Corpus approaches to language in the media

The main aim of this chapter is to offer an overview of research that has adopted the methodology of Corpus Linguistics to study aspects of language use in the media. The overview begins by introducing the key principles and analytical tools adopted in corpus research. To demonstrate the contribution of corpus approaches to media linguistics, a selection of recent corpus studies is subsequently discussed. The final section summarises the strengths and limitations of corpus approaches and discusses avenues for further research

Intersections and differentiations: a corpus-assisted discourse study of gender representations in the British press before, during and after the London Olympics 2012

This study examines the impact of a global sports event on gender representations in media reporting. Whereas previous research on gender, sport and media has been mainly concerned with sports events in the North American or Australian context, this study investigates the British media reporting before, during and after the London Olympics 2012. Our study follows the approach of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) and uses both quantitative and qualitative research procedures. The results reveal more balanced gender representations during the London Olympics in that the ‘regular’ biased associations were supressed in favour of positive references to female achievements. However, little carry-though of the ‘gains’ was noted. Also, this study shows that the positive associations intersected with national sentiments and were used to celebrate the nation-state. At the same time, some subtle resistance was observed to accepting as ‘truly’ British the non-white athletes and those not born in Britain

‘Bad’ mums tell the ‘untellable’: narrative practices and agency in online stories about postnatal depression on Mumsnet

Health research highlights transformative and therapeutic effects of peer-to-peer online communication. Yet, we still know little about the practices and processes that generate such effects. This paper seeks to contribute to this understanding by examining polylogue online stories about postnatal depression (PND) on the popular parenting website Mumsnet. Drawing on the notion of narrative, small stories and positioning, this study shows how a narrative discourse-analytical approach can reveal narrative practices used to project and transform illness identities. At the micro level, the analysis shows that the small stories studied here draw on two big canonical narratives confession and exemplum. Whereas confessions are a ‘way in’ to disclose PND, the ‘didactical’ exempla serve as a knowledge resource and tools of alignment, and validation helping women to narratively repair ‘spoiled’ identity. At the macro-level, the analysis highlights tensions that exist between hegemonic discourses about motherhood and personal PND stories in which women appropriate and re-work these discourses to break silence and exercise agency. This study shows how together with technosocial factors these narrative practices can work to produce transformative effects of trouble telling and sharing online and contributes to a better understanding of digital practices underlying peer-to-peer interactions about stigmatised conditions

Playful language alternation in an online discussion forum: the example of digital code plays

This paper explores the linguistic practice of digital code plays in an online discussion forum, used by the community of English-speaking Germans living in Britain. By adopting a qualitative approach of Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis, the article examines the ways in which these bilinguals deploy linguistic and other semiotic resources on the forum to co-construct humorous code plays. These performances occur in the context of negotiating language norms and are based on conscious manipulations of both codes, English and German. They involve play with codes at three levels: play with forms, meanings, and frames. Although, at first sight, such alternations appear to be used mainly for a comic effect, there is more to this than just humour. By mixing both codes at all levels, the participants deliberately produce aberrant German ‘polluted’ with English and, in so doing, dismantle the ideology of language purity upheld by the purist movement. The deliberate character of this type of code alternation demonstrates heightened metalinguistic awareness as well as creativity and criticality. By exploring the practice of digital code plays, the current study contributes to the growing body of research on networked multilingualism as well as to practices associated with translanguaging, poly- and metrolingualism

Using a corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) approach to investigate constructions of identities in media reporting surrounding mega sport events: the case of the London Olympics 2012

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how the combination of critical discourse analysis and corpus-linguistic methodology can be used to study global sports events, especially their impact on the representations of identities. The study of media texts around global events, such as the London Olympics and the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, can yield important insights into the identities which are ideologically normalised in the reporting of such events, and those which are devalued or excluded. Our study focuses on these two events in particular as the Olympics and the World Cup are regarded as ‘the most dramatic and high profile’ global sports events (Tomlinson & Young, 2006: 1) in that the ‘whole world is watching … the same thing at the same time’ (Rowe, 2003: 284). Media representations generated at these times can be seen to be high-impact reflections of cultural assumptions, tailored to coincide with the expectations and beliefs of the audiences of the mass media. Global sports events are thus prominent representations of not only national ideologies (Kinkema and Harris. MediaSport studies: Key research and emerging issues. In L. A. Wenner (Ed.), MediaSport (pp. 27–54). London: Routledge, 1998), but also of ethnicity and race, as well as gender (Hunt & Jaworska, in press), revealing detailed patterns of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991). In the proposed chapter we demonstrate the synergistic relationship possible in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) (see Baker, 2008; Baker et al., Discourse and Society, 19(3): 273–306, 2008; Partington, Duguid, & Taylor, Corpora and discourse, a most congruous beast. In A. Partington, J. Morley, & L. Haarman (Eds.), Corpora and discourse (pp. 9–18). Frankfurt/M: Peter La, 2013), showing how systematic linguistic analysis can yield ideological insights whilst resting on a quantitative base of statistically significant relationships and patterns in language use. Our data comprise a corpus of nearly 30 million words, sampled from national newspaper texts published in Britain from 2011 to 2013 and in South Africa (SA) from 2009 to 2012, in order to track the impact of the respective sporting event on media representation, as suggested by McEnery et al. (2013). Both events boosted representations of national unity in the year of the event, but there was little carry through of the gains to the following year. Divisions in terms of race were maintained, especially in the SA context, whilst gendered representations were often positive in the British context

