When governments introduce controversial policies that many citizens disapprove of, officeholders increasingly use discursive legitimation strategies in their public communication to ward off blame. In this paper, we contribute to the study of blame avoidance in government social media communication by exploring how corpus-assisted discourse analysis helps to identify three types of common legitimations: self-defensive appeals to personal authority of policymakers, impersonal authority of rules or documents and goals or effects of policies. We use a specialised (...) class='Hi'>corpus of tweets by the Brexit department of the British government which we analyse both qualitatively and quantitatively. We demonstrate how the analysis of lexical bundles that characterise each type of legitimation might provide a new avenue for identifying the presence, characteristics and uses of these legitimations in larger datasets. (shrink)

This corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of news reports on air pollution published from 2008 through 2015 by China Daily, China’s largest official English-language newspaper, reveals a significant attitudinal shift around the end of 2011 as regards public awareness of increasing air pollution levels in China and related public criticism. It also constructs a clear image of the increasing determination and resolve of the Chinese central government over the course of this 8-year period to take action to effectively (...) reduce air pollution. This study highlights the submissive role played by the official Chinese press in their reporting on air pollution under the strict censorship system of the Communist Party of China, as well as the socio-political role that international sporting events such as the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games played in raising both public and governmental awareness of environmental issues. (shrink)

The present paper aims to report on the preliminary findings from the initial stages of ongoing research on hate speech in Lithuanian online comments. Comments are marked strongly by such phenomena as flaming and trolling; therefore, in this genre we can expect a high degree of hostility, obscenity, high incidence of insults and aggressive lexis, which can inflict harm to individuals or organizations. The goal of the current research is thus to make an attempt to identify some features of verbal (...) aggression in Lithuanian by applying the principles and instruments of corpus linguistics, which proved to be a useful approach when dealing with such issues as trolling. It is expected that further analysis of those features will help to identify and define formal linguistic criteria that could facilitate identification of hate speech in public discourse. The data has been obtained from the Lithuanian corpus of user-generated comments collected from one major Lithuanian portal, www.delfi.lt. The corpus consists of all the comments posted in the year 2014 and in total includes 17,909 comments, which make up 1,160,109 words. For the initial data analysis, linguistic aspects, such as wordlists, collocations, and formulaic language, were analysed by using the AntConc software. The interpretations of the results are still very tentative, but what the initial findings show is that overt aggression does not feature among the most frequent and most salient features of comments. Aggression is, in our data, indirectly expressed through creative language use, which can mainly be studied through qualitative analysis. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Since the United Kingdom’s referendum on European Union (EU) membership in 2016, a new political cleavage of Remainers and Leavers has developed (Kelley, N. [2019]. British social attitudes survey: Britain’s shifting identities and attitudes. (36). National Centre for Research). This paper explores how five pro-Brexit newspapers discursively construct political division in Britain in relation to two key events in the final year of Britain’s EU membership: the extension of the withdrawal process past the original date of March, and the (...) introduction of the Benn Act in September. The paper reveals two primary discursive constructions of division in Britain: a divide between incompetent and arrogant political officials and an innocent, suffering public, and an identity cleavage between pro-Remain ‘elites’ and ‘ordinary’ Leave-voting citizens. The study argues that the construction of these divisions threatens a collective national identity in Britain at a time when it is most required. It concludes that by apportioning blame for socio-political divisions, the newspapers obfuscate their role in contributing to disunity in the UK. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis study is situated within corpus-assisted discourse analysis. Corpora and discourse studies: Integrating discourse and corpora. London: Palgrave Macmillan.) and provides a critical discussion of key topics and stances in the marriage equality debate in Germany. The ways in which the German print media covered the debate are explored through two corpora which include relevant texts from three German newspapers and two magazines from two key periods ; in 2001, Germany introduced ‘civil unions’ but it was only (...) in 2017 that marriage was opened to same-sex couples. Qualitative and quantitative analyses using AntConc and ProtAnt suggest that while there are parallels to marriage equality debates in other countries, there are also language-/culture-specific features. For example, there is a stronger focus on children’s welfare in the contemporary data, since marriage equality meant joint adoption rights for same-sex couples. Through an exploration of keywords/collocations and close reading of prototypical texts, it is shown how linguistic choices contribute to framing the arguments for/against marriage equality and how these stances are connected to culture-specific and cross-cultural norms. (shrink)

Music genres showcase the wide range of language use, offering rich ground for linguistic studies. Recently, song lyrics, in particular, have gained attention due to their reflection on the socio-c...

