‘This is England, speak English!’:A corpus-assisted critical study of language ideologies in the right-leaning British press

This article examines right-leaning press representations of people living in the UK who can’t speak English, or at least speak English well, following the 2011 Census, which was the first to ask respondents about their main language and proficiency in English. The analysis takes a corpus-assisted approach to critical discourse analysis, based on a 1.8 million-word corpus of right-leaning newspaper articles about ‘speak(ing) English’ in the years following this historic Census (2011 to 2016). The analysis reveals the tendency for the press to focus on immigrants – particularly in the contexts of education and health – who are represented with recourse to a series of argumentation strategies, or ‘topoi’. Over the course of this paper, we argue that these topoi are problematic, as they present paradoxes, obscure the role of the Government in ensuring integration, overlook the difficulties of language learning and cultural assimilation, and generally contribute to a broader anti-immigrant UK media narrative which serves to legitimise exclusionary and discriminatory practices against people from minority linguistic and ethnic backgrounds

Empowering people to make healthier choices:A critical discourse analysis of the Tackling Obesity policy

In response to the heightened risk that coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) poses to the health and lives of people with obesity, in 2020 the U.K. government launched a new package of policies intended to stimulate weight loss among the country’s population. In this article, I present a critical discourse analysis of the policy paper which announced these new measures. I identify the discourses that are used to represent things, people, and processes in this policy text. These discourses are interpreted in terms of broadly neoliberal ideologies of public health management. Taken together, the discourses identified contribute to a broadly neoliberal ideology of public health management. It is argued that the policy paper represents an instance of “lifestyle drift,” as it initially appears to engage with social and economic determinants of health but ultimately neglects these in favor of focusing on individual lifestyle factors, particularly in the shape of individuals’ “choices.

Insulin restriction, medicalisation and the Internet:A corpus-assisted study of diabulimia discourse in online support groups

Diabulimia is a contested eating disorder characterised by the deliberate restriction of insulin by people with type 1 diabetes in order to lose and control their body weight. This article reports the first discourse-based study of diabulimia. It employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques afforded by corpus linguistics, a methodology for examining extensive collections of digitised language data, to interrogate the discourse surrounding diabulimia in an approx. 120,000-word collection of messages posted to three English-speaking online diabetes support groups. The analysis shows how, despite lacking official disease status, diabulimia was nonetheless linguistically constructed by the support group contributors as if it were a medically-legitimate mental illness. This article explores some of the consequences that such medicalising conceptions are likely to have for people experiencing diabulimia, as well as their implications for health professionals caring for people presenting with this emerging health concern in the future

The discursive construction of diabulimia: a corpus linguistic examination of online health communication

This study is the first of its kind to examine the discursive construction of diabulimia. Diabulimia is a contested disease characterised by the deliberate restriction of insulin dosage by people with insulin-dependent diabetes in order to control their weight. The analysis takes a mixed methods approach, combining quantitative corpus linguistic techniques with qualitative discourse analytic methods to examine how diabulimia is discursively constructed in three English-speaking diabetes internet fora. By examining the discursive construction of diabulimia in this context, this study explores this emerging health phenomenon from the perspectives of those individuals who, in many cases, have lived, first-hand experience of it. The corpus analysis reveals the discursive construction of diabulimia in this context to be deeply influenced by medicalisation and the neoliberal imperative of autonomous diabetes self-management. Individuals with diabetes who restrict their insulin dosage to control their weight are likely to articulate their experiences and concerns using decidedly medicalising language, construing these experiences as the symptoms of a disease (diabulimia). It is also found that the demands of diabetes self-management figure in and shape individuals’ experiences and understandings of diabulimia in varying and conflicting ways. By providing novel insight into subjective experiences and understandings of diabulimia, the findings reported in this study give voice to those individuals affected by it, findings which also bear important implications for health care practitioners likely to encounter such individuals in the future

Opening up the NHS to market:using multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine the ongoing corporatisation of health care communication

Since its implementation, the British Government’s controversial 2013 Health and Social Care Act has had far-reaching effects on English health care provision, not least the creation of 212 regional practitioner-led clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) which are now responsible for much of the service provision across the country. Taking as an example the website of one of these new commissioning groups, this study shows that multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) can reveal how health and social care matters are being increasingly framed within a corporate and neoliberal set of ideas, values, identities and social relations. Despite government assurances that the Act preserves the (non-commercial) founding values of the NHS, our MCDA provides textual evidence of the influence of neoliberal and commercial discourses operating across CCG websites, which appear to prioritise corporate rather than the practical, day-to-day concerns of patients