Using multiple data sets

This chapter highlights the benefits of using multiple data sets and data triangulation in corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) research. It discusses the nitty-gritty of methodological decision-making involved in selecting appropriate data sources and analytical tools for meaningful comparisons of discourse across corpora, and outlines a hands-on framework for doing CADS with multiple data sets. This chapter is a must read for students and researchers who are interested in using corpus tools and methods to examine how discourse behaves across contexts and explore aspects of recontextualisation and intertextuality

Crossing languages - crossing discourses: a corpus-assisted discourse study of Kulturkampf in German, Polish and English

Recent studies concerned with historical Germanisms have demonstrated that apart from indexing cultural stereotypes, public discourses in other languages often appropriate German loanwords as frames of references to interpret political realities and influence collective attitudes. This paper intends to contribute to this new research by investigating transpositions of the historical Germanism Kulturkampf in Polish and in English. Originally coined in the context of Bismarckian political attempts to reduce the power of the Catholic Church in Prussia, over time this term had been ‘borrowed’ to signify conflicts in various political and cultural contexts. By adopting a corpus-assisted discourse analysis, this paper examines the use of Kulturkampf in a large collection of newspaper data in English and Polish. Results demonstrate the ways in which the meaning of Kulturkampf has been discursively extended to perform ideological work in contemporary public discourse in the two different cultural context

Doing well by talking good? A topic modelling-assisted discourse study of corporate social responsibility

Using the novel technique of topic modelling, this paper examines thematic patterns and their changes over time in a large corpus of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports produced in the oil sector. Whereas previous research on corporate communications has been small-scale or interested in selected lexical aspects and thematic categories identified ex ante, our approach allows for thematic patterns to emerge from the data. The analysis reveals a number of major trends and topic shifts pointing to changing practices of CSR. Nowadays ‘people’, ‘communities’ and ‘rights’ seem to be given more prominence, whereas ‘environmental protection’ appears to be less relevant. Using more established corpus-based methods, we subsequently explore two top phrases - ‘human rights’ and ‘climate change’ that were identified as representative of the shifting thematic patterns. Our approach strikes a balance between the purely quantitative and qualitative methodologies and offers applied linguists new ways of exploring discourse in large collections of texts

Formulaic sequences in native and non-native argumentative writing in German

Whereas there is substantial scholarship on formulaic language in L1 and L2 English, there is less research on formulaicity in other languages. The aim of this paper is to contribute to learner corpus research into formulaic language in native and non-native German. To this effect, a corpus of argumentative essays written by advanced British students of German (WHiG) was compared with a corpus of argumentative essays written by German native speakers (Falko-L1). A corpus-driven analysis reveals a larger number of 3-grams in WHiG than in Falko-L1, which suggests that British advanced learners of German are more likely to use formulaic language in argumentative writing than their native-speaker counterparts. Secondly, by classifying the formulaic sequences according to their functions, this study finds that native speakers of German prefer discourse-structuring devices to stance expressions, whilst British advanced learners display the opposite preferences. Thirdly, the results show that learners of German make greater use of macro-discourse-structuring devices and cautious language, whereas native speakers favour micro-discourse structuring devices and tend to use more direct language. This study increases our understanding of formulaic language typical of British advanced learners of German and reveals how diverging cultural paradigms can shape written native speaker and learner output

Investigating media representations of the coronavirus in the UK, USA and Germany: what can a comparative corpus-based discourse analysis contribute to our understanding of the Covid-19 pandemic?

This small study explores some of the ways in which the coronavirus has been discursively constructed in the popular public media in three distinctive cultural and linguistic contexts: the UK, US, and Germany. Such comparisons are important for several reasons. With some exceptions (e.g. Antanasova and Koteyko, 2017), most discourse-analytical research on health and illness has focused mainly on one national context and one language. While such perspectives can offer rich insights into the representations of a discursive phenomenon, these representations are always ‘bespoke’ and restricted to that context and language, thus limiting our understating of how the phenomenon is ‘seen’ elsewhere (Partington et al., 2013; Leuschner and Jaworska, 2018). The coronavirus knows no borders and while the biological properties of the pathogen are everywhere the same, the ways in which the virus is talked about can be influenced by distinctive societal, cultural and linguistic factors. If we want to better understand the social reality of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is essential to compare how the virus has been represented in different contexts. Widely disseminated media outlets such as national newspapers can offer some important insights into such representations. Moreover, comparisons across different contexts are important not only because they can limit some of the generalizations that are sometimes made (based on research on representations in English only) about the ways in which we talk about health and illness, but also for epistemological reasons. Exploring how the coronavirus has been represented in public media discourse across different national contexts could uncover different ways of reasoning in relation to the pandemic and how they are reflected and reinforced through the language choices people make, potentially leading to a better understanding of the pandemic and stimulating knowledge exchange