Charlotte Taylor
University of Sussex, English, Faculty Member
- Language and Media Discourses, Migration (Sociology), Corpus Linguistics and Discourse Analysis, Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis, Corpus Approaches to Discourse Studies, Linguistic Impoliteness, and 13 moreConflict (Languages and Linguistics), Linguistic Politeness, Migration Studies, Immigration, Corpus Linguistics, Language and Ideology, Language in Society, Language Ideology, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Gender and Sexuality, Verbal Irony, Humor and Sarcasm, and Conventionalized verbal ironyedit
- I'm basically interested in how people get stuff done with language and within this (very!) broad area my research fa... moreI'm basically interested in how people get stuff done with language and within this (very!) broad area my research falls into two main areas:
1) the analysis of linguistic impoliteness in interaction, in particular mock polite behaviours
2) corpus-assisted discourse analysis of press reporting. In particular, I have focussed on the representation of migrants in the press and I am looking to extend this work. I am also interested in methodological issues and am currently working on a book (with Anna Marchi) on the question of subjectivity in corpus and discourse work.edit
Corpus linguistics has now come of age and Corpus Approaches to Discourse equips students with the means to question, defend and refine the methodology. Looking at corpus linguistics in discourse research from a critical perspective, this... more
Corpus linguistics has now come of age and Corpus Approaches to Discourse equips students with the means to question, defend and refine the methodology. Looking at corpus linguistics in discourse research from a critical perspective, this volume is a call for greater reflexivity in the field. The chapters, each written by leading authorities, contain an overview of an emerging area and a case-study, presenting practical advice alongside theoretical reflection. Carefully structured with an introduction by the editors and a conclusion by leading researcher, Paul Baker, this is key reading for advanced students and researchers of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis.
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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... more
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 recent issues relating to the US, UK, Europe, the Middle East, China and India, every topic is complemented with guiding tasks and queries 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.
‘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 recent issues relating to the US, UK, Europe, the Middle East, China and India, every topic is complemented with guiding tasks and queries 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.
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This volume presents an in-depth analysis of mock politeness, bringing together research from different academic fields and investigating a range of first-order metapragmatic labels for mock politeness in British English and Italian. It... more
This volume presents an in-depth analysis of mock politeness, bringing together research from different academic fields and investigating a range of first-order metapragmatic labels for mock politeness in British English and Italian. It is the first book-length theorisation and detailed description of mock politeness and, as such, contributes to the growing field of impoliteness. The approach taken is methodologically innovative because it takes a first-order metalanguage approach, basing the analysis on behaviours which participants themselves have identified as impolite. Furthermore, it exploits the affordances of corpus pragmatics, a rapidly developing field. Mock Politeness in English and Italian: A corpus-assisted metalanguage analysis will be of interest to scholars and postgraduate students researching im/politeness and verbal aggression, in particular those interested in im/politeness implicatures and non-conventional meanings.
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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";... more
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.
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This study addresses the media reporting of the conflict in Iraq in 2003 and analyses the linguistic representation of the participants in the war. As Fowler (1991: 4) states “[t]here are always different ways of saying the same thing,... more
This study addresses the media reporting of the conflict in Iraq in 2003 and analyses the linguistic representation of the participants in the war. As Fowler (1991: 4) states “[t]here are always different ways of saying the same thing, and they are not random, accidental alternatives. Differences in expression carry ideological distinctions (and thus differences in representation)”. Our aims are to take such differences in expression and to describe how the various participants were construed in the UK press over a specific period, basing ourselves on the theoretical assumption that, as social identities are enacted in discourse, they can be uncovered through discourse analysis. From the analyses we conclude that the reporting of this war was characterised by vagueness regarding the enemy, which appears as one dimensional and under-defined as the Other in the metaphorical war on terror.
This paper examines the ways in which the group of people now known as the Windrush generation, who moved to the UK in the period 1948–1971, have been represented in public discourse. This group has been adversely affected by the current... more
This paper examines the ways in which the group of people now known as the Windrush generation, who moved to the UK in the period 1948–1971, have been represented in public discourse. This group has been adversely affected by the current ‘hostile environment’ policy in the UK regarding immigration. As I show, in the ensuing and highly critical debate, the government repeatedly positioned them as ‘good’ migrants and placed them in a binary opposition with ‘undesirable’ migrants, who they cite as the intended target of their policy. Using diachronic corpora of parliamentary debates and national media, I compare this contemporary rhetoric with (a) Windrush representations in the 1940s and 1950s, and (b) contemporary representation of those the government constructs as unwanted migrants. Taking metaphor as a key for the comparison I show that there is very little continuity or overlap in how the Windrush migrants were discussed at the time of their arrival and in the current period. Instead, there is a much greater proximity in the past representations of the Windrush migrants and the current representations of ‘undesirable’ migrants. This mismatch in actual and perceived representation at the time of arrival indicates how nostalgia functions in
migration discourses, even facilitating anti-immigration arguments.
migration discourses, even facilitating anti-immigration arguments.
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While much cross-cultural and cross-linguistic analysis centres on difference because it is so often what is salient in miscommunication, we argue that we need to be more aware of similarity. Drawing on corpus-assisted discourse studies,... more
While much cross-cultural and cross-linguistic analysis centres on difference because it is so often what is salient in miscommunication, we argue that we need to be more aware of similarity. Drawing on corpus-assisted discourse studies, we aim to uncover similarities in the pragmatic processes across two languages/cultures, more specifically, the shared developments in the conventionalisation of apparently polite forms for impolite functions used in British and Chinese forum communities within the last decade or so. The case studies which have been selected for analysis are 'hehe' in Chinese and 'HTH' [hope that helps] in British English. In both cases, these items had previously been identified as potentially mock polite through their presence in meta-discussions of im/politeness within the forums themselves. Our analysis shows how the items become pragmaticalised within specific contexts, while remaining unaffected in others, displaying both diachronic and synchronic variation in the degree of conventionalisaton of mock politeness which they express. The differentiation between the expected behaviours in different areas of the forms (collaborative or combative) and correlation with the mock polite usage also helps explain how it is that users orient towards the conventionalised meaning even when it is still relatively low frequency compared to polite usage, i.e. low frequency but high saliency.
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In this paper I investigate one aspect of the relationship between gender and mock politeness, focussing in particular on sarcastic behaviours. Previous research into sarcasm as an academic concept has suggested that it is more likely to... more
In this paper I investigate one aspect of the relationship between gender and mock politeness, focussing in particular on sarcastic behaviours. Previous research into sarcasm as an academic concept has suggested that it is more likely to be performed by males. In the data analysed here, there was no correlation between mock politeness and gender. However, there was a preference for labelling male mock polite behaviour as sarcastic, suggesting that the correlation is not between the academic concept of sarcasm and the male behaviour, but the way that mock polite behaviour is evaluated and labelled. The analysis draws on both corpus linguistics and survey data to further describe the relationship between the metapragmatic labels sarcastic and bitchy and gender of the performer.
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This chapter addresses the theme of othering by reporting on preliminary work from a European project aimed at building a dictionary of migration discourse keywords. The chapter investigates the use of the terms COMMUNITY and comunità in... more
This chapter addresses the theme of othering by reporting on preliminary work from a European project aimed at building a dictionary of migration discourse keywords. The chapter investigates the use of the terms COMMUNITY and comunità in two British and Italian newspapers (Guardian, Times, Repubblica, Corriere della Sera) using corpus-assisted discourse analysis. In the first stage, it shows how these terms are interpreted as keywords of migration discourse. In the second, it examines the evaluative weighting of these lexical items. Contrary to previous work (e.g. Williams, 1983; Gallissot, 2007), it is shown here that the terms COMMUNITY and comunità are actually used as part of a pattern of othering, when employed in the context of migration discourse.
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The relationship between irony and sarcasm has been much discussed and yet there is still little agreement on how the two relate at a theoretical level, as Attardo (2000: 795) notes “there is no consensus on whether irony and sarcasm are... more
The relationship between irony and sarcasm has been much discussed and yet there is still little agreement on how the two relate at a theoretical level, as Attardo (2000: 795) notes “there is no consensus on whether irony and sarcasm are essentially the same thing […] or if they differ significantly”. The aim of this paper is to take a user-perspective and report on how participants in everyday conversations in the UK and Italy talk about irony and sarcasm and what kinds of authentic behaviors are described using these labels. These findings are discussed with reference to the academic concepts of irony and sarcasm to investigate how the lay and academic perspectives relate.