The purposes of this study are twofold. First, it investigates how the digital media discursively react against the use of anabolic-androgenic steroids. Second, it examines how Thailand is portrayed as a venue for steroid holiday among recreational bodybuilders from the Western countries. Adhering to the principle of theoretical triangulation, the study employs two frameworks including Reisigl and Wodak’s discursive strategies and Van Dijk’s ideological structures. The methodology undertaken is a corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The corpus contains 100 (...) articles published on various websites between the period of 2014 and 2019 with the total number of 107,116 words. Main findings indicate that, regarding the first purpose, the media portray AAS as the ‘outgroup’ by employing various negative lexical items while attempting to dilute any claimed benefits. Concerning the second purpose, Thailand is represented as a venue in which AAS are easily available coupled with corrupt dealers and lax regulations. (shrink)

This paper examines how gender is represented within conspiracy theories by drawing on data from a corpus composed of conspiracy theory documents. It presents an analysis of the collocates of gendered nouns, highlighting the ways that conspiracy theorists use language to reinforce connections between religiosity and masculinity and understandings of femininity that rely on biological gender essentialism. Further, this paper highlights the overlap in values between religious masculinity and hegemonic masculinity that occur within this discourse. It also argues (...) that the ways in which gender is represented in conspiracy theory discourse shares links to far-right ideology, even when the conspiracies in question do not have direct or overt connections to the far-right. (shrink)

This article exploits the synergy of critical discourse studies and Corpus Linguistics to study the pervasive representation of Islam and Muslims in an approximate 670,000-word corpus of US news media stories published between 2001 and 2015. Following collocation and concordance analysis of the most frequent topics or categories which revolve around the representation of Islam and Muslims in US news stories, the Discourse-Historical Approach to critical discourse analysis was adopted to investigate how the discursive strategies of (...) nomination and predication are used in US news media stories. The findings indicated that, in general, Islam and Muslims are associated with violence, religious radicalism, and Islamic extremist militants. Finally, the article discusses the discursive themes resulting from the analysis of personal pronouns as well as the educational implications of the findings for social studies and multicultural education. (shrink)

This corpus analysis of linguistic and semantic features in French parliamentary debates concerning online hate speech regulation, highlights tensions between state powers and private rights. Two key themes are identified: first, the _problem of definition_: how such online content is defined in the debates, and second, the _problem of regulation_: how the debates negotiate the supra-jurisdictional and individual jurisdiction issues involved, in regulating both the global online content and the responsibilities of the owners of the platforms who manage (...) the content. For this analysis, the authors created a corpus of French National Assembly Examination Committee discussions and public sessions between July 2019 to January 2020 discussing the _Loi Avia _(Avia Law). The corpus was analysed using quali-quantitative methods. Overall, the study combines a top-down (global) and a bottom-up (local) analysis of the data, applying corpus semantic approaches (Lecolle et al. in Langages 210(2):35–54, 2018; Rastier in The Routledge handbook of semantics, Routledge, pp 507–522, 2015) to contextualize the analysis of the meta-discourse (Hyland in Meta-discourse: exploring interaction in writing, 1st ed. Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350063617 ). The analysis highlights the linguistic features revealing the power dynamics inherent within the discourse and counter-discourse of the dominant and opposition political parties respectively. (shrink)

This paper investigates the role of (DIS)RESPECT a value premise in two landmark civil rights cases given by the United States Supreme Court. It adopts a corpus-assisted approach whereby a keyword analysis and the analysis of key semantic domains are used to identify potential values relied upon by judges in their justifications. The two categories of NO RESPECT and RESPECTED have been selected and examined as one domain of (DIS)RESPECT. (DIS)RESPECT turns out to be the only (...) value marked by strong evaluative polarity and it is found in the majority, as well as in dissenting opinions. The analysis shows how the notion of (DIS)RESPECT has been integrated into the arguments of judges and it highlights the central importance of values and the related evaluative language for legal argumentation. (shrink)

