Alan Partington

The main part of this book consists of a series of case studies which involve the use of corpora and corpus analysis technology. Each case study sets out with a discussion of a problem area, with reference to both the descriptive and applied literature on the argument, and then goes on to suggest ways of exploiting corpus data to shed light on the area. Emphasis is given to what can be gleaned from studying data but cannot be learnt from other resources such as dictionaries, grammars,
language textbooks and so on. In many cases the evidence of language use obtained from corpora is able to refine, or even correct, the information that other resources provide.
The particular contribution the book makes to corpus studies is that it combines language description with suggestions for pedagogical application (where these are relevant). Moreover, it includes various different types of language description, ranging from investigations into word sense, through phraseology and syntax, text studies, idiom and metaphor to creative use. It deals with meaning at a variety of levels: denotational, connotational, syntactic, textual, metaphorical and pragmatic/cultural. What is common to all the studies, however, is the regard for the importance of context in interpreting every sort of meaning.

This accessible introductory textbook 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.

This 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.

Intended as a textbook for courses in politics, media and communication studies, this volume looks at the relationship among politicians, the press and the public through the language they employ. Topics include persuasion and "spin"; political metaphors; slogans, soundbites and rhetorical figures; ways of arguing (from the logical to the non-logical but nevertheless effective argument); news interviewing techniques; humour, irony and satire; and how to praise and how to blame. Texts considered range from extracts by Dr Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela to thoughts by and about Barack Obama and his election campaign to the infamous BBC Paxman - Blair interview. Each unit contains a wide variety of practical examples and student exercises with keys. About the authors: Alan Partington is Associate Professor of English linguistics at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Bologna. Charlotte Taylor is Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics, School of Languages, University of Portsmouth.

This volume contains a collection of papers pertaining to the SiBol corpora, which consist of British broadsheet newspapers from the years 1993 and 2005. In order to examine diachronic variation, the papers compare the two sets of corpora using techniques such as keyword analyses, and targeted searches of terms like moral, ethics and science. The papers are from the field of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) which combines a quantitative, statistical approach with a more qualitative approach typical of discourse analysis. Using such large corpora, the authors are able to study not only grammatical developments over time but also variations in lexical and phrasal preferences. This enables us to observe changes in newspaper prose style over the period (which reflect shifting relationships between newspapers and their readerships as well as perhaps overall changes in language) and also perform various sorts of content analyses, that is, examine new - and older - attitudes to social cultural and political phenomenon, as construed and projected by the mainstream UK quality (or 'blacktop') press.

Corpus linguistics has made impressive strides in the fields of lexicography and grammatical description, but has had relatively little to say as yet in describing features of discourse. This volume, then, examines how it is possible to use concordance technology and the detailed linguistic evidence available in corpora to enhance the study of, among other things, how speakers/writers organise their discourse, how they express evaluation of their topics and the rhetorical strategies they employ to persuade an audience. Particular attention is paid to interrogating specialized corpora and to devising techniques to discover what is going on between speakers and between authors and readers in particular varieties of the language. These studies reveal the value of integrating corpus techniques with other, non-automatic, methods of research into the linguistic record and of combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. In general, they show how it is possible to use corpora to analyse discourse not only as product but also as process. The term Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) is coined to describe a mixed methods approach to studying discourse using corpora.

This book is a corpus-assisted examination of the relationship between the White House, in the person of its press secretary, and the press corps, through a linguistic analysis of the language used by both sides.

This work is highly original in demonstrating how concordance technology and the detailed linguistic evidence available in corpora can be used to study discourse features of text and the communicative strategies of speakers. It is of considerable interest to all linguists interested in corpus-based linguistics and pragmatics, as well as sociolinguists and students and scholars of communications, politics and the media.

The Linguistics of Laughter examines what speakers try to achieve by producing ‘laughter-talk’ (the talk preceding and eliciting an episode of laughter) and, by using abundant examples from language corpora, what hearers are signalling when they produce laughter.