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This paper investigates the extent to which perceptions of cultural variation correspond to actual practice with reference to (national) cultures in Britain and Italy. More specifically, the aspect of im/politeness which is addressed is... more
This paper investigates the extent to which perceptions of cultural variation correspond to actual practice with reference to (national) cultures in Britain and Italy. More specifically, the aspect of im/politeness which is addressed is mock politeness, a subset of implicational impoliteness (Culpeper 2011) which is triggered by an im/politeness mismatch.
In the first phase of the study, two sets of comparable corpora are employed to investigate perceptions of mock politeness (using search terms such as sarcastic and patronising) in relation to cultural identities. The first pair of corpora is composed of national newspapers in England and Italy, collected in 2014, and the second set are web corpora (ItTenTen and EnTenTen12, see Jakubíček et al. 2013). What emerges from this stage is a strong tendency for both the English and Italian corpora to associate (potential) mock polite behaviours such as being ironic with a British cultural identity.
In the second stage of the study, I use a corpus of conversational data from British English and Italian online discussion forums, in which mock polite behaviours have been identified and annotated, in order to investigate whether there is any evidence for the cultural assumptions found in the first phase. As will be shown, the analysis reveals both variation in cultural practice and a significant gap between perceptions and practice.
In describing and identifying this gap between perceptions and practice, I show both how (anglocentric) academic description has underestimated cultural variation, and, in contrast, how cultural variation is over-estimated in lay description.
In the first phase of the study, two sets of comparable corpora are employed to investigate perceptions of mock politeness (using search terms such as sarcastic and patronising) in relation to cultural identities. The first pair of corpora is composed of national newspapers in England and Italy, collected in 2014, and the second set are web corpora (ItTenTen and EnTenTen12, see Jakubíček et al. 2013). What emerges from this stage is a strong tendency for both the English and Italian corpora to associate (potential) mock polite behaviours such as being ironic with a British cultural identity.
In the second stage of the study, I use a corpus of conversational data from British English and Italian online discussion forums, in which mock polite behaviours have been identified and annotated, in order to investigate whether there is any evidence for the cultural assumptions found in the first phase. As will be shown, the analysis reveals both variation in cultural practice and a significant gap between perceptions and practice.
In describing and identifying this gap between perceptions and practice, I show both how (anglocentric) academic description has underestimated cultural variation, and, in contrast, how cultural variation is over-estimated in lay description.
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This paper aims to cast light on the somewhat neglected area of mock politeness. The principle objectives are to describe the ways that mock politeness is talked about and performed. In order to investigate such usage, I analyse data from... more
This paper aims to cast light on the somewhat neglected area of mock politeness. The principle objectives are to describe the ways that mock politeness is talked about and performed. In order to investigate such usage, I analyse data from informal, naturally occurring conversations in a UK-based online forum. The paper introduces a range of metalinguistic expressions which are used to refer to mock polite behaviours in lay interactions and describes the different structures of mock polite behaviours. The analysis shows that both metalanguage and structure are more diverse than anticipated by previous research and, as a result, the paper argues against equating mock politeness with sarcasm and calls for further research into mock politeness as an important strategy of impoliteness.
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This paper is a cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse study of the representation of migrants in the Italian and UK press and it adopts a two-stage methodological approach. In the first phase, the number of references to... more
This paper is a cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse study of the representation of migrants in the Italian and UK press and it adopts a two-stage methodological approach. In the first phase, the number of references to nationalities which collocate with refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, migrants (and Italian equivalents) are calculated and this information is subsequently used to identify any ‘mismatch’ between the amount of attention that migrants from a given country receive in the media and the official population estimates. In the second, and most extensive stage, the representations of the foregrounded nationalities are analysed through the moral panic framework. Results show an extensive negative representation of some groups, but there is no evidence of a fully iterated moral panic relating to any of the nationalities investigated.
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It has often been noted that corpus-assisted discourse analysis is inherently comparative (e.g. Partington 2009) but in this paper I want to emphasise that such comparison does not exclusively entail the analysis of difference and that... more
It has often been noted that corpus-assisted discourse analysis is inherently comparative (e.g. Partington 2009) but in this paper I want to emphasise that such comparison does not exclusively entail the analysis of difference and that the analysis of similarity can be productively incorporated into the framework. As Baker (2006: 182) notes, the way that differences and similarities interact with each other is ‘an essential part of any comparative corpus-based study of discourse’. In this paper, first, I outline why the search for similarity is relevant to the analysis of discourse using corpus linguistics, I then go on to survey some possible ways of doing this, and finally I take the representation of boy/s and girl/s in British broadsheet newspapers as an example.
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In this chapter we focus on issues of identity as they relate to the construction of the ‘other’, or more precisely of foreign immigrants, in the press partitions of the British and Italian corpora. As Hastings and Manning argue: ‘[i]t... more
In this chapter we focus on issues of identity as they relate to the construction of the ‘other’, or more precisely of foreign immigrants, in the press partitions of the British and Italian corpora. As Hastings and Manning argue: ‘[i]t has long been an anthropological truism that the construction of (ethnolinguistic) identity cannot be studied except at its boundaries, beginning with alterity or otherness’ (2004: 293). This is also in line with Hardt-Mautner’s statement that ‘[n]ational identity emerges very much as a relational concept, the construction of “self” being heavily dependent on the construction of “other”’ (1995: 179). By studying who is other we learn how we think of ourselves.
The two sections of the chapter both start with a brief historical overview of the way the press has dealt with immigration in the past in the relevant country before going on to make analyses of the most salient expressions referring to immigration in the IntUne Italian and UK press corpora. These analyses are based on building up collocational profiles by looking at the words which co-occur most frequently with these expressions, their collocates, first of all in the limited context of a concordance line, classically of 80 characters and, where necessary, in a larger context, frequently reading the whole article. We then examine how the ‘us’ of the title is constructed by identifying the significant collocates of the word our for English and nostr* for Italian. There is also a brief analysis of the metaphors and topoi related to immigration which appear in both waves of the UK and Italian press partitions of the IntUne Corpus. The chapter ends with a comparison of the construction of the immigrant in these two partitions.
The two sections of the chapter both start with a brief historical overview of the way the press has dealt with immigration in the past in the relevant country before going on to make analyses of the most salient expressions referring to immigration in the IntUne Italian and UK press corpora. These analyses are based on building up collocational profiles by looking at the words which co-occur most frequently with these expressions, their collocates, first of all in the limited context of a concordance line, classically of 80 characters and, where necessary, in a larger context, frequently reading the whole article. We then examine how the ‘us’ of the title is constructed by identifying the significant collocates of the word our for English and nostr* for Italian. There is also a brief analysis of the metaphors and topoi related to immigration which appear in both waves of the UK and Italian press partitions of the IntUne Corpus. The chapter ends with a comparison of the construction of the immigrant in these two partitions.
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This paper uses corpus-assisted discourse studies to explore the representation of foreign migrants in the Italian press. Presenting a para-replication of extensive research on the representation of migrants in the British press, the... more
This paper uses corpus-assisted discourse studies to explore the representation of foreign migrants in the Italian press. Presenting a para-replication of extensive research on the representation of migrants in the British press, the importance of identifying accurate translation equivalents in crosslinguistic studies is briefly discussed, and the constructions of immigrati, clandestini,extracomunitari and stranieri are analysed from a linguistic, discursive perspective. Subsequently, the different nationalities which collocate with these terms are briefly examined, and in particular the lexical items cinese/cinesi are studied in greater detail, with reference to moral panic stories.
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This chapter uses the corpus-assisted discourse studies approach to analyse the Hutton Inquiry from the theoretical perspective of (im)politeness. As with many instances of institutional discourse, in hostile examination it cannot be... more
This chapter uses the corpus-assisted discourse studies approach to analyse the Hutton Inquiry from the theoretical perspective of (im)politeness. As with many instances of institutional discourse, in hostile examination it cannot be assumed that conversational norms apply, nor that participants are involved in cooperative facework, and therefore this chapter aims to contribute to the growing body of work on impoliteness in institutional(ized) situations of conflict.