From Wodehouse to the White House: A Corpus-Assisted Study of Play, Fantasy and Dramatic Incongruity in Comic Writing and Laughter-Talk In this paper I consider two discourse types, one written and literary, the other spoken and semi-conversational, in an attempt to discover if there are any similarities in the ways in which humour is generated in such apparently diverse forms of communication. The first part of the paper is concerned with the explicitly comic prose of P. G. Wodehouse, (...) whilst in the second part of the paper, we investigate the laughter-talk, defined as the talk preceding and provoking, intentionally or otherwise, an episode of laughter, occurring during press briefings held at the White House during the Clinton era and the subsequent Bush administration. Both studies, by employing corpus analysis techniques together with detailed discourse reading, integrate quantitative and qualitative approaches to the respective data sets. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This corpus-assisted critical discourse study examines news reports published by China’s official English-language media from 2000 to 2018, with the goal of understanding how they represent LGBTQ+ issues within the China’s socio-political context. Analysis reveals that the discussion of LGBTQ+-related topics has been consistently discouraged in China’s official English-language media, and the few news reports which have appeared in these media sources have focused on preventing the spread of HIV/aids through homosexual behaviors, on promoting LGBTQ+ rights, (...) and on advocating for the liberalization of sex education in China. The range of these focuses indicates that, despite widely-held negative stereotypes regarding homosexual behaviors and their relation to the spread of HIV/aids, the official English-language media of China have endeavored to project a positive image of the Chinese central government’s efforts to construct a society that is open, inclusive, and tolerant of LGBTQ+ individuals. This study also discusses positive changes in the social well-being of LGBTQ+ persons in China as evidenced first by the more liberal attitudes that gradually have resulted from the efforts of Chinese netizens to influence LGBTQ+-related governmental policies and second, by the more positive representations of LGBTQ+ issues being communicated to global audiences through the China’s official English-language media. (shrink)

Corpus-assisted analyses of public discourse often focus on the lexical level. This article argues in favour of corpus-assisted analyses of discourse, but also in favour of conceptualising salient lexical items in public discourse in a more determined way. It draws partly on non-Anglophone academic traditions in order to promote a conceptualisation of discourse keywords, thereby highlighting how their meaning is determined by their use in discourse contexts. It also argues in favour of emphasising the cognitive and (...) epistemic dimensions of discourse-determined semantic structures. These points will be exemplified by means of a corpus-assisted, as well as a frame-based analysis of the discourse keyword financial crisis in British newspaper articles from 2009. Collocations of financial crisis are assigned to a generic matrix frame for ‘event’ which contains slots that specify possible statements about events. By looking at which slots are more, respectively less filled with collocates of financial crisis, we will trace semantic presence as well as absence, and thereby highlight the pragmatic dimensions of lexical semantics in public discourse. The article also advocates the suitability of discourse keyword analyses for systematic contrastive analyses of public/political discourse and for lexicographical projects that could serve to extend the insights drawn from corpus-guided approaches to discourse analysis. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This corpus-assisted critical discourse study examines news reports published by China’s official English-language media from 2000 to 2018, with the goal of understanding how they represent LGBTQ+ issues within the China’s socio-political context. Analysis reveals that the discussion of LGBTQ+-related topics has been consistently discouraged in China’s official English-language media, and the few news reports which have appeared in these media sources have focused on preventing the spread of HIV/aids through homosexual behaviors, on promoting LGBTQ+ rights, (...) and on advocating for the liberalization of sex education in China. The range of these focuses indicates that, despite widely-held negative stereotypes regarding homosexual behaviors and their relation to the spread of HIV/aids, the official English-language media of China have endeavored to project a positive image of the Chinese central government’s efforts to construct a society that is open, inclusive, and tolerant of LGBTQ+ individuals. This study also discusses positive changes in the social well-being of LGBTQ+ persons in China as evidenced first by the more liberal attitudes that gradually have resulted from the efforts of Chinese netizens to influence LGBTQ+-related governmental policies and second, by the more positive representations of LGBTQ+ issues being communicated to global audiences through the China’s official English-language media. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis 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 English’ in the years following this historic Census. 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. (shrink)

