Overlooked text types: From fictional texts to real-world discourses

Behind the enthusiastic adoption of corpus-based approaches in discourse research lies the promise of an ability to explore data more completely and representatively. Traditional methods in discourse studies were primarily designed for delicacy and richness; given the complexity of the links between language use and its social context, and the wide range of linguistic features in which these links are expressed, research tended to focus on the ‘detailed analysis of a small number of discourse samples’ (Fairclough 1992: 230). But the depth afforded by such approaches places corresponding limits on breadth of coverage: examining particular excerpts in such detail is only possible at the expense of overlooking everything else that goes on in a given discursive practice. The ‘fragmentary [and] exemplificatory’ nature of the evidence that can be thus gathered poses considerable problems for generalisation (Fowler 1996: 8). When texts and features for analysis are selected on the basis of the researcher’s intuitive judgement (Marchi & Taylor 2009: 3), there is no guarantee that they truly represent the distinctive patterns that characterise a discourse (Stubbs 1997)

Doing the naughty or having it done to you? Agent roles in erotic writing

Frequent criticisms of pornography have argued that it reproduces hegemonic misogyny by emphasising representations of females as passive, powerless and submissive. Nevertheless, attempts to substantiate such claims have been scarce. This paper seeks to provide empirical evidence on this question through an analysis of the representation of sexual activity in a large corpus of online pornographic stories. I employ corpus linguistic methods to examine the grammatical patterns used to attribute agency to male and female participants in sexual acts. The analysis shows these narratives tend to represent sexual intercourse as an asymmetric engagement between an agent and a patient, rather than as a joint collaborative activity. Although representations emphasising female agency are not rare, they are significantly less common than those assigning males the agent role, thus reinforcing rather than challenging dominant discourses of gender and sexuality. Linguistic methods such as these have the potential for a more nuanced and finer-grained description than is often possible for visual materials, and can profitably add to our understanding of gender and genre differences in pornography

The construction of expert knowledge in popular management literature

Esta tesis estudia, desde una perspectiva crítica, cómo el conocimiento experto y la autoridad del autor se construyen y legitiman a través de la estructura discursiva de los libros populares sobre gestión de empresas (management). Empleando un corpus de un centenar de textos, escogido mediante criterios propios del campo para proporcionar una muestra de obras fuertemente influyentes, se resean algunos de los más importantes de sus aspectos textuales y contextuales. Su estructura se aborda a partir de cinco estudios empíricos, prestando especial atención a la construcción discursiva de la identidad de lector y autor: la naturaleza de los títulos de los libros sobre management, que fija el tono pragmático para la interpretación de la utilidad de los mismos; el uso de estrategias metadiscursivas para fijar y reconocer las expectativas del género, iluminando las expectativas recíprocas de autores y lectores; los patrones de ejemplificación, que muestran cómo es posible la construcción de un discurso altamente persuasivo sin por ello requerir de argumentos universales o aún generales; el uso de narrativas de experiencia personal para afirmar la credibilidad del autor; y el uso estratégico del conocimiento presupuesto para movilizar las inclinaciones y las convicciones de los lectores en temas de fuerte contenido moral. El propósito de estos estudios es proporcionar una aproximación general, de base discursiva, a las formas típicas de persuasión que caracterizan a la literatura popular de gestión, ayudando así a ilustrar las propiedades epistémicas que definen a la disciplina. Estos análisis muestran el carácter altamente idiosincrático de la literatura popular de gestión, que no se deja asimilar con facilidad a los criterios de la escritura académica ni a los de la popularización científica. El posicionamiento de los autores respecto de sus textos, sus temáticas y su audience se interpreta como una función de su posición dentro del campo del management, en el que los intereses y hábitos de diversos grupos profesionales coinciden, se solapan y entran en competencia. La relación de este posicionamiento con el bien descrito caracter ideológico de la gestión de empresas se discute en las conclusiones, así como el valor del análisis del discurso lingüísticamente informado para la crítica de tales ideologias

In times of crisis : a corpus approach to the construction of the financial crisis annual reports