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In this paper, I analyse the changing rhetorical role of science in UK broadsheet newspapers from 1993 and 2005, and conclude that there have been noteworthy changes. First, science, and more specifically, the formulation the science, is... more
In this paper, I analyse the changing rhetorical role of science in UK broadsheet newspapers from 1993 and 2005, and conclude that there have been noteworthy changes. First, science, and more specifically, the formulation the science, is increasingly employed as a model of authority, appealing to ethos rather than logos; the authority is asserted but relatively rarely justified, and this may be considered the most significant change in that it drives several others. At the same time, there has been a popularisation of the science in the newspapers as it becomes an ‘add on’ to popular stories. Furthermore, there is evidence that science is being progressively fitted into the news story format, which demands recency as a news value, as opposed to features-style reports. Finally, science appears to have shifted from its earlier place in opposition to art and culture, to a paradigm in which its primary alter, or opposition, is religion.
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This chapter uses corpus-assisted discourse studies to examine the variety of functions which negative politeness forms fulfil in institutional discourse, and in particular it aims to add to the increasing literature which demonstrates... more
This chapter uses corpus-assisted discourse studies to examine the variety of functions which negative politeness forms fulfil in institutional discourse, and in particular it aims to add to the increasing literature which demonstrates that negative politeness features are clearly not limited to mitigation of the effect of an unavoidable face-threatening act (FTA) on the addressee. I would argue that in certain contexts some ‘polite’ phraseologies have become so conventionalized that, like Hacker, most competent English speakers would be primed to treat them as discourse markers indicating that a (possibly avoidable) face threat is about to follow. Within the discourse types studied here, polite phraseologies, while superficially expressing distance and deference, are seen to perform a variety of overlapping functions including: showing awareness of the discourse norms, allowing the participant to be ‘consciously aggressive in an acceptable way’ (Locher, 2004: 90), demonstrating that the participant can ‘handle it’ (Mullany, 2002), marking sections of the interaction for attention of the beneficiaries, and, finally, functioning as an integral part of the impolite move in the case of mock politeness. A secondary aim of this chapter is to explore the contribution that corpus linguistics can make to im/politeness studies.
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Witness discourse has often been associated with powerless speech (O’Barr / Atkins 1980), which was considered to be influenced by relatively low social status and lack of previous courtroom experience. The Hutton Inquiry offered a rare... more
Witness discourse has often been associated with powerless speech (O’Barr / Atkins 1980), which was considered to be influenced by relatively low social status and lack of previous courtroom experience. The Hutton Inquiry offered a rare opportunity to examine the discourse of witnesses who possessed a high social status, and were familiar with restricted question and answer formats. The data analysed in this chapter reveals that while the presence of what O’Barr and Atkins (1980) term powerless speech corresponds to a lack of institutional power, these same features may also be a means of negotiating and exerting interactional power. The negative politeness features which tend to characterise the discourse of witness talk are here not only used to mitigate unavoidable face threatening acts but to be aggressive in an acceptable way.
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Stubbs (2006), in his state of the art overview, draws attention to the frequent reticence or vagueness of corpus analysts in discussing their operational methods within a scientific context, (a context addressed in detail in Partington... more
Stubbs (2006), in his state of the art overview, draws attention to the frequent reticence or vagueness of corpus analysts in discussing their operational methods within a scientific context, (a context addressed in detail in Partington (forthcoming)). This lack of clarity in discussing the methodological framework employed is, perhaps, most surprising given the way in which corpus linguistics situates itself within a scientific frame, and lays such claims to a scientific nature. This brief paper, then, addresses the question posed in its title, namely, “What is Corpus Linguistics?” – is it a discipline, a methodology, a paradigm or none or all of these? - but does not attempt to offer any definitive answers. Rather, the aim is to present the reader with a number of observations on how corpus linguistics has been construed in its own literature and then to leave the question open, in the hope of stimulating further discussion.
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This study addresses the media reporting of the conflict in Iraq in 2003 and analyses the linguistic representation of the participants in the war. As Fowler (1991: 4) states “[t]here are always different ways of saying the same thing,... more
This study addresses the media reporting of the conflict in Iraq in 2003 and analyses the linguistic representation of the participants in the war. As Fowler (1991: 4) states “[t]here are always different ways of saying the same thing, and they are not random, accidental alternatives. Differences in expression carry ideological distinctions (and thus differences in representation)”. Our aims are to take such differences in expression and to describe how the various participants were construed in the UK press over a specific period, basing ourselves on the theoretical assumption that, as social identities are enacted in discourse, they can be uncovered through discourse analysis. From the analyses we conclude that the reporting of this war was characterised by vagueness regarding the enemy, which appears as one dimensional and under-defined as the Other in the metaphorical war on terror.
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This paper investigates how the European Union was represented in three British newspapers over two different time periods: 1993 and 2005. The Treaty on European Union, which led to the creation of the European Union, was signed in 1992... more
This paper investigates how the European Union was represented in three British newspapers over two different time periods: 1993 and 2005. The Treaty on European Union, which led to the creation of the European Union, was signed in 1992 and entered into force in 1993. The Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe was signed in 2004, and like the Maastricht Treaty was subject to ratification. However, unlike the Maastricht Treaty, it was rejected in referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005 and therefore was not implemented. These two events were chosen for their importance in the history of the European Union and because they allow for a diachronic comparison of the construal of Europe in the British press. Two sub-corpora were used in the study, the first, SiBol_93, contains approximately 92 million tokens from three broadsheet British newspapers collected in 1993 and the second, SiBol_05, contains approximately 150 million tokens collected from the same sources in 2005. Each of these corpora covers the year after the signing of the treaties and therefore the period in which the ratification was discussed. The corpora were investigated using Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) which involves a shunting between quantitative and qualitative analytical approaches and starting points (see, for example, Partington 2004, forthcoming; Baker 2006). Our findings show that while there is no simplistic positive to negative reversal of evaluation, there is certainly a marked decrease in the newsworthiness of Europe and the European Union, and the problem the European Union faces is primarily one of visibility.
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This paper explores how ‘laughter’ is communicated in a structured language learning forum. The participants are English language learners at levels A1-B1 (according to the Common European Framework), and their teachers. I start by... more
This paper explores how ‘laughter’ is communicated in a structured language learning forum. The participants are English language learners at levels A1-B1 (according to the Common European Framework), and their teachers. I start by surveying what can be analysed as ‘laughter’ including the textual representation of laughter sounds; laughter/humour related terms; emoticons; intensification; the co-construction of a humorous frame. I then go on to look at the interactional functions of the laughter in this context through analysing who laughs, what at, when, and what it accomplishes.
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The aim of this paper is to reflect on a methodological issue in multilingualism and corpus linguistics, that of comparison. How do we compare across or within corpora containing different languages? How do we identify meaningful language... more
The aim of this paper is to reflect on a methodological issue in multilingualism and corpus linguistics, that of comparison. How do we compare across or within corpora containing different languages? How do we identify meaningful language units for comparison in this context? How do we know that we are comparing like with like, and not, as the title suggests, apples and oranges? In the introductory section of this paper, I survey some of the potential challenges in setting up comparisons across languages and the kinds of study in which these difficulties may arise. I then move on to two consider in detail two points of comparison. In the first, I focus on comparison at the lexical level and draw on work from a project I am involved in which intends to create a European Discourse Dictionary of Migration Keywords. In the second part, I turn to means of comparison which allow us to abstract out above the lexical level and illustrate these with case studies on which I have worked. These supra-lexical layers of analysis include (but are not limited to) the use of semantic fields, naming strategies, transitivity patterns, metaphor, discourse frames and moral panic frames. By presenting some issues and partial solutions regarding comparison across and within multilingual corpora, I hope to create a space for a productive discussion in which we will also be able to collectively fill out and enrich this set of resources.
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This paper was a review of how work has developed between corpus linguistics and language & gender in the period since 2006.
