Welcome to the first issue of the Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies

The rationale behind the launch of the online open-access Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies (JCaDS) is partly to meet the need for a discourse journal dedicated to research in which corpora play a significant role and partly to create a new corpus linguistics journal with a particular focus on discourse. Discourse is here defined as language in use as a vehicle of communication, as language doing things, as speakers and writers attempting to influence the beliefs and actions of their interlocutors using language. But the rationale was also the realization that corpus-based, corpus-driven, corpusassisted discourse analysis, corpus approaches to discourse, however we wish to name it, definable as \u2018that set of studies into the form and/or function of language as communicative discourse which incorporate the use of corpora\u2019 (Partington, Duguid and Taylor, 2013, p. 10), has for some considerable time matured into a field of study in its own right. It already has for instance, a biannual conference, and several volumes with \u2018corpora\u2019 and \u2018discourse\u2019 in their titles are on library bookshelves. As editors, then, we felt the time had come to provide a journal home, an on-line shop-window for the produce of this field of study

A corpus-based investigation into the use of metaphor in British business journalism

L’article présente une analyse de la nature des métaphores récurrentes dans le discours journalistique des affaires. L’analyse est conduite principalement à partir d’un corpus de textes. À la lumière des résultats observés, on tente une comparaison entre deux importantes théories modernes de la métaphore : pragmatique et cognitive. La méthode utilisée pour cette analyse paraît productive, ou pourra l’étendre à l’étude de nombreux aspects lexicaux de genres particuliers.In this paper, the author presents a (principally) corpus-based analysis of the nature of the systematic metaphors employed in business journalism. In the light of the results of this analysis, a comparison of two influential modern theories of metaphor — the pragmatic and the cognitivist — is attempted. The suggestion is made that the methodology used in the analysis is productive, i.e., can be used to study many of the lexical aspects of genre

Modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies: methodologies fro tracking language change over recent time.

This paper presents a description of the tools and methodologies employed in the novel discipline of modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies. The main instruments are a set of three ‘sister’ corpora of parallel structure and content from different moments of contemporary time, namely 1993, 2005 and 2010, along with a number of corpus interrogation tools. The methodologies are the particular techniques devised by the research team to which the author belongs (the SiBol group) for employing these interrogation tools to shed light on the various research questions treated in the paper. The first part of the paper outlines ways in which these tools and techniques can be used to track changes in the grammar, lexis and discourse practices of UK broadsheet or ‘quality’ newspapers. Given the important role of newspapers, some of these changes may well be indicative of general changes in UK written English. The second part, instead, describes a number of studies conducted by the research group into how the reporting of various social and cultural themes and issues, ranging from what is seen as a moral issue, to the rhetoric of appeals to science, to how antisemitism is debated, has developed over the time period in question. The concluding section discusses the relationship between the methodologies employed in modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies and wider scientific research methodology. SiBol is a portmanteau of Siena and Bologna, the two universities involved in initiating the project. http://www3.lingue.unibo.it/clb

Modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies: methodologies for tracking language change over recent time

This paper presents a description of the tools and methodologies employed in the novel discipline of modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies. The main instruments are a set of three ‘sister’ corpora of parallel structure and content from different moments of contemporary time, namely 1993, 2005 and 2010, along with a number of corpus interrogation tools. The methodologies are the particular techniques devised by the SiBol research team1 for employing these interrogation tools to shed light on the various research questions treated in the paper. The first part of the paper outlines ways in which these tools and techniques can be used to track changes in the grammar, lexis and discourse practices of UK broadsheet or ‘quality’ newspapers. Given the important role of newspapers, some of these changes may well be indicative of general changes in UK written English. The second part, instead, describes a number of studies conducted by the research group into how the reporting of various social and cultural themes and issues, ranging from what is seen as a moral issue, to the rhetoric of appeals to science, to how antisemitism is debated, has developed over the time period in question. The concluding section discusses the relationship between the methodologies employed in modern diachronic corpus-assisted language studies and wider scientific research methodology. 1 SiBol is a portmanteau of Siena and Bologna, the two universities involved in initiating the project. http://www3.lingue.unibo.it/clb

Anxiety, stress and perceived workload during the command and control of computer simulated fire service training environments