Despite the widely disseminated assumption that metaphors are the key persuasive devices in promoting tourist destinations, specifically those located in tropical regions, there has been to date no systematic research investigating the use of figurative language in tourism promotional discourse. Using a corpus-assisted approach to the identification and analysis of metaphors supported by Wmatrix, this study attempts to establish empirically whether promotion of destinations culturally and geographically faraway does deploy more metaphors than marketing of tourist places “closer” (...) to home and what kind of conceptual mappings and metaphorical expressions are utilized. The results point to a significant increase of metaphor use in the descriptions of tropical destinations. Five domains—“BODY,” “NATURAL PRECIOUS ELEMENT,” “COLOR,” “TASTE,” and “RELIGION”—prove especially productive. The combinations of metaphorical expressions from these domains generate sensory fusions that appeal to multiple senses at once including vision, taste and imagination, and in doing so, potentially increase the “appetite” for “consuming” a destination. They also perform ideological work as devices in discourse that clandestinely perpetuates colonial legacies. (shrink)

In this paper we explore how some of the largest US-newspapers linguistically frame immigrants to the USA in articles about Mexican and Central American immigrants. Specifically, it is a corpus-assisted discourse study which examines the frequency of different semantic predicate-types with migrant subjects and migrant by-agents in the quest for underlying positive or negative biases. We wish to ascertain what activities migrants are presented as taking part in, principally as agents. The analysis shows that more than half (...) of the migrant/predicate-pairings reflect the dictionary definitions of migrant. However, immigrants are described as illegal 66% of the times that their location is mentioned with an immigrant/predicate-pairing. The non-definition-confirming pairings also show evidence of a negative framing of immigrants, but not of migrants. Furthermore, immigrants are more often than migrants cast as agents of activities that do not simply reiterate their status as migrants. Finally, we found evidence of the Negation Bias in the immigrant/predicate-pairings. (shrink)

This article traces how students are represented in undergraduate prospectuses from 1998 to 2021 by employing a corpus-assisted approach to critical discourse analysis of a 1.9 million word corpus of prospectuses from a single Russell Group university in England. Recent decades have witnessed an increase in tuition fees and competition to attract students; hence, it is important to understand to what extent, if any, the representation of students has changed in the prospectuses. Our findings add to (...) the literature by showing for the first time that the representation of students in prospectuses has shifted in ways consistent with the impact of market-driven policy on the sector. Initially, students were positioned primarily as learners, partners to the university, and members of a community. Latterly, students are positioned primarily as consumers and future professionals. These findings are significant because they capture the extent to which a market-driven agenda has been normalised by institutions, and demonstrate how this process of normalisation occurs. Even before they reach campus, young people are conditioned and defined by the market, with the prospectus presenting university as an opportunity to enhance earning power rather than to benefit from life-changing education. (shrink)

The present study is a corpus-assisted analysis of discourses on the Catalan movement of independence in the Catalan and Spanish press. A referendum for Catalan independence was held on 1 October 2017 but was not approved by the central Spanish government and was declared illegal. Spanish and Catalan newspapers differed considerably in their treatment and representation of the conflict, which also drew the attention of the international press to Catalonia. My analysis interconnects theoretical perspectives from linguistic (...) critical discourse studies, cognitive linguistics, and media studies. The methodology is based on the analysis of two comparable corpora of journalistic texts. My aim is to identify and compare different features of the semantic prosody of words describing the event of geopolitical separation and the different narratives on this sociopolitical conflict that these prosodies contribute to producing. More specifically, I focus on a selection of keywords, like independence, secession, and sovereignty, that seem to be indicative of different discursive strategies consciously, and possibly unconsciously, chosen by a selection of national Catalan and Spanish newspapers. By carrying out a contrastive analysis of the two corpora, I am able to describe certain similarities, like the similar frequent use of the word independence, and differences, like the more frequent use of the word secession in the Spanish corpus, that indicate different framings of the same event and can be related to different ideological positionings against or in favor of Catalonia’s independence from Spain. (shrink)

