Tag Archives: critical discourse analysis

Coming this year: Corpora and Discourse Studies (Palgrave Advances in Language and Linguistics)

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Three members of CASS have contributed chapters to a new volume in the Palgrave Advances in Language and Linguistics series. Corpora and Discourse Studies will be released later this year.

corpdiscThe growing availability of large collections of language texts has expanded our horizons for language analysis, enabling the swift analysis of millions of words of data, aided by computational methods. This edited collection of chapters contains examples of such contemporary research which uses corpus linguistics to carry out discourse analysis. The book takes an inclusive view of the meaning of discourse, covering different text-types or modes of language, including discourse as both social practice and as ideology or representation. Authors examine a range of spoken, written, multimodal and electronic corpora covering themes which include health, academic writing, social class, ethnicity, gender, television narrative, news, Early Modern English and political speech. The chapters showcase the variety of qualitative and quantitative tools and methods that this new generation of discourse analysts are combining together, offering a set of compelling models for future corpus-based research in discourse.

Table of Contents:

  1. Introduction; Paul Baker and Tony McEnery
  2. E-Language: Communication in the Digital Age; Dawn Knight
  3. Beyond Monomodal Spoken Corpora: Using a Field Tracker to Analyse Participants’ Speech at the British Art Show; Svenja Adolphs, Dawn Knight and Ronald Carter
  4. Corpus-assisted Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Television and Film Narratives; Monika Bednarek
  5. Analysing Discourse Markers in Spoken Corpora: Actually as a Case Study; Karin Aijmer
  6. Discursive Constructions of the Environment in American Presidential Speeches 1960-2013: A Diachronic Corpus-assisted Study; Cinzia Bevitori
  7. Health Communication and Corpus Linguistics: Using Corpus Tools to Analyse Eating Disorder Discourse Online; Daniel Hunt and Kevin Harvey
  8. Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Academic Discourse; Jack A. Hardy
  9. Thinking About the News: Thought Presentation in Early Modern English News Writing; Brian Walker and Dan McIntyre
  10. The Use of Corpus Analysis in a Multi-perspectival Study of Creative Practice; Darryl Hocking
  11. Corpus-assisted Comparative Case Studies of Representations of the Arab World; Alan Partington
  12.  Who Benefits When Discourse Gets Democratised? Analysing a Twitter Corpus Around the British Benefits Street Debate; Paul Baker and Tony McEnery
  13. Representations of Gender and Agency in the Harry Potter Series; Sally Hunt
  14. Filtering the Flood: Semantic Tagging as a Method of Identifying Salient Discourse Topics in a Large Corpus of Hurricane Katrina Reportage; Amanda Potts

New CASS Briefing: Representations of Islam in the British press, 1998 – 2009

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CASSbriefings-islamRepresentations of Islam in the British press, 1998 – 2009. Is the British press Islamophobic? How are Islam and Muslims typically written about? Have representations of Islam and Muslims changed over time, particularly since 9/11? Are some newspapers less ‘friendly’ towards Muslims than others? Read this CASS: Briefing of a large-scale corpus-based discourse analytical study to discover more.

New resources will be added regularly to the new CASS: Briefings tab above, so check back soon.

Writing for the press: the deleted scenes

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In late July and early August 2013, the stories of Caroline Criado-Perez, the bomb threats, and latterly, the horrific tragedy of Hannah Smith broke across the media, and as a result, the behaviour supposedly known as “trolling” was pitched squarely into the limelight. There was the inevitable flurry of dissections, analyses, and opinion pieces, and no doubt like any number of academics in similar lines of work, I was asked to write various articles on this behaviour. Some I turned down for different reasons, but one that I accepted was for the Observer. (Here’s the final version that came out in both the Observer and the Guardian.)

Like the majority of people, I have been mostly in the dark about how the media works behind the scenes. That said, throughout my time at university, I have studied areas like Critical Discourse Analysis and the language of the media, and over the past three years, my work has been picked up a few times in small ways by the media, so I probably had a better idea than many. I realise now, however, that even with this prior knowledge, I was still pretty naive about the process. I wasn’t too surprised, then, when I got a number of comments on the Observer article raising exactly the sorts of questions I too would have asked before I’d gone through what I can only describe as a steep media learning curve. There were, essentially, three main issues that kept recurring:

(1)    Why didn’t you talk about [insert related issue here]? This other thing is also important!

(2)  Why didn’t you define trolling properly? This isn’t what I’d call trolling!

(3)   Why did you only mention the negative types of trolling? There are good kinds too!

All three questions are interrelated in various ways, but I’ve artificially separated them out because each gives me a chance to explain something that I’ve learned about what happens behind the scenes during the process of producing media content.

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