In particular, Alan Partington focuses on the tactical use of laughter-talk to achieve specific rhetorical, and strategic, ends: for example, to construct an identity, to make an argumentative point, to threaten someone else’s face or save one's own. Although laughter and humour are by no means always related, the book also considers the implications these corpus-based observations may have about humour theory in general.

As one of the first works to have recourse to such a sizeable databank of examples of laughter in spontaneous running talk, this impressive volume is an essential point of reference and an inspiration for scholars with an interest in corpus linguistics, discourse, humour, wordplay, irony and laughter-talk as a social phenomenon.

This volume is a collection of original essays written in dedication to John Morley, who founded the Centro Linguistico of the University of Siena at the end of the 1980s. The range of topics embraced, which include grammar, lexicology, semiotics, corpus-assisted discourse studies, stylistics, cross-language studies, and political, social and media linguistics, is a testament to the very wide variety of intellectual interests, curiosities and pursuits of its dedicatee.

This paper will cover a wide range of history, of themes and of linguistic approaches and notions. As the title implies, we intend to examine how delegimitisation of opposing speakers / authors and their stances is attempted, incorporating the use of techniques from the burgeoning area of Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies (CaDS; Partington et al 2013). We will draw on notions of persuasion first systematised by Aristotle, and also more recent theories which have largely arisen from the area of corpus-assisted linguistics, namely text organisation/structures (Hoey 1983, 1991; Partington / Taylor 2018), evaluation analysis (Hunston / Thompson 2000), lexical priming (Hoey 2005) and its subcategory, highly relevant to political discourse, of deliberately forced lexical priming (Duguid 2009a). Attempts to use corpus techniques to investigate argument structures is a much neglected ‘dusty corner’ (Taylor / Marchi eds. 2018) of CaDS, given a historical tendency of corpus linguistics to focus on copious micro- rather than macro-structures and strategies.

Page 1. Alan Partington, John Morley & Louann Haarman (eds.) Corpora and Discourse ooooao ... 57 LOUANN HAARMAN "John, what's going on?" Some features of live exchanges on television news 71 DISCOURSE SIGNPOSTING 89 ...

"This paper is an overview of the application of corpus linguistics methodologies, with special reference to the field of cross-cultural studies. It discusses the application of corpus techniques in the study of grammar, semantics, evaluation, contemporary language evolution, translation, discourse studies and cross-cultural issues. If some of these linguistic aspects are investigated by sorting to general corpora or, more precisely, ‘heterogeneric’ corpora, more specific research objectives may be achieved by compiling ‘monogeneric’, that is, ‘ad-hoc’ specialized corpora. Empirical data provided by both types of corpora may help cross-cultural studies to become more systematic in detecting the shifts in cultural practices as reflected in language. "

This paper presents a description of the tools and methodologies employed in the novel discipline of modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies. The main instruments are a set of three ‘sister’ corpora of parallel structure and content from different moments of contemporary time, namely 1993, 2005 and 2010, along with a number of corpus interrogation tools. The methodologies are the particular techniques devised by the SiBol research team for employing these interrogation tools to shed light on the various research questions treated in the paper. The first part of the paper outlines ways in which these tools and techniques can be used to track changes in the grammar, lexis and discourse practices of UK broadsheet or ‘quality’ newspapers. Given the important role of newspapers, some of these changes may well be indicative of general changes in UK written English. The second part, instead, describes a number of studies conducted by the research group into how the reporting of ...