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1 Introduction The question posed in the title comes from a conversation within my dataset and it is one that I intend to address in this paper, although probably not in the way that author intended. What I am interested in is the use of... more
1 Introduction
The question posed in the title comes from a conversation within my dataset and it is one that I intend to address in this paper, although probably not in the way that author intended. What I am interested in is the use of the label bitchy, and other terms, to describe women’s behaviours and how these relate to labels used to describe men’s behaviours. More specifically, I focus on behaviours which involve some kind of mismatch in politeness, as in:
I usually say something if someone doesn't thank me to be honest - a sarcastic "no problem" might remind them to be polite next time. (example from the mumsnet corpus)
The aims of this paper are twofold: first, to investigate the extent to which perceptions of gender and mock polite behaviour correlate with actual usage and, second, to explore the limits of corpus linguistics in this kind of pragmatic enquiry.
2 Mock politeness
Mock politeness is used here as a broad term intended to encompass all verbal behaviours in which when there is a politeness mismatch leading to an implicature of impoliteness. It is a subset of Culpeper’s (2011) category of implication impoliteness and draws on Leech’s (1983/2014) Irony Principle.
In previous research, I have found that the following labels are used to describe mock politeness in conversation: bitchy, biting, caustic, condescending, cutting, MAKE FUN, MOCK, passive aggressive, patronising, PUT DOWN, overly polite, TEASE. These labels will be used here to identify mock polite behaviours, adopting a first-order approach.
3 Gender and mock politeness
Previous research into the relationship between gender and mock politeness has focussed on behaviours labelled as sarcastic and patronising/condescending
More specifically, studies of gender and sarcasm have tended to focus on whether men or women are more likely to use sarcasm and whether reception of sarcasm differs according to the addressee or target of the sarcastic behaviour. To date, there is a consensus amongst researchers that men are more likely to use sarcasm than women. However, these findings are frequently based on self-reports in which participants are asked whether they are sarcastic/use sarcasm (e.g. Rockwell & Theriot 2001; Ivanko et al. 2004; Dress et al. 2008; Colston & Lee 2004). From a corpus pragmatic perspective, this is deeply worrying because what is actually being assessed is perception of use, not actual use. And, equally worrying from a corpus semantic/pragmatic perspective, what is being assessed is identification with a particular label, and not performance of a particular behaviour.
Thus, what I wanted to verify in this study was a) whether the range of terms used for describing male and female performance varied according to gender and b) whether the actual behaviours varied. In other words, is a woman being bitchy, doing the same thing as a man being sarcastic?
4 Corpora and tools
The main corpus used in this study comprises approximately 61 million tokens of forum interactions from the UK website mumsnet.com. This source was selected because it allows access to ‘everyday’ or ‘conversational’ comments on im/politeness, and thus offers a ‘wide range of different kinds of mundane everyday interactions beyond what a single researcher might realistically collect’ (Haugh 2014: 83).
The corpus was downloaded using BootCaT using a wide range of im/politeness related search terms and was interrogated using Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al 2004), WordSmith Tools (Scott 2008) and the Collocational Network Explorer (Gullick and Lancaster University 2010).
5 Process: A three-pronged approach
I take a three-stage approach to the investigation, combining the methodologies Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (Partington 2004; Partington et al. 2013) with an experimental approach more common in psychological studies of irony:
In the first stage, I exploit the ability of corpus tools to handle very large amounts of data by using collocation analyses to investigate the mock politeness labels for gender associations. This stage showed how several meta-pragmatic labels are more strongly associated with men/women and boys/girls.
In the second stage, I make use of more typical corpus pragmatic tools by using a heavily marked up and annotated sub-corpus. This sub-corpus is made up of the behaviours which were referred to using the mock politeness labels and the added information includes information such as the gender of the speaker and type of im/politeness mismatch which occurs. This is then used to verify to what extent the behaviours which are associated with particular genders are similar or different. The findings from this stage show that there were many similarities between the differently labelled behaviours.
In the third stage, I step away from the corpus analysis because this is the point I feel marks the limitation of the direct corpus analysis. In this stage, I take the examples of mock politeness analysed in the previous stage and manipulate the gender of the speakers in these examples so they can be used in an experimental extension. The original and modified examples will be given to participants who will be asked to describe the behaviour using one of a set of meta-pragmatic labels. The aim of this stage is to verify to what extent the choice of a particular label is influenced by the perceived gender of the speaker.
6 Conclusions
Two main aspects are addressed in this paper. In the first I analyse the relationship between gender and mock politeness at the level of perception and evaluation, following in the footsteps of Baker’s (2014) work on gender using corpora. In the second, more methodologically-focused aspect, I examine the ways in which corpus linguistics may be combined with other approaches in order to complete and complement analyses.
References
Baker, P. 2014. Using Corpora to Analyze Gender. London & New York: Bloomsbury.
Colston, H. L., & Lee, S. Y. 2004. Gender differences in verbal irony use. Metaphor and Symbol, 19(4), 289-306.
Culpeper, J. 2011. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge University Press.
Dress, M.L., R.J. Kreuz, K.E. Link and G.M. Caucci. 2008. Regional Variation in the Use of Sarcasm. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 27: 71.
Gibbs, R. W. 2000. Irony in talk among friends. Metaphor & Symbol 15 (1&2): 5-27.
Gullick, D. & Lancaster University 2010. Collocational Network Explorer (CONE) Available from https://code.google.com/p/collocation-network-explorer/
Haugh, M. 2014. Jocular mockery as interactional practice in everyday Anglo-Australia conversation. Australian Journal of Linguistics 34, 1: 76-99.
Ivanko, S. L., Pexman, P. M., & Olineck, K. M. 2004. How sarcastic are you? Individual differences and verbal irony. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 23(3), 244-271.
Kilgarriff, A., P. Rychly, P. Smrz and D. Tugwell. 2004. The Sketch Engine. Proceedings of EURALEX 2004, Lorient, France; pp 105-116 http://www.sketchengine.co.uk
Leech, G. 1983. The Principles of Pragmatics. London & New York: Longman.
Leech, G. 2014. The Pragmatics of Politeness. Oxford: OUP.
Partington, A. 2004. Corpora and discourse, a most congruous beast. In A. Partington, et al. (eds.) Corpora and Disocurse. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 11–20.
Partington, A., Duguid, A. and Taylor, C. 2013. Patterns and Meanings in Discourse: Theory and Practice in Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Rockwell, P. & E.M. Theriot 2001. Culture, gender, and gender mix in encoders of sarcasm: A self-assessment analysis. Communication Research Reports 18(1):44-52.
Scott, M., 2008, WordSmith Tools version 5, Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software.
The question posed in the title comes from a conversation within my dataset and it is one that I intend to address in this paper, although probably not in the way that author intended. What I am interested in is the use of the label bitchy, and other terms, to describe women’s behaviours and how these relate to labels used to describe men’s behaviours. More specifically, I focus on behaviours which involve some kind of mismatch in politeness, as in:
I usually say something if someone doesn't thank me to be honest - a sarcastic "no problem" might remind them to be polite next time. (example from the mumsnet corpus)
The aims of this paper are twofold: first, to investigate the extent to which perceptions of gender and mock polite behaviour correlate with actual usage and, second, to explore the limits of corpus linguistics in this kind of pragmatic enquiry.
2 Mock politeness
Mock politeness is used here as a broad term intended to encompass all verbal behaviours in which when there is a politeness mismatch leading to an implicature of impoliteness. It is a subset of Culpeper’s (2011) category of implication impoliteness and draws on Leech’s (1983/2014) Irony Principle.
In previous research, I have found that the following labels are used to describe mock politeness in conversation: bitchy, biting, caustic, condescending, cutting, MAKE FUN, MOCK, passive aggressive, patronising, PUT DOWN, overly polite, TEASE. These labels will be used here to identify mock polite behaviours, adopting a first-order approach.
3 Gender and mock politeness
Previous research into the relationship between gender and mock politeness has focussed on behaviours labelled as sarcastic and patronising/condescending
More specifically, studies of gender and sarcasm have tended to focus on whether men or women are more likely to use sarcasm and whether reception of sarcasm differs according to the addressee or target of the sarcastic behaviour. To date, there is a consensus amongst researchers that men are more likely to use sarcasm than women. However, these findings are frequently based on self-reports in which participants are asked whether they are sarcastic/use sarcasm (e.g. Rockwell & Theriot 2001; Ivanko et al. 2004; Dress et al. 2008; Colston & Lee 2004). From a corpus pragmatic perspective, this is deeply worrying because what is actually being assessed is perception of use, not actual use. And, equally worrying from a corpus semantic/pragmatic perspective, what is being assessed is identification with a particular label, and not performance of a particular behaviour.
