves. As editors, then, we felt
the time had come to provide a journal home, an on-line shop-window for the produce
of this field of study
Brexit: before and after. A corpus-assisted study of the Referendum campaigns and the immediate aftermath
No full textIn this work, we look at how attitudes to the 2016 Brexit Referendum were represented in a number of UK national newspapers, some of which were broadly pro-Brexit, others anti-Brexit, in the three-month period immediately before the vote and in a similar stretch of time after. Given the large scale of data, the examination availed itself of corpus linguistics and corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) methodologies. The principal impression arising from the data before the vote was that to divide attitudes towards Brexit into “for or “against” was far too simplistic. They were many shades of opinion between the two extremes. In addition, both the “for” and the “against” sides contained leftwing and rightwing voices. As regards the comments of various agents after the vote, we uncovered some rather surprising reactions by both the “winners” and “losers”
The Language of Persuasion in Politics
No full textThis accessible introduction looks at the modern relationship between politicians, the press and the public through the language they employ, with extensive coverage of key topics including:
‘spin’, ‘spin control’ and ‘image’ politics
models of persuasion: authority, contrast, association
pseudo-logical and ‘post-truth’ arguments
political interviewing: difficult questions, difficult answers
metaphors and metonymy
rhetorical figures
humour, irony and satire
Extracts from speeches, soundbites, newspapers and blogs, interviews, press conferences, election slogans, social media and satires are used to provide the reader with the tools to discover the beliefs, character and hidden strategies of the would-be persuader, as well as the counter-strategies of their targets. This book demonstrates how the study of language use can help us appreciate, exploit and protect ourselves from the art of persuasion.
With a wide variety of practical examples on both recent issues and historically significant ones, every topic is complemented with guiding tasks, queries and exercises with keys and commentaries at the end of each unit. This is the ideal textbook for all introductory courses on language and politics, media language, rhetoric and persuasion, discourse studies and related areas
Patterns and Meanings in Discourse
No full textThe present volume mixes theoretical discussions with practical demonstrations. It begins with introductory chapters defining terms and outlining the rationale and aims of the volume, the theoretical linguistic stance underpinning it and the overall methodologies to be used. After this introduction, each chapter begins by outlining a topic or an area in discourse studies, followed by descriptions of case studies which attempt both to shed light on particular themes or issues in this area and also and especially to demonstrate the methodologies which might be fruitfully employed to investigate such issues. Each chapter concludes with suggestions on activities which the readers may wish to undertake themselves. Finally, Appendix 1 contains a list of currently available resources for corpus linguistics research.
The topics for case study include studies in lexis, phraseology, syntax, text grammar, evaluative meaning, metaphor and “unusuality” (defined as the creative upsetting and exploitation of readers and hearers expectations of regularity in language). All of these concerns are present in the current work and are augmented by studies into author style, irony, spoken interaction, including face and politeness and diachronic studies of both linguistic and social, cultural and political changes over recent time
Intimations of “Spring”? What got said and what didn’t get said about the start of the Middle Eastern/North African uprisings: a corpus-assisted discourse study of a historical event
No full textIn this paper I wish to examine a particular form of presence and absence, namely, that of the mention and failure to mention in political and media news reporting of messages relating to a particular historical event, namely, the outbreak of protest in the Arab Middle East and North Africa in 2011. The analyses will take a sort of ‘before and after’ contrastive approach, comparing how particular political and media sources talked about events and people involved in the period before the start of the protests and the period following the outbreak of the protests.
The overarching preliminary research aim is to discover if the discussions changed, if so, how, and in particular what messages were present or absent, appeared or disappeared, completely or in relative terms, between the two periods of time. Various sets of data are examined in order to examine three subsidiary research aims (listed in the Introduction) contributing to this main one
Corpus-assisted discourse study of representations of the "underclass" in the english-language press: Who are they, how do they behave, and who is to blame for them?
No full textRepresentations of the ‘underclass’ in the English-language press. Who are they, how do they behave and who is to blame for them?
Jane Johnson, Alan Partington. Bologna University.
The term underclass is widely used in sociology, but definitions of what it consists of differ. In the chapter we wish to examine how underclass(es) and the way they supposedly behave are represented in a number of English-language press outlets, of differing political persuasions, in various countries, including the USA, UK, India, Hong Kong and China.
The term itself has highly negative evaluative connotations. It is a class - or classes - which should not exist. But if whoever uses the term believes that it - or they - do exist, who is considered to be responsible? Are the same social actors blamed in different societies and by political voices from different political standpoints? There is some preliminary evidence to suggest that, in western newspapers at least, the term is ‘weaponised’, one political side accuses the other of having created an underclass by its negative or negligent policies. In another example, the Chinese authorities are criticized for having created the hukou an ‘underclass’ of migrant workers (South China Morning Post).
The corpora employed in the study will include newspaper comment pieces from 2010-2016 which treat the topic of underclasses, downloaded using Lexis Nexis
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
J. R. Partington, A History of Chemistry, vol. III, IV
No full textColnort Suzanne. J. R. Partington, A History of Chemistry, vol. III, IV. In: Revue d'histoire des sciences et de leurs applications, tome 23, n°2, 1970. pp. 180-181
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