This paper is an examination in three parts of the UK\u2019s debate on membership of the European Union, before and immediately after the so-called \u2018Brexit\u2019 Referendum. The first part takes its cue from an article by Wolfgang Teubert which has exercised considerable influence in the field of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), namely, his examination of the language of EUscepticism in the UK (Teubert 2001). The aim of the CADS approach is the uncovering, in the discourse type under study, of non-obvious meanings and patterns of meanings, that is, meanings which might not be readily available to naked-eye perusal. Teubert\u2019s paper was an inspiring example of these procedures.1 In the second part, a para-replication of Teubert\u2019s work, we revisit attitudes to the EU as represented in sections of the UK press in 2013 (the year the British Prime Minister announced an \u201cin-out\u201d referendum on EU membership). The third section examines the themes debated immediately before and immediately after the referendum vote in June 2016. We also reflect on how the much-invoked notion of negative representation needs to be employed with care, particularly with regard to media discourses

"The kind of linguistic behaviour under scrutiny in this paper is an example of institutional talk, defined as talk at work and talk for work (Drew and Heritage 1992). Some of the constitutive rules of institutional talk are as structural and unequivocal as those determining the stalking behaviour of lions or the game of chess, in our case: address your question to the podium; ask one question per turn; make your question as brief as is reasonable. Beyond these there are rules of etiquette: use first names, such as ‘Mike’, ‘Joe’, ‘Helen’; if you do have a second question, pre-announce it: ‘and I have a follow-up, if I may’. But beyond these, as we have seen, in language-based and competitive activities like these brief-ings, many of the rules are open to negotiation: are ad hominem attacks permissible?; is entrapment admissible? is the press’s insistence on the Clinton-Lewinsky case an obsession or legitimate interest? Beyond this kind of rules we enter into the realms of strategy. Just as with any rule-based activity, not all games unfold in the same way and different players adopt different techniques from, in our case, the cynical Helen Thomas (UPI), to the hyper-aggressive Lester Kinsolving (talk radio), to the companionable Wolf Blitzer (CNN). Constitutive rules are exploitable resources, from the hunting behaviour of big cats to the Sicil-ian Defence, from the incisive questioning of a Washington Post reporter to the fight or flight of a White House press secretary. "

The Goffman (1967) and Brown and Levinson (1987) socio-pragmatic theory of face was first devised through speculating on and observing the interaction of individuals. Later research has looked at the phenomenon of group-face (e.g. Spencer-Oatey 2007). In this research we examine how face and facework theory can also be applied to communications made by state actors to the outside world, in other words, whether facework theories could also be applied to national face. To this end we compiled a corpus of all press conferences held by the Ministry of Chinese Foreign Affairs in 2016 and subjected it to quantitative and qualitative analysis, as well as comparative analysis with US White House press briefings. Chinese government statements were felt to be a promising genre partly because of the particularly intricate relations China has with its geographically close partners and neighbours and partly because of the supposed special importance accorded to face in Chinese culture (Kádár et ...

In this paper, I want to examine the special relevance of (non)obviousness in corpus linguistics through drawing on case studies. The research discussion is divided into two parts. The first is an examination of (non)obviousness at the micro-level, that is, in lexico-grammatical analyses, whilst the second looks at the more macro-level of (non)obviousness on the plane of discourse. In the final sections, I will examine various types of non-obvious meaning one can come across in Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies (CADS), which range from: ‘I knew that all along (now)’ to ‘that's interesting’ to ‘I sensed that but didn't know why’ (intuitive impressions and corpus-assisted explanations) to ‘I never even knew I never knew that’ (serendipity or ‘non-obvious non-obviousness’, analogous to ‘unknown unknowns’).

Abstract Evaluative clashes are, of course, only noticed because of the expectation that speakers will use evaluation consistently and coherently over set stretches of discourse, a process I term evaluative harmony. In this paper I first categorize types of evaluative clash and then investigate, with detailed examples, many derived from large language corpora, of how speakers and writers both construct cohesive evaluative harmony in stretches of text but also how they can sometimes exploit this harmony to surprise and engage their listeners and readers.