Thus, what I wanted to verify in this study was a) whether the range of terms used for describing male and female performance varied according to gender and b) whether the actual behaviours varied. In other words, is a woman being bitchy, doing the same thing as a man being sarcastic?
4 Corpora and tools
The main corpus used in this study comprises approximately 61 million tokens of forum interactions from the UK website mumsnet.com. This source was selected because it allows access to ‘everyday’ or ‘conversational’ comments on im/politeness, and thus offers a ‘wide range of different kinds of mundane everyday interactions beyond what a single researcher might realistically collect’ (Haugh 2014: 83).
The corpus was downloaded using BootCaT using a wide range of im/politeness related search terms and was interrogated using Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al 2004), WordSmith Tools (Scott 2008) and the Collocational Network Explorer (Gullick and Lancaster University 2010).
5 Process: A three-pronged approach
I take a three-stage approach to the investigation, combining the methodologies Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (Partington 2004; Partington et al. 2013) with an experimental approach more common in psychological studies of irony:
In the first stage, I exploit the ability of corpus tools to handle very large amounts of data by using collocation analyses to investigate the mock politeness labels for gender associations. This stage showed how several meta-pragmatic labels are more strongly associated with men/women and boys/girls.
In the second stage, I make use of more typical corpus pragmatic tools by using a heavily marked up and annotated sub-corpus. This sub-corpus is made up of the behaviours which were referred to using the mock politeness labels and the added information includes information such as the gender of the speaker and type of im/politeness mismatch which occurs. This is then used to verify to what extent the behaviours which are associated with particular genders are similar or different. The findings from this stage show that there were many similarities between the differently labelled behaviours.
In the third stage, I step away from the corpus analysis because this is the point I feel marks the limitation of the direct corpus analysis. In this stage, I take the examples of mock politeness analysed in the previous stage and manipulate the gender of the speakers in these examples so they can be used in an experimental extension. The original and modified examples will be given to participants who will be asked to describe the behaviour using one of a set of meta-pragmatic labels. The aim of this stage is to verify to what extent the choice of a particular label is influenced by the perceived gender of the speaker.
6 Conclusions
Two main aspects are addressed in this paper. In the first I analyse the relationship between gender and mock politeness at the level of perception and evaluation, following in the footsteps of Baker’s (2014) work on gender using corpora. In the second, more methodologically-focused aspect, I examine the ways in which corpus linguistics may be combined with other approaches in order to complete and complement analyses.
References
Baker, P. 2014. Using Corpora to Analyze Gender. London & New York: Bloomsbury.
Colston, H. L., & Lee, S. Y. 2004. Gender differences in verbal irony use. Metaphor and Symbol, 19(4), 289-306.
Culpeper, J. 2011. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge University Press.
Dress, M.L., R.J. Kreuz, K.E. Link and G.M. Caucci. 2008. Regional Variation in the Use of Sarcasm. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 27: 71.
Gibbs, R. W. 2000. Irony in talk among friends. Metaphor & Symbol 15 (1&2): 5-27.
Gullick, D. & Lancaster University 2010. Collocational Network Explorer (CONE) Available from https://code.google.com/p/collocation-network-explorer/
Haugh, M. 2014. Jocular mockery as interactional practice in everyday Anglo-Australia conversation. Australian Journal of Linguistics 34, 1: 76-99.
Ivanko, S. L., Pexman, P. M., & Olineck, K. M. 2004. How sarcastic are you? Individual differences and verbal irony. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 23(3), 244-271.
Kilgarriff, A., P. Rychly, P. Smrz and D. Tugwell. 2004. The Sketch Engine. Proceedings of EURALEX 2004, Lorient, France; pp 105-116 http://www.sketchengine.co.uk
Leech, G. 1983. The Principles of Pragmatics. London & New York: Longman.
Leech, G. 2014. The Pragmatics of Politeness. Oxford: OUP.
Partington, A. 2004. Corpora and discourse, a most congruous beast. In A. Partington, et al. (eds.) Corpora and Disocurse. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 11–20.
Partington, A., Duguid, A. and Taylor, C. 2013. Patterns and Meanings in Discourse: Theory and Practice in Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Rockwell, P. & E.M. Theriot 2001. Culture, gender, and gender mix in encoders of sarcasm: A self-assessment analysis. Communication Research Reports 18(1):44-52.
Scott, M., 2008, WordSmith Tools version 5, Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software.
Research Interests:
Concerns about globalisation often centre on fears of cultural homogenisation and loss of local cultural identity (as discussed in Machin & Van Leeuwen 2007), but cultural identity itself relies on socially constructed boundaries in which... more
Concerns about globalisation often centre on fears of cultural homogenisation and loss of local cultural identity (as discussed in Machin & Van Leeuwen 2007), but cultural identity itself relies on socially constructed boundaries in which difference is emphasised over similarity (cf social identity theory, Tajfel 1972; 1982). This presupposition of cultural difference, therefore, underpins discussion of globalisation and homogenisation. In this paper, I aim to investigate to what extent such perceptions cultural variation/difference correspond to actual practice with reference to (national) cultures in Britain and Italy. More specifically, the aspect of im/politeness that I am interested in is mock politeness, a subset of implicational impoliteness (Culpeper 2011) which is triggered by a politeness mismatch.
I employ the methodologies of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS, Partington et al. 2013) in the analysis. In the first phase of the study, I use two sets of comparable corpora to investigate perceptions of mock politeness (using search terms such as sarcastic and patronising) in relation to cultural identities. The first pair of corpora is composed of national newspapers in England and Italy, collected in 2014, and the second set are web corpora (ItTenTen and EnTenTen12, see Jakubíček et al. 2013). What emerges from this stage is a strong tendency for both the English and Italian corpora to associate mock polite behaviours such as sarcasm with a British cultural identity.
In the second stage of the study, I use a corpus of data from British English and Italian online discussion forums, in which mock polite behaviours have been identified and annotated, in order to investigate whether there is any evidence for the cultural assumptions identified in the first phase. As will be shown, what emerges from this stage is both variation in cultural practice and a significant gap between perceptions and practice.
In describing and identifying this gap between perceptions and practice, I intend to show both how (anglocentric) academic description has underestimated cultural variation, and, in contrast, how cultural variation is over-estimated in lay description.
I employ the methodologies of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS, Partington et al. 2013) in the analysis. In the first phase of the study, I use two sets of comparable corpora to investigate perceptions of mock politeness (using search terms such as sarcastic and patronising) in relation to cultural identities. The first pair of corpora is composed of national newspapers in England and Italy, collected in 2014, and the second set are web corpora (ItTenTen and EnTenTen12, see Jakubíček et al. 2013). What emerges from this stage is a strong tendency for both the English and Italian corpora to associate mock polite behaviours such as sarcasm with a British cultural identity.
In the second stage of the study, I use a corpus of data from British English and Italian online discussion forums, in which mock polite behaviours have been identified and annotated, in order to investigate whether there is any evidence for the cultural assumptions identified in the first phase. As will be shown, what emerges from this stage is both variation in cultural practice and a significant gap between perceptions and practice.
In describing and identifying this gap between perceptions and practice, I intend to show both how (anglocentric) academic description has underestimated cultural variation, and, in contrast, how cultural variation is over-estimated in lay description.