Purpose – Incidents requiring command and control require all personnel from firefighters (FFs) to the incident commander (IC) to make continuous decisions often with limited information and under acute time-pressure. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore the stress reactivity of specific roles during the command and control of an immersive, computer-based incident. Design/methodology/approach – Experienced firefighting personnel undergoing incident command training participated in this study. Participants completed measures of state anxiety and stress immediately before and after taking part in a computer-based simulation of a large-scale incident run in real time. During the simulation personnel assumed one of four roles: IC, sector commander, entry control officer (ECO), and command support officer. Following the simulation personnel then completed measures of perceived workload. Findings – No significant changes in state anxiety were observed, but levels of stress and perceived workload were related to task roles. Specifically, ICs reported the greatest levels of mental and temporal demands and stress when compared with ECOs. Research limitations/implications – Limitations include the lack of environmental factors (such as rain, darkness, and noise), a relatively small sample size, and the use of self-reported questionnaires. Practical implications – The application of immersive training environments as a method of developing FFs experience of incident command roles and skills pertinent to high-acuity, low-frequency events. Originality/value – The paper represents one of the first attempts to identify the self-reported anxiety, stress, and perceived workload of specific role demands during the command and control of simulated incidents

Remembering Michael Hoey's work

Prof. Michael Hoey was one of Britain’s leading academic linguists and language theorists who made transformative contributions in the areas of text and discourse analysis, and in corpus-based lexicology and dictionary-building. Hoey’s body of academic work spanned five decades, during which linguistic theory underwent a sea-change. Hoey was one of scholars not only creating the change but also making it comprehensible to a worldwide audience. Hoey’s early work, in days when dealing with discourse above the level of the sentence was still a novelty, presents a fascinating picture of how relations among sections of texts can be categorised into a limited set of patterns, including Sequence (e.g. Time, Consequence) and Matching (e.g. Contrast, Exemplification) relations. Hoey viewed all discourse, including writing, as a dialogue of sorts, and his work on cohesion, which aims to aid receiver comprehension, shows how the majority of the physical signals of the semantic relations connecting the different parts of a text are lexical items of some sort, and reversed tradition notions of the frequency and significance of lexical cohesion in relation to grammatical. His later work on lexical priming demonstrated in meticulous detail how extremely complex the associative behaviour of all lexical items is. It presents a new theory of language, of how we internalise knowledge of this associative behaviour by exposure to language, reproduce it in our own speech and thus continue the cycle of lexical priming of others in our various language communities

Book review: Gillings, M., Mautner, G., & Baker, P. (2023). Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (Cambridge Elements)

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Is Contamination Good or Bad? A Corpus-assisted Case Study in Translating Evaluative Prosody

In this article we showcase the relevance of corpus evidence in examining potential differences in evaluative prosody in the use of two seeming translation equivalents, namely the Italian noun contaminazione and its French "lookalike" contamination. Our analysis suggests that, when the item is used literally, its evaluative prosody is negative in both languages. However, when used figuratively (particularly in cultural and artistic contexts) the prosody of the Italian contaminazione is neutral or positive, whereas this figurative, positive use does not appear to be shared by French contamination. On the basis of these observations, we reflect on the role of corpus analysis in raising awareness of evaluative prosody, in particular how the \u201csame\u201d item can have a different evaluative prosody when used literally or figuratively, and how lookalike items can have a different evaluative prosody across languages \u2013 an especially tricky issue for language learners and professionals. In the final part of our work, we make proposals for a further, more exploratory use of corpus methods (relying in particular on collocates) for identifying cross-linguistic correspondences

Vacuum-assisted decellularization: an accelerated protocol to generate tissue-engineered human tracheal scaffolds

Patients with large tracheal lesions unsuitable for conventional endoscopic or open operations may require a tracheal replacement but there is no present consensus of how this may be achieved. Tissue engineering using decellularized or synthetic tracheal scaffolds offers a new avenue for airway reconstruction. Decellularized human donor tracheal scaffolds have been applied in compassionate-use clinical cases but naturally derived extracellular matrix (ECM) scaffolds demand lengthy preparation times. Here, we compare a clinically applied detergent-enzymatic method (DEM) with an accelerated vacuum-assisted decellularization (VAD) protocol. We examined the histological appearance, DNA content and extracellular matrix composition of human donor tracheae decellularized using these techniques. Further, we performed scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and biomechanical testing to analyze decellularization performance. To assess the biocompatibility of scaffolds generated using VAD, we seeded scaffolds with primary human airway epithelial cells in vitro and performed in vivo chick chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) and subcutaneous implantation assays. Both DEM and VAD protocols produced well-decellularized tracheal scaffolds with no adverse mechanical effects and scaffolds retained the capacity for in vitro and in vivo cellular integration. We conclude that the substantial reduction in time required to produce scaffolds using VAD compared to DEM (approximately 9 days vs. 3–8 weeks) does not compromise the quality of human tracheal scaffold generated. These findings might inform clinical decellularization techniques as VAD offers accelerated scaffold production and reduces the associated costs