Correlation, collocation and cohesion : A corpus-based critical analysis of violent jihadist discourse

This article explores the language of violent jihad, focussing upon lexis encoding concepts from Islam. Through the use of correlation statistics, this article demonstrates that the words encoding such concepts distribute in dependent relationships across different types of texts. The correlation between the words cannot be simply explained in terms of collocation; rather, the correlation is evidence of other forms of cohesion at work in the texts. The variation in patterns of cohesion across a spectrum of texts from those advocating violence to those which do not promote violence demonstrates how these concepts are contested and redefined by violent jihadists and the role that collocation and other forms of cohesion can play in the process. This article concludes that the terms, and their redefinition, are a key part of the symbolic capital used by groups to create identities which licence violence

Corpus Linguistics and 17th-Century Prostitution

Corpus linguistics has much to offer history, being as both disciplines engage so heavily in analysis of large amounts of textual material. This book demonstrates the opportunities for exploring corpus linguistics as a method in historiography and the humanities and social sciences more generally. Focusing on the topic of prostitution in 17th-century England, it shows how corpus methods can assist in social research, and can be used to deepen our understanding and comprehension. McEnery and Baker draw principally on two sources – the newsbook Mercurius Fumigosis and the Early English Books Online Corpus. This scholarship on prostitution and the sex trade offers insight into the social position of women in history

Corpus linguistics for indexing

This methodological paper demonstrates how methods from corpus linguistics – a collection of computer-assisted approaches to the analysis of large volumes of text – can be used in the creation of indexes. We begin this article by introducing corpus linguistics, including its main principles and advantages, before demonstrating how corpus methods can be used by indexers, providing a case study in which we create an index for an academic journal article using the established corpus techniques of frequency, keywords, collocation and concordance. This case study shows how when combined with human input and intuition, corpus linguistics methods can provide indexers with new perspectives on the texts they are working on, all the while increasing the systematicity, replicability and objectivity of the indexing process itself

Language Surrounding Poverty in Early Modern England:A corpus-based investigation of how people living in the seventeenth century perceived the criminalized poor

A study exploring attitudes to the criminalised poor using a billion words of data from early-modern England

The Value of Revisiting and Extending Previous Studies:The Case of Islam in the UK Press

In this chapter, the authors introduce corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), a means of using the methods of corpus linguistics to facilitate discourse analysis of large volumes of textual data. The chapter uses this framework not only to demonstrate the value of CADS but also to explore the importance of repeating studies over time to test the degree to which discourse is static, or changes, through time. By extending a study of the representation of Muslims and Islam in the UK press, the chapter shows the value of exploring the dynamic nature of discourse as a way of cautioning against the idea that discourse is necessarily stable across time

Identifying and describing functional discourse units in the BNC Spoken 2014

On the surface, it appears that conversational language is produced in a stream of spoken utterances. In reality conversation is composed of contiguous units that are characterized by coherent communicative purposes. A large number of important research questions about the nature of conversational discourse could be addressed if researchers could investigate linguistic variation across functional discourse units. To date, however, no corpus of conversational language has been annotated according to functional units, and there are no existing methods for carrying out this type of annotation. We introduce a new method for segmenting transcribed conversation files into discourse units and characterizing those units based on their communicative purposes. The development and piloting of this method is described in detail and the final framework is presented. We conclude with a discussion of an ongoing project where we are applying this coding framework to the British National Corpus Spoken 2014

The representation of citizens and monarchy in Acts of Parliament in 1800 to 2000 : Identifying social roles through collocations

Peer reviewe