Research Interests:
The bulk of academic research into mock politeness (defined here as a strategy of impoliteness in which the speaker uses, or is perceived to use, superficial politeness in order to attack face) has been carried out under the second-order... more
The bulk of academic research into mock politeness (defined here as a strategy of impoliteness in which the speaker uses, or is perceived to use, superficial politeness in order to attack face) has been carried out under the second-order terms irony and sarcasm. However, as Attardo (2000:795) notes ‘there is no consensus on whether irony and sarcasm are essentially the same thing […] or if they differ significantly’. Furthermore, there has been relatively little analysis of the first-order use of these labels, or indeed of alternative labels for describing mock politeness (such as passive aggressive). This lack of reflexivity also means that it is unclear to what extent the second-order models have been influenced by the fact that most research has been carried out in North-American contexts. Therefore, in this paper, I compare the second-order descriptions and models of irony and sarcasm with the ways in which the terms are used at the first-order level. The data comes from two, large comparable corpora consisting of interactions from online forums, one from the UK and one from Italy. These online data sources were chosen because they allow for the fullest possible retrieval of context surrounding the use of these meta-pragmatic labels. In the first stage of the analysis, I analyse the use of the labels ironic and sarcastic (and Italian cognates) using corpus linguistic methods and in the second stage, I retrieve and analyse the behaviours which were described as ironic / sarcastic by the participants. Particularly salient aspects for comparison across the corpora and against the second-order literature, are the kind of facework employed in the behaviours (e.g. do they perform mock politeness? is there a target for impolite behaviour?) and what kind of mismatch (e.g. propositional, implicational, evaluative) is present in the utterances.
Research Interests:
In this paper I address the discursive behaviour of the terms COMMUNITY and COMUNITA’ in English and Italian newspaper discourse on the topic of migration. These terms function as ‘discourse keywords’ (as discussed in the introductory... more
In this paper I address the discursive behaviour of the terms COMMUNITY and COMUNITA’ in English and Italian newspaper discourse on the topic of migration. These terms function as ‘discourse keywords’ (as discussed in the introductory paper in this panel) within the discussion of migration and their salience stems from the frequency of co-occurrence within this context, the importance of the concepts they represent and their perceived role within the discourse. With reference to frequency of co-occurrence, COMMUNITY/COMUNITA’ are both statistically salient collocates of IMMIGRANT/IMMIGRATO; in other words they occur together significantly more frequently than would be expected with a random distribution. In terms of perceived relevance, searching for occurrences of ‘the word community’ (and Italian equivalent) in UK and Italian websites showed that there was substantial, ongoing meta-discussion of these terms (8,790 and 14,200 hits respectively). Furthermore, community is well-established as central concept within discussion of migration, for instance it is discussed as one of fourteen keywords within migration discourse in Gallissot et al. (2007). Gallissot (2007: 65) describes how ‘“community” serves to define the ingroup and delimit the borders of membership and of the distinction between “us” and “them”, consequently placing “the others” outside, excluding them’ (translation from Italian). However, discourse analysis has indicated that in both English (Baker et al. 2013) and Italian (Taylor 2009) newspaper discourse it is those who are labelled as a community that are represented as being outside the ‘unmarked’ norm or even society. Therefore, in this paper I will first analyse the extent to which the discourse keywords community and comunita’ actually refer to the same concept, and second how these keywords are used and deployed within migration discourse.
Research Interests:
In this paper I investigate the way in which migrants are constructed in the UK press and, more specifically, I focus on what is absent from those discourses. Fowler (1991: 4) states that “there are always different ways of saying the... more
In this paper I investigate the way in which migrants are constructed in the UK press and, more specifically, I focus on what is absent from those discourses. Fowler (1991: 4) states that “there are always different ways of saying the same thing, and they are not accidental alternatives. Differences in expression carry ideological distinction (and thus differences in representation)” and this assumption lies at the core of (critical) discourse analysis. However, if we consider discourse analysis to be an analysis of the choices that speakers make, then, logically, it must be equally important to identify the rejected choices, in other words, that which is not said, and this is what I aim to address. The main data set that I use is a corpus of c. 20 million words containing all articles which refer to REFUGEES, ASYLUM SEEKER, IMMIGRANT and MIGRANT in the UK national newspapers in 2009. In order to identify what is absent in the discourses in this corpus, I argue that we must have a systematic and replicable means of establishing expectations of presence. Therefore, I explore how such expectations can be created through comparison with other texts, meta-references to absence (e.g. not talking about) and use of non-linguistic data such as population statistics. The methodology is that of corpus-assisted discourse studies which combines both discourse-analytic tools, and corpus linguistic tools, such as key words and collocation analysis.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
1 Introduction In this paper we address the issue of the researcher's individual influence on the research findings and explore the potential of falsification as a counter-corroboration strategy. 2 It is our intent to follow up on an... more
1 Introduction
In this paper we address the issue of the researcher's individual influence on the research findings and explore the potential of falsification as a counter-corroboration strategy.
2 It is our intent to follow up on an experiment into researcher triangulation we did a few years ago (Marchi and Taylor 2009), where we tested whether two researchers starting with the same corpus and research question and theoretical /methodological framework would come to the similar conclusions. In that case our main interest was methodological reliability, recently investigated on a larger scale by Baker (2011), here, instead the focus is more specifically on the scientist’s personal influence (Myrdal 1970). In our previous experiment we concluded wishing to ‘investigate with greater rigour the extent of the influence of the researcher’ (Marchi and Taylor 2009: 20). In this study, as before, both researchers work on the same corpus and the same RQ, but with explicitly different hypotheses. By adding the specific hypothesis element to the experimental design, we aim to test to what extent predictions/expectations impact on the outcome. In the second part fo the study we then attempt to falsify each other’s hypothesis as a means of testing the potential of falsification. 2 Case study
The topic (i.e. the secondary research question) chosen as testing ground for our primary RQ is the representation of the LGBT community in an Italian (la Repubblica) and British (the Guardian) newspaper of similar political affiliation.
More specifically we are asking:
How do the Italian and British liberal newspapers write about LGBT-related issues and are the resulting constructions of LGBT people similar or different?
3 Corpus
Two search term based corpora of the Guardian and la Repubblica were compiled. Equivalent terms for GAY, LESBIAN, homosex*, heterosex*, transsex*, transgender, LGBT, GLBT, same-sex, intersex*, hermaphrodit* were selected in English and Italian, in order to grant maximum coverage of LGBT related issues. Each corpus consists of approximately 1 million words and covers a period of two years (between October 2007 and October 2009). The choice of the period of time is arbitrary and is based on the criterion of availability of data for the Italian corpus, the contextual timeline of events in the two countries was however taken into careful account as we wanted to look at a relatively ‘banal’ period, rather than a period of high newsworthiness.
The two corpora have been defined as “comparable” on the basis of the similar political leaning and of the two newspapers, actual comparability remains however a problem. ***
4 Method
The methodological and theoretical framework behind this work is that variously defined as corpus-based or corpus-assisted discourse studies. The approach builds, among others, on seminal work such as Stubbs’ (1996 and 2001) and our method largely follows the model of research done at Lancaster University on projects such as RASIM (Baker et al. 2008, Gabrielatos and Baker 2008) and research done by the SiBol group at the universities of Bologna, Siena and Portsmouth (Partington 2010, edited volume).
The research mainly relies on collocation and concordance analysis of the query terms and compares patterns for the two languages.
5 Definitions
• Falsification: according to Popper (1959) falsifiability is an essential quality of hypotheses, and the very scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability. Here we use falsification both to refer to the testing of one’s own hypothesis during the analysis and to the researcher’s mutual attempt to confute each other’s completed analyses though it is important to keep the distinction between the two types clear.
• Reflexivity: we distinguish between two types of reflexivity, personal and epistemological. Epistemological reflexivity ‘encourages us to reflect upon the assumptions (about the world, about knowledge) that we have made in the course of the research, and it helps us to think about the implications of such assumptions for the research and its findings’ (Willig, 2001: 10), i.e. it is related to the impact of the research process on the outcome. Personal reflexivity, on the other hand, is specifically related to how a person’s values, beliefs, interests, identity influence his or her research.
6 Experiment description
The experiment is divided in two phases. For the first phase the two researchers work independently with opposing hypotheses. Researcher A’s initial hypothesis is that, despite their similar political leaning, the Italian newspaper will be more bigoted than the British one in treating LGBT related issues. Researcher B’s hypothesis is that there won’t be such difference.
Each researcher develops a falsifiable account of the patterns of representation. This allows us to discuss the extent to which the initial hypothesis affects the analytic process and the outcome.
In the second phase the two researchers exchange analyses and attempt to falsify the other’s results. This allows us to then compare the process of falsification within one’s own work with the process of falsifying another researcher’s analysis.