In this chapter we will first examine what the label Europe has been used to indicate in both modern and historical times. In the course of this we will examine the recent political controversy over the centrality or otherwise of Christianity to European traditions and unity. We will examine data from the Italian and UK press partitions of the IntUne Corpus drawn from four Italian and four British newspapers (see the Introduction to this volume for the composition of the corpus) for traces of awareness of a common European historical identity and attempt to contrast different stances both between the two national presses and among individual newspaper titles

This paper examines the discourses relating to antisemitism in the three leading UK national “quality” newspapers from 1993 to 2009. To this end, three corpora were compiled, each consisting of the complete set of instances in context in these papers where antisemitism is mentioned, the first from 1993 the others from 2005 and 2009. Considerable changes were noted between the discourses in the earlier corpus compared to the later ones. In the first, the majority of discourses were either historical and/or literary-artistic (typically discussing whether a particular writer or artist had been antisemitic) or, if they were related to contemporary society, they were discussions of potential or reported antisemitism outside the UK, especially in Eastern Europe. In the later corpora, however, there is much more discussion about a perceived resurgence of antisemitism in the UK and Western Europe. After an overview of these changing patterns, particularly controversial recent cases of alleg...

This paper presents a description of the tools and methodologies employed in the novel discipline of modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies. The main instruments are a set of three 'sister' corpora of parallel structure and content from different moments of contemporary time, namely 1993, 2005 and 2010, along with a number of corpus interrogation tools. The methodologies are the particular techniques devised by the SiBol research team 1 for employing these interrogation tools to shed light on the various research questions treated in the paper. The first part of the paper outlines ways in which these tools and techniques can be used to track changes in the grammar, lexis and discourse practices of UK broadsheet or 'quality' newspapers. Given the important role of newspapers, some of these changes may well be indicative of general changes in UK written English. The second part, instead, describes a number of studies conducted by the research group into how the reporting of various social and cultural themes and issues, ranging from what is seen as a moral issue, to the rhetoric of appeals to science, to how antisemitism is debated, has developed over the time period in question. The concluding section discusses the relationship between the methodologies employed in modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies and wider scientific research methodology.

This 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.

In this paper, I want to examine the special relevance of (non)obviousness in corpus linguistics through drawing on case studies. The research discussion is divided into two parts. The first is an examination of (non)obviousness at the micro-level, that is, in lexico-grammatical analyses, whilst the second looks at the more macro-level of (non)obviousness on the plane of discourse. In the final sections, I will examine various types of non-obvious meaning one can come across in Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies (CADS), which range from: 'I knew that all along (now)' to 'that's interesting' to 'I sensed that but didn't know why' (intuitive impressions and corpus-assisted explanations) to 'I never even knew I never knew that' (serendipity or 'non-obvious non-obviousness', analogous to 'unknown unknowns').

In 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.

Keywords: evaluation, corpus-assisted discourse studies, semantic prosody, suffixes, political linguistics

This paper is an examination in three parts of the UK’s debate on membership of the European Union, before and immediately after the so-called ‘Brexit’ Referendum.
The first part takes its cue from an article by Wolfgang Teubert
which has exercised considerable influence in the field of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), namely, his examination of the language of EUscepticism in the UK (Teubert 2001). The aim of the CADS approach is the uncovering, in the discourse type under study, of non-obvious meanings and patterns of meanings, that is, meanings which might not be readily available to naked-eye perusal. Teubert’s paper was an inspiring example of these procedures.
In the second part, a para-replication of Teubert’s work, we revisit
attitudes to the EU as represented in sections of the UK press in 2013 (the year the British Prime Minister announced an “in-out” referendum on EU membership).
The third section examines the themes debated immediately before and
immediately after the referendum vote in June 2016. We also reflect on how the much-invoked notion of negative representation needs to be employed with care, particularly with regard to media discourses.