Based on a corpus-driven analysis of two translated versions ofHongloumeng(one by David Hawkes and the other by Xianyi Yang and Gladys Yang) in parallel corpora, this article investigates the use of lexical bundles in an attempt to trace the stylistic features and differences in the translations produced by the respective translators. TheHongloumengcorpus is developed at the sentence level to facilitate co-occurrence of the source texts and the two corresponding translations. For this purpose, the three-word and four-word lexical bundles (...) were first extracted and then analyzed with respect to the functional classification proposed by Biber et al. (2004). The results of the study show that Hawkes' translation is embedded with a greater number and variety of lexical bundles than the one by the Yang couple. The study also identified the differences between the two versions which can be traced back to the deployment of different translation strategies of the translators, appearing in turn to be influenced by the language backgrounds of the translators, the translation skopos and settings, and the social, political, and ideological milieu in which the translations were produced. (shrink)

Bullying behaviour among adolescents is a prevalent concern all over the world as it holds significant implications for their mental health and social life. Similarly, bullying has emerged as a grave concern in high schools in Pakistan. However, very limited literature has covered the dynamics of religious education and bullying behaviour among high school students in Pakistan. Therefore, this study seeks to investigate the impact of religious beliefs and practices on the prevalence of abuse and bullying among high school students (...) in Pakistan. The study has adopted a qualitative research design to fulfil this objective. The primary qualitative data for the study was collected by interviewing high school students from three prominent high schools in Pakistan. The data was analysed with the help of thematic analysis. The findings of this study indicate that religious education can help promote compassion, empathy, and respect among students. Thus, the study holds significant implications regarding the role of the community and teachers in taking a stand against bullying. (shrink)

During the period covered by this volume, Bertrand Russell first retired from and then resumed his philosophical career. In 1927 he published two philosophy books, The Analysis of Matter and An Outline of Philosophy . His next book in academic philosophy, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth , was not published until 1940. Yet, Russell published a significant amount of essays and popular books between 1927 and 1946, mostly to finance the running of Beacon Hill School, and his growing (...) family. Those years also saw his break-up with Dora Russell, his marriage to Patricia Spence and a move of the family to the United States. Volume 10 brings together Russell's writings on ethics, politics, religion and academic philsophy. It is an invaluable guide to the thought and development of one of the most famous philosophers of this century. (shrink)

Corpus linguistics is becoming a respected method of statutory and constitutional interpretation in the United States over the past decade, yet it has also generated a backlash from a group of scholars that engage in empirical work. This essay attempts to demonstrate both the contributions and the risks of using linguistic corpora as a primary tool in legal interpretation. Its legitimacy stems from the fact that courts routinely state that statutory terms, when not defined as a matter of law, (...) are to be given their ordinary meaning. Judges have responded to this challenge, with the assistance of the linguistics community, by using corpora to determine which meanings are ordinary. However, legal analysts have not determined exactly what makes one meaning ordinary and another not ordinary. This gap has led to a level of disagreement in the field. Moreover, while linguists who engage in corpus linguistic analysis typically emphasize the importance of context, the legal application is peculiarly context-free, in keeping with legal philosophies that eschew reliance on reference to a law’s purpose and the intent of the legislature that enacted it. This move adds a political dimension to corpus analysis as a means of legal interpretation. Yet, the article concludes that by relying on a blend of general and specialized corpora, the legal system can substantially reduce the problem of contextualization, as some linguists and practitioners have already recognized. (shrink)

Covid-19 has occasioned ongoing shifts in discourse as language changes to reflect and shape new stages of the global pandemic and different voices weigh in on topics, such as infectious diseases and vaccine efficacy. This study looks at an instance of this that relates to the ‘global education industry’, where cancellation of the International Baccalaureate’s May 2020 high stakes examination instigated a wide-ranging discussion about the organisation. This was triggered by the publication of IB results for 174,355 students in 146 (...) countries, many of which showed large discrepancies between predicted and final grades. Using computer-assisted discourse analysis and a corpus of tweets containing the hashtag #ibscandal, patterns of language use are analysed, providing valuable new insights into the impact on students in different national contexts. (shrink)