Although both academics and policy-makers still debate its exact causes and the extent of its consequences, the ongoing nancial crisis is doubtlessly the most distinctive economic event of the late 2000s. But despite the importance of such large-scale economic phenomena, there has been little research on their discursive construction. This paper presents some empirical data to show how the crisis is identi ed and its boundaries construed in corporate communication, seeking to understand how economic actors selectively shape public perceptions of critical events by routinely emphasising the role of certain agents and stakeholders while ignoring others. Terms for the crisis, their collocates and their discourse preferences are 1 drawn from a 1'500'000-word ad-hoc corpus of annual reports

Discriminación a través de las ilustraciones de libros de texto de educación secundaria obligatoria en España.

Discriminación a través de las ilustraciones de libros de texto de educación secundaria obligatoria en España. (Morales, Oscar Alberto y Lischinsky, Alon) Resumen Este trabajo propone un análisis sociosemiótico del racismo discursivo, tal como se presenta en textos complejos que combinan lo visual y lo verbal. A partir de un corpus de 250 imágenes obtenido de diez libros de texto de ciencias sociales de nivel medio publicados en España entre 1995 y 2004, explora cómo la ideología dominante produce representaciones diferenciadas de un endogrupo y un exogrupo en los subsistemas visual y lingüístico. Asimismo, examina cómo dentro de las constricciones de elevado control del género discursivo -sometido a procedimientos de evaluación por distintas instancias gubernamentales desde el inicio de su producción hasta su utilización en el salón de clases- los valores, estereotipos, ideologías y significados que no pueden expresarse de manera verbal se comunican visualmente. Se halló que las imágenes representan positivamente al endogrupo y negativamente al exogrupo. Para crear una dicotomía, seleccionan situaciones específicas como rasgos distintivos, característicos de cada grupo. Se concluye que la selección de las imágenes no es neutra ni arbitraria, sino que intenta reproducir el sistema de desigualdades, caracterizado por la discriminación, el racismo y la xenofobia. Abstract This paper presents a social semiotic analysis of racist discursive practices, as found in complex media comprising both visual and linguistic elements. Drawing from a corpus of 250 images sampled from social science high school textbooks published in Spain from 1995 to 2004, we explore how the ideological polarisation between us and them is differently encoded in pictures and text. Due to the close monitoring that textbooks undergo -from their initial evaluation by government authorities to their practical deployment in the classroom-, meaning-making practices restrict the verbal representation of certain values, stereotypes and ideologies, which nevertheless surface in visual communication. Thus, pictures represent the ingroup in a positive light, correlatively depicting outgroup members negatively; their arrangement helps build dichotomies, selecting specific traits and situations to represent each group according to ideological principles. This analysis show that the selection of visual material is not a mere decorative procedure superimposed on a text where the real meaning would be developed, but rather strongly contributes to the reproduction of an unequal system characterised by discrimination, racism and xenophobia. Artículo Publicado en: Discurso y Sociedad. 2008, 2(1), 115-152. http://www.dissoc.org/ediciones/v02n01/DS2%281%29Morales%20&%[email protected], [email protected] monográfic

125 Nordicom Review 35Talking Green in the Public Sphere Press Releases, Corporate Voices and the Environment

In a climate of growing public concern and monitoring of business’s impact on the environ - ment, corporations and industry groups have developed increasingly sophisticated strategies to manage their environmental reputation and to influence the outcome of environmental debates in the public sphere. In this article, we provide an exploratory overview of how the largest Swedish corporations selectively subsidise environmental news-making by supply -ing it with promotional materials disguised as journalistic copy. We analyse a year’s worth of public relations output from the largest 15 companies traded in the Stockholm exchange or owned by the Swedish state, in order to shed light on the environmental themes they cover, the techniques they adopt to maximise the likelihood of media coverage and the evidence they provide to support their claims. Our analysis shows that corporate voices make substantial use of environmental and ecological arguments in their strategic com -munication, but they provide little useful information about the company’s impact and do not usually foster forms of dialogic stakeholder engagemen