Corpus linguistics has occasionally been criticised for being blind to absence, that is, it may have much to say about what is present in the corpus being examined but it cannot enlighten us about what is absent, what is not found therein (see the discussion in Baker 2005: 35). But such criticisms derive from a narrow simplistic view of corpus linguistics as simple statistics gathering. Instead, the capacity of corpus techniques to allow the researcher to compare and contrast large data collections actually adds new dimensions to the investigation of absence, as Taylor remarks:

As corpus linguists and and discourse analysts, we actually have a rather impressive arsenal for  investigating absence (Taylor 2012)

Moreover, as we have seen during the course of this research, absences come in different types. An important distinction was made between ‘known absence’ - or rather suspected absence - and ‘unknown absence’. A suspected absence can be searched for as, for instance, when we checked the 2010 newspaper data to see whether various MENA leaders were ever referred to as dictator. An  ‘unknown absence’ is an absence revealed serendipitously during the course of research as when stepping from one concordance to another took us in various stages from Mubarak to the discovery a White House distinction between countries where both sides were blamed for violence and those where only one side was blamed.
We can list then a number of ways in which corpus techniques can shed light on absences in the analysis of a historical political event. They can:

• Verify - or otherwise - suspected absences.
• Reveal previously unsuspected ‘unknown absences’.
• Locate absence, that is, tell us from which part of the data a particular message is missing, for instance, speculation if the forcible removal of Mubarak was absent from the briefings but present in the CNN news reports. If a corpus of spoken interaction is tagged for type of speaker, for example, questioners and responders, it should be possible to discover what sorts of messages are present or absent in the contributions of each speaker type.
• Quantify absence, for example, we saw there was no increase in references to MENA countries in MENAlate, the corpus subsection containing articles from the last quarter of 2010, compared to the rest of the year.
• Track presences - absence, that is, the appearance and disappearance of messages over time (see section 1.2 on modern diachronic corpus-assisted discourse studies). For instance in the White House briefings we tracked the rapid disappearance of Libyan government and its replacement by Qaddafi regime.

As for the interpretation and consequent explanation of absence, as with all interpretation, so much will depend on the skill, knowledge of the world and indeed the worldview and prejudices of the researcher. However, the marriage of comparative statistical techniques with researcher inferencing from data would seem to offer a more valid basis for interpretative statements on absence than introspection and conjecture alone, however educated, on what messages might be absent from or should have been present in a particular set of texts. Indeed, it is hard to see how, without corpus techniques, any confident statements on many of the absences in the large data-sets, as employed in this research, could be made. Before debating ‘what is implied, inferred, insinuated or latently hinted at’ (Baker et al. 2008: 296), one needs to ascertain what actually was and was not said or written, and corpus tools and techniques seem to be helpful and at times even vital in doing so.

The Goffman (1967) and Brown and Levinson (1987) socio-pragmatic theory of face was first devised through speculating on and observing the interaction of individuals. Later research has looked at the phenomenon of group-face (e.g. Spencer-Oatey 2007). In this research we examine how face and facework theory can also be applied to communications made by state actors to the outside world, in other words, whether facework theories could also be applied to national face. To this end we compiled a corpus of all press conferences held by the Ministry of Chinese Foreign Affairs in 2016 and subjected it to quantitative and qualitative analysis, as well as comparative analysis with US White House press briefings. Chinese government statements were felt to be a promising genre partly because of the particularly intricate relations China has with its geographically close partners and neighbours and partly because of the supposed special importance accorded to face in Chinese culture (Kádár et al 2013; Chen and Hwang 2016). The techniques we employ in the analyses derive from the field of corpus-assisted discourse studies (Partington, Duguid and Taylor 2013).

In this paper we outline ways in which corpus-assisted
discourse studies (CADS) can help build upon traditional qualitative linguistic analysis. We begin by presenting a number of illustrative case studies, and conclude with methodological considerations on how CADS can reveal both 'known unknown' and 'unknown unknown' types of meaning in large collections of texts.

This Chapter discusses some of the more controversial apsects of evaluative (semantic) prosody. It investigates how texts are not only cohere propositionally but also evaluatively; we both construct and elaborate texts in evaluative blocks.
In Aijmer & Ruhlemann (2015) Corpus Pragmatics. CUP.

Scanned version with page numbers. Full citation:
Partington A. 2008. The armchair and the machine: Corpus-Assisted Discourse Research, in C. Taylor Torsello, K. Ackerley and E. Castello (eds) Corpora for University Language Teachers, Bern: Peter Lang, 189-213.