7 Collaborative work
It is relevant to point out that the affinity between the two researchers’ views made it difficult to find a topic that gave them diverging hypothesis to work from. This case study was chosen precisely because it could provide such a condition***
In CADS (Partington 2009), we tend not to come to the data with a specific hypothesis to test, but we are very likely to have more or less loose expectations. Furthermore, particularly in discourse oriented research, we tend to study things that we care about (in a continuum that goes from vague interest to committed involvement), which makes it important to keep track of our individual influence /bias as researchers (personal reflexivity), on top of our researching influence (epistemological reflexivity).
Something.
Ultimately we see cooperative research as a guarding strategy against corroboration-drive and we argue for a system that encourages academic collaboration, for example not penalising authors’ order in publications .
References
Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., Khosravinik, M., Krzyzanowski, M., McEnery, T. and Wodak, R. 2008. “A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press”. Discourse & Society 19(3): 273–305.
Baker, P. 2011. “Discourse, news representations and corpus linguistics”. Plenary given at Corpus Linguistics 2011 Conference, Birmingham 20-22 July 2011.
Gabrielatos, C. and Baker, P. 2008. “Fleeing, Sneaking, Flooding: A Corpus Analysis of Discursive Constructions of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press, 1996-2005”. Journal of English Linguistics 36(1): 5–38.
Marchi, A. and Taylor, C. 2009. “‘If on a winter night two researchers’: A challenge to assumptions of soundness of interpretation”. CADAAD Journal 3(1): 1–20.
Myrdal, G. 1970. Objectivity in Social Research. London: Gerald Duckworth & Company Ltd.
Partington, A. 2009. “Evaluating evaluation and some concluding thoughts on CADS”. In J. Morley and P. Bayley (eds.) Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies on the Iraq Conflict: Wording the War. London: Routledge, pp. 261–303.
Partington, A. 2010. Corpora special issue. Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Popper, K. 1959. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson and Co.
Stubbs, M. 1996. Text and Corpus Analysis: Computer-Assisted Studies of Language and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
Stubbs, M. 2001. Words and Phrases: corpus studies of lexical semantics. London: Blackwell.
Willig, C. 2001. Introducing Qualitative research in Psychology: adventures in theory and method. Open University Press, Buckingham
In this paper we address the issue of the researcher's individual influence on the research findings and explore the potential of falsification as a counter-corroboration strategy.
2 It is our intent to follow up on an experiment into researcher triangulation we did a few years ago (Marchi and Taylor 2009), where we tested whether two researchers starting with the same corpus and research question and theoretical /methodological framework would come to the similar conclusions. In that case our main interest was methodological reliability, recently investigated on a larger scale by Baker (2011), here, instead the focus is more specifically on the scientist’s personal influence (Myrdal 1970). In our previous experiment we concluded wishing to ‘investigate with greater rigour the extent of the influence of the researcher’ (Marchi and Taylor 2009: 20). In this study, as before, both researchers work on the same corpus and the same RQ, but with explicitly different hypotheses. By adding the specific hypothesis element to the experimental design, we aim to test to what extent predictions/expectations impact on the outcome. In the second part fo the study we then attempt to falsify each other’s hypothesis as a means of testing the potential of falsification. 2 Case study
The topic (i.e. the secondary research question) chosen as testing ground for our primary RQ is the representation of the LGBT community in an Italian (la Repubblica) and British (the Guardian) newspaper of similar political affiliation.
More specifically we are asking:
How do the Italian and British liberal newspapers write about LGBT-related issues and are the resulting constructions of LGBT people similar or different?
3 Corpus
Two search term based corpora of the Guardian and la Repubblica were compiled. Equivalent terms for GAY, LESBIAN, homosex*, heterosex*, transsex*, transgender, LGBT, GLBT, same-sex, intersex*, hermaphrodit* were selected in English and Italian, in order to grant maximum coverage of LGBT related issues. Each corpus consists of approximately 1 million words and covers a period of two years (between October 2007 and October 2009). The choice of the period of time is arbitrary and is based on the criterion of availability of data for the Italian corpus, the contextual timeline of events in the two countries was however taken into careful account as we wanted to look at a relatively ‘banal’ period, rather than a period of high newsworthiness.
The two corpora have been defined as “comparable” on the basis of the similar political leaning and of the two newspapers, actual comparability remains however a problem. ***
4 Method
The methodological and theoretical framework behind this work is that variously defined as corpus-based or corpus-assisted discourse studies. The approach builds, among others, on seminal work such as Stubbs’ (1996 and 2001) and our method largely follows the model of research done at Lancaster University on projects such as RASIM (Baker et al. 2008, Gabrielatos and Baker 2008) and research done by the SiBol group at the universities of Bologna, Siena and Portsmouth (Partington 2010, edited volume).
The research mainly relies on collocation and concordance analysis of the query terms and compares patterns for the two languages.
5 Definitions
• Falsification: according to Popper (1959) falsifiability is an essential quality of hypotheses, and the very scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability. Here we use falsification both to refer to the testing of one’s own hypothesis during the analysis and to the researcher’s mutual attempt to confute each other’s completed analyses though it is important to keep the distinction between the two types clear.
• Reflexivity: we distinguish between two types of reflexivity, personal and epistemological. Epistemological reflexivity ‘encourages us to reflect upon the assumptions (about the world, about knowledge) that we have made in the course of the research, and it helps us to think about the implications of such assumptions for the research and its findings’ (Willig, 2001: 10), i.e. it is related to the impact of the research process on the outcome. Personal reflexivity, on the other hand, is specifically related to how a person’s values, beliefs, interests, identity influence his or her research.
6 Experiment description
The experiment is divided in two phases. For the first phase the two researchers work independently with opposing hypotheses. Researcher A’s initial hypothesis is that, despite their similar political leaning, the Italian newspaper will be more bigoted than the British one in treating LGBT related issues. Researcher B’s hypothesis is that there won’t be such difference.
Each researcher develops a falsifiable account of the patterns of representation. This allows us to discuss the extent to which the initial hypothesis affects the analytic process and the outcome.
In the second phase the two researchers exchange analyses and attempt to falsify the other’s results. This allows us to then compare the process of falsification within one’s own work with the process of falsifying another researcher’s analysis.
7 Collaborative work
It is relevant to point out that the affinity between the two researchers’ views made it difficult to find a topic that gave them diverging hypothesis to work from. This case study was chosen precisely because it could provide such a condition***
In CADS (Partington 2009), we tend not to come to the data with a specific hypothesis to test, but we are very likely to have more or less loose expectations. Furthermore, particularly in discourse oriented research, we tend to study things that we care about (in a continuum that goes from vague interest to committed involvement), which makes it important to keep track of our individual influence /bias as researchers (personal reflexivity), on top of our researching influence (epistemological reflexivity).
Something.
Ultimately we see cooperative research as a guarding strategy against corroboration-drive and we argue for a system that encourages academic collaboration, for example not penalising authors’ order in publications .
References
Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., Khosravinik, M., Krzyzanowski, M., McEnery, T. and Wodak, R. 2008. “A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press”. Discourse & Society 19(3): 273–305.
Baker, P. 2011. “Discourse, news representations and corpus linguistics”. Plenary given at Corpus Linguistics 2011 Conference, Birmingham 20-22 July 2011.
Gabrielatos, C. and Baker, P. 2008. “Fleeing, Sneaking, Flooding: A Corpus Analysis of Discursive Constructions of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press, 1996-2005”. Journal of English Linguistics 36(1): 5–38.
Marchi, A. and Taylor, C. 2009. “‘If on a winter night two researchers’: A challenge to assumptions of soundness of interpretation”. CADAAD Journal 3(1): 1–20.
Myrdal, G. 1970. Objectivity in Social Research. London: Gerald Duckworth & Company Ltd.
Partington, A. 2009. “Evaluating evaluation and some concluding thoughts on CADS”. In J. Morley and P. Bayley (eds.) Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies on the Iraq Conflict: Wording the War. London: Routledge, pp. 261–303.
Partington, A. 2010. Corpora special issue. Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Popper, K. 1959. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson and Co.
Stubbs, M. 1996. Text and Corpus Analysis: Computer-Assisted Studies of Language and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
Stubbs, M. 2001. Words and Phrases: corpus studies of lexical semantics. London: Blackwell.