Two main goals of the emerging field of neurocognitive poetics are the use of more natural and ecologically valid stimuli, tasks and contexts and providing methods and models allowing to quantify distinctive features of verbal materials used in such tasks and contexts and their effects on readers responses. A natural key element of poetic language, metaphor, still is understudied insofar as relatively little empirical research looked at literary or poetic metaphors. An exception is Katz et al.’s corpus of 204 (...) literary metaphors by authors such as Shakespeare or Dylan Thomas, for which various rating data are available. We reanalyzed their corpus using a combination of quantitative narrative analysis, latent semantic analysis, and machine learning in order to identify relevant features of the metaphors that influenced the ratings. The combined application of computational tools sheds light on surface and affective-semantic features that co-determine the reception of poetic metaphors and successfully predicted the period of origin, authorship and goodness ratings of the metaphors. The present results can be used for generating quantitative hypotheses or selecting and matching verbal stimuli in empirical studies of literature and neurocognitive poetics. (shrink)

Brain monitoring combined with automatic analysis of EEGs provides a clinical decision support tool that can reduce time to diagnosis and assist clinicians in real-time monitoring applications (e.g., neurological intensive care units). Clinicians have indicated that a sensitivity of 95% with specificity below 5% was the minimum requirement for clinical acceptance. In this study, a high-performance automated EEG analysis system based on principles of machine learning and big data is proposed. This hybrid architecture integrates hidden Markov models (HMMs) (...) for sequential decoding of EEG events with deep learning-based postprocessing that incorporates temporal and spatial context. These algorithms are trained and evaluated using the Temple University Hospital EEG, which is the largest publicly available corpus of clinical EEG recordings in the world. This system automatically processes EEG records and classifies three patterns of clinical interest in brain activity that might be useful in diagnosing brain disorders: (1) spike and/or sharp waves, (2) generalized periodic epileptiform discharges, (3) periodic lateralized epileptiform discharges. It also classifies three patterns used to model the background EEG activity: (1) eye movement, (2) artifacts and (3) background. Our approach delivers a sensitivity above 90% while maintaining a specificity below 5%. We also demonstrate that this system delivers a low false alarm rate, which is critical for any spike detection application. (shrink)

Part I: Theoretical considerations from the beginnings to the present day -- Chapter 1: Delexicalisation, relexicalisation and classroom application -- Chapter 2: collocation, interpretation, and context of situation -- Chapter 3: Semantic prosodies, irony, insincerity and literary analysis -- Chapter 4: Data-assisted negotiating -- Chapter 5: The analysis and creation of humour -- Chapter 6: Events in the context of culture, language events, subtext -- PART II: New applications -- Chapter 7: Alexander Pushkin and authorial intention -- (...) Chapter 8: Translating Pushkin: a case in point -- Chapter 11 : Contextualprosodic theory in the stylistics classroom --Chapter 12: Student-centred stylistics: does subtext read text?. (shrink)

How do politicians engage with and offer to assist their constituents: the people who vote them into power? We address the question by analysing a corpus of 80 interactions recorded at the office of a Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom, and comprising telephone calls between constituents and the MP’s clerical ‘caseworkers’ as well as face-to-face encounters with MPs in their fortnightly ‘surgeries’. The data were transcribed, and then analysed using conversation analysis, focusing on the design and (...) placement of offers of assistance. We identified three types of offers within a longer ‘offering’ sequence: ‘proposal offers’, which typically appear first in any offering sequence, in which politicians and caseworkers make proposals to help their constituents using formats that request permission to do so, or check that the constituent does indeed want help ; ‘announcement offers’, which appear second, and indicate that something has been decided and confirm the intention to act and ‘request offers’, which appear third, and take for form ‘let me do X’. Request offers indicate that the offer is available but cannot be completed until the current conversation is closed; they also appear in environments in which the constituent reissues their problems and appears dissatisfied with the offers so far. The article contributes to what we know about making offers in institutional settings, as well as shedding the first empirical light on the workings of the constituency office: the site of engagement between everyday members of the public and their elected representatives. (shrink)