Evaluative clashes are, of course, only noticed because of the expectation that speakers will use evaluation consistently and coherently over set stretches of discourse, a process I term evaluative harmony. In this paper I first categorise types of evaluative clash and then investigate, with detailed examples, many derived from large language corpora, of how speakers and writers both construct cohesive evaluative harmony in stretches of text but also how they can sometimes exploit this harmony to surprise and engage their listeners and readers.

In this multi-comparative study, Partington uses techniques from corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), along with analytical notions from functional grammar, to examine how the Arab world is represented in various written media. The first comparison is between the representations in two politically diverse UK newspapers, the left-leaning Guardian and the right-leaning Telegraph. The second comparison is between these representations and those found in two Arabic English-language newspapers, the Daily News Egypt and the Gulf News. In a further diachronic comparison, the objective is to see if there are any changes in the representations of the Arab world in the western newspapers between 2010 and 2013, given the events in this period in the Middle East and North Africa. The study begins with a consideration of the significance of the notion of representation(s) in discourse analysis of the media. It ends with a discussion of some of the issues frequently encountered in this kind of research.

This paper addresses the charge sometimes made against corpus linguistics that, although CL may be suited to saying things about what is to be found in a dataset it cannot deal with absences, that is, items not to be found therein. We begin by examining what absence might mean in a linguistic sense and distinguish among different varieties of absences, for instance, ‘known absence’ compared with ‘unknown absence’, absence from a sizeable corpus, from a limited set of texts or from a position in a single text, relative absence and absolute absence, and absence defined as ‘hidden from open view’, that is, hidden meaning. This is followed by an examination of how corpus linguistics has been able to address each of these kinds of absences and indeed, on occasion, is shown to be the only means by which certain absences could be examined. We demonstrate too how certain concepts arising from corpus linguistics, in particular evaluative (semantic) prosody and lexical priming, are extremely relevant to research into absence. Overall, we show how corpus techniques are invaluable in not only locating absence but in identifying types of absence, in quantifying it and even in assisting the researcher to evaluate the relevance of absences.

This volume is a collection of original essays written in dedication to John Morley, who founded the Centro Linguistico of the University of Siena at the end of the 1980s. The range of topics embraced, which include grammar, lexicology, semiotics, corpus-assisted discourse studies, stylistics, cross-language studies, and political, social and media linguistics, is a testament to the very wide variety of intellectual interests, curiosities and pursuits of its dedicatee.

This chapter has two research aims. The first is to examine how speakers mark importance both at local and more macro levels in a particular discourse type (TED talks). The second is to demonstrate how methodologies typically employed in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), particularly the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis, that is, the moving backwards and forwards between statistical analysis and close reading, are particularly effective in investigating the somewhat neglected topic of importance marking in discourse.

The data for the present study comprises laughter-talk (defined as the talk preceding and provoking, intentionally or otherwise, a bout of laughter) occurring in two corpora of press briefings held at the White House, during the Clinton era and the subsequent Bush administration respectively. It was apparent that one very common form of laughter-eliciting utterance or event was misperformance, that is, some form of error or shortcoming on the part of a participant. Another common occasion for laughter was explicit metadiscursive comment on the business in hand, that is, asides. The two were frequently found in tandem, the first triggering the second. In this paper we look at the repercussions of misperformance and asides on the kind of face-work (Brown and Levinson 1987) performed in this discourse type, at how accusations of shortcoming can be used to threaten another speaker’s face, how perpetrators react and how they might attempt to recover the face they have lost.

This paper outlines a corpus-assisted investigation into the nature and functions of irony in both spoken
interaction and written texts. It begins 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.

I was eager to read this book for a number reasons, not least that I was about to teach an MA module on language analysis and I am also intending to use corpus based methods in my PhD research. All thought-provoking ideas are, therefore, welcome […]