Willig, C. 2001. Introducing Qualitative research in Psychology: adventures in theory and method. Open University Press, Buckingham
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According to Baker (2006: 183) ‘presence tends to take precedence over absence in a corpus, because we often may not know what is missing’. This in turn may lead to skewed and potential misleading picture of the discourse under analysis.... more
According to Baker (2006: 183) ‘presence tends to take precedence over absence in a corpus, because we often may not know what is missing’. This in turn may lead to skewed and potential misleading picture of the discourse under analysis. In this paper, I address the issue of absence and attempt to group and identify some ways in which we can identify what is not in the corpus when combining corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. As such, this paper falls into a methodological tradition of developing and grouping resources that help us to avoid bias or (partial) blindness where possible.
Absence may be an issue at several different levels; from the corpus construction (is it as representative as possible?) to the various stages of the analysis. If we consider Fowler’s crystallising statement that “there are always different ways of saying the same thing, and they are not accidental alternatives. Differences in expression carry ideological distinction (and thus differences in representation)” (Fowler, 1991: 4), then it is clear that (critical) discourse analysis is founded upon the analysis of present and absent choices. As such, the issue of absence is not unique to corpus-assisted discourse studies, but to all discourse studies. In this paper, I explore how we may try to tackle the issue employing both analyses that start from corpus linguistic methodologies and from discourse analytic tools in order to get a richer perspective on the data. For instance, from the corpus perspective we may attempt to identify (potential) absence through selecting/creating relevant corpora in order to use one of the central tools; keywords. While from the more discourse analytical starting point, methods may include the analysis of grammatical relations (are certain participants or processes missing?) or, similarly, but at a different linguistic level, using frame-based approaches (are certain expected slots left unfilled?). In addition, the integrated use of non-linguistic contextual data may be employed to establish a set of expectations about the data which will allow for absence to be identified.
In order to explore the range of methods available, I take my current research project into the representation of migrants as a case-study and investigate what additional information may be gained through the search for absence – and where we cannot (yet) identify what is not in the discourse.
Absence may be an issue at several different levels; from the corpus construction (is it as representative as possible?) to the various stages of the analysis. If we consider Fowler’s crystallising statement that “there are always different ways of saying the same thing, and they are not accidental alternatives. Differences in expression carry ideological distinction (and thus differences in representation)” (Fowler, 1991: 4), then it is clear that (critical) discourse analysis is founded upon the analysis of present and absent choices. As such, the issue of absence is not unique to corpus-assisted discourse studies, but to all discourse studies. In this paper, I explore how we may try to tackle the issue employing both analyses that start from corpus linguistic methodologies and from discourse analytic tools in order to get a richer perspective on the data. For instance, from the corpus perspective we may attempt to identify (potential) absence through selecting/creating relevant corpora in order to use one of the central tools; keywords. While from the more discourse analytical starting point, methods may include the analysis of grammatical relations (are certain participants or processes missing?) or, similarly, but at a different linguistic level, using frame-based approaches (are certain expected slots left unfilled?). In addition, the integrated use of non-linguistic contextual data may be employed to establish a set of expectations about the data which will allow for absence to be identified.
In order to explore the range of methods available, I take my current research project into the representation of migrants as a case-study and investigate what additional information may be gained through the search for absence – and where we cannot (yet) identify what is not in the discourse.
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In this paper I look at the ways in which migrants are represented in the press in the UK and Italy. To date there has been relatively little cross-linguistic discourse analysis using corpus linguistics (as addressed in Freake 2011) and... more
In this paper I look at the ways in which migrants are represented in the press in the UK and Italy. To date there has been relatively little cross-linguistic discourse analysis using corpus linguistics (as addressed in Freake 2011) and therefore this case-study offers an opportunity to consider some of the issues that may arise. Within the case-study, I focus on the representation of migrants in the Italian and UK press by adopting a three stage methodological approach. In the first stage, emic accounts of racism and xenophobia are analysed to provide a background of the newspapers’ own conceptualisations of these notions/labels. In the second phase, the number of references to nationalities which collocated with refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, migrants (and Italian equivalents) were calculated and this information was subsequently used to identify any mis-match between the estimated numbers of migrants from a given country and the amount of attention that they receive in the media. In the third stage, the representations of the foregrounded nationalities were analysed and the resulting representations of migrants were then compared to the newspapers’ stated stance towards racism. Moral panic narratives were found in the UK tabloid and the Italian regional press and these were not substantially challenged in the national press in either country. The findings also showed how these newspapers made extensive use of attribution in order to include racist discourses.
In this paper I look at what corpus linguistics can contribute to the study of one particular area of pragmatics; impoliteness, and more specifically mock politeness, which is defined here as instances of impoliteness in which there is a... more
In this paper I look at what corpus linguistics can contribute to the study of one particular area of pragmatics; impoliteness, and more specifically mock politeness, which is defined here as instances of impoliteness in which there is a reversal of face evaluation. To date, much corpus work on im/politeness has tended to use the corpus as a bank of examples whereas I intend to explore how corpus analysis may be used to structure the analysis of im/politeness. This methodological approach follows on from work such as Culpeper (2009) by using corpus analysis to describe first order descriptions of the construct. These user-descriptions can then be employed to identify events or behaviours which have been identified, by those users, as involving mock politeness, thus avoiding the analyst’s dilemma of deciding what is (not) mock politeness prior to the investigation. In the second stage, these user-identified examples can be examined and where corpus analysis may inform the research at this point is in the identification of conventionalised phraseologies for the expression of mock politeness. The data used in this study comes from online discussion forums based in the UK and Italy.
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The aim of this paper is to analyse in greater depth the realisations and functions of one of the impoliteness strategies identified in Culpeper (1996), that of mock politeness, which is defined there as occasions in which “the FTA is... more
The aim of this paper is to analyse in greater depth the realisations and functions of one of the impoliteness strategies identified in Culpeper (1996), that of mock politeness, which is defined there as occasions in which “the FTA is performed with the use of politeness strategies that are obviously insincere, and thus remain surface realisations” (1996: 356). Mock politeness is considered to be particularly interesting as it involves a reversal of face evaluation both in the contrast between form and function, or implicatum and dictum, but also in the garden-path nature of the realisation: from respect for face to attack on face. While garden-pathing has been more extensively analysed in relation to humour studies (see for example Dynel 2009) it has been less frequently studied in politeness analyses, and yet is central to mock politeness. In the corpora analysed here, mock politeness seems to be realised in two main ways. In the first, the impoliteness is created through a textually explicit clash of evaluations consisting in the juxtaposition of easily identified politeness forms with overt intensification of the face threatening act. This first type of mock politeness is seen to fulfil a wide range of functions. In the second, the politeness is intensified beyond credible interpretation, given knowledge of the context of production, and this is the most likely of the two modes to be comparable to sarcasm. The data used in this study predominately comes from UK radio and television discussion programmes, and both audio and text files were analysed.
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All the papers for our conference Approaches to Migration, Language and Identity are now *free* to watch online. The conference will take place Wed 9 - Fri 11 June 2021 and registration is still open on the website.
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This is the handout for further reading from my talk on Friday 3 June.
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This is a work-in-progress bibliography created for a paper at the 2016 BAAL Language, Gender & Sexuality SIG
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This chapter looks into discourses about migration in four European countries through the lens of cultural keywords (cf. Williams 1983; Bennett et al. 2005; Wierzbicka 1997); using Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis, it compares the use... more
This chapter looks into discourses about migration in four European countries through the lens of cultural keywords (cf. Williams 1983; Bennett et al. 2005; Wierzbicka 1997); using Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis, it compares the use of the keywords multicultural and multiculturalism. The study is based on corpora from British, French, German and Italian newspaper articles covering the time span 1998-2012, collated from one conservative and one left-liberal national newspaper in each language.
Across the languages, the results show that the adjective multicultural is mostly descriptive of a state of affairs, typically without negative evaluation, and that the noun multiculturalism is associated with abstract concepts and points to a more negative discourse prosody, indicated by collocates such as ‘failure’.
Across the languages, the results show that the adjective multicultural is mostly descriptive of a state of affairs, typically without negative evaluation, and that the noun multiculturalism is associated with abstract concepts and points to a more negative discourse prosody, indicated by collocates such as ‘failure’.