Within the scope of the POPULISMUS research project, we have engaged in a methodological cross-fertilization between Essex School-inspired methods of analysis and computer-assisted text analysis. In this chapter, emphasis is placed on the Greek case and the material analyzed involves newspaper articles from the 2014–5 period. In particular, the analysis focuses on the antagonistic language games developed around representations of ‘the people’ and ‘populism’. Highlighting the need to study anti-populism together with populism, something that has not (...) attracted much attention in the relevant bibliography, and focusing on their mutual constitution from a discourse-theoretical as well as lexicometric perspective, we articulate a comprehensive analysis of the populist and anti-populist press in Greece, with broader implications for populism research globally. (shrink)

This study compares the coverage of coping strategies and emotions portrayed in news regarding COVID-19 by The New York Times in the U.S. and People’s Daily of China via social media. By employing corpus assisted discourse analysis to scrutinize the text corpora, our study uncovered prominent keywords and themes. Findings indicate that a comprehensive range of themes relating to coping strategies was more common in People’s Daily while a relatively smaller number of themes was apparent in The (...) New York Times. In terms of emotions exhibited in the news coverage, positive emotions such as cheer, gratitude, and good wishes predominated in People’s Daily whereas in The New York Times, negative emotions in the form of fears and anxiety were salient. The differences are explained with reference to the political context intertwined with the news environment and prior experiences in handling epidemics, with practical implications. (shrink)

IntroductionThe assisted reproductive technology field deals with consistent and predictable gaps in knowledge. Expressing lack of knowledge with a sentence like “I don’t know” can be challenging for doctors. This study examined physicians’ negative epistemic disclaimer “non lo so” in Italian ART doctor-couple interactions. In particular, it aimed to reveal specific features of “non lo so”: function, topic, temporality, responsibility, and interactional aspects.MethodsThis was a video-based observational study. We used microanalysis of face-to-face dialogue to analyze 20 purposively selected triadic (...) consultations from a corpus of 85. This inductive analysis focused on the function, the content and some selected interactional aspects of the “non lo so”, quantifying and capturing the interaction between these qualitative features.ResultsWe found 82 doctors’ “non lo so” in the corpus. We discovered three main functions of this expression: propositional, relational, discursive. The most frequent topics raising doctors’ “non lo so” were costs, treatment-related aspects, and timing issues. In more than half of the cases, present issues emerged. The majority of “non lo so” was framed using the “I,” with doctors’ taking personal responsibility. Patients played a role in these expressions from doctors: Patients initiated more than one third of them, and in one fourth of the cases, patients followed up immediately.ConclusionOur findings may be related to characteristics of the specific field of ART. Doctors in this setting must frequently express a direct lack of knowledge to their patients, and when they do, they mean it literally. Patients contribute to such disclosures, and their responses suggest that they find them acceptable, showing that they may expect limitations in their potential to conceive. (shrink)

This study investigates the strategies employed in the representation of masculinity in a sample of 50 advertising campaigns launched between 1999 and 2020. The chosen posters advertise products targeted at men that fit into five categories: beverages, food, daily care products, male fragrances, and clothing. Among the brands advertised are American Apparel, Clinique, Coca-Cola, Dove, Givenchy, McDonald's, and Nike. The analysis of discursive strategies is complemented by an analysis of the Corpus of Contemporary American English that investigates (...) the most salient collocates of real man/men in US English; this search was conducted due to the frequent mention of the term real men in the slogans under investigation. The corpus analysis supports the key findings of the study by showing that language and advertising operate in a circular structure and mutually impact one another. The five major strategies identified as recurrent in the representation of masculinity include gentleman's look, gender equality and fatherhood, sex appeal, sex and dominance, and strength. The findings reveal the prevalence of stereotypical representations of masculinity that foreground sex appeal, strength, and dominance over women, and to a lesser extent, the image of the classic gentleman. The Dove Men Care Collection promotes the idea of fatherhood and gender equality, which might be considered a slight departure from the usual representations of masculinity in advertising, though it is still embedded within the dominant framework of hegemonic masculinity. (shrink)

A universal reasoning approach based on shallow semantical embeddings of higher-order modal logics into classical higher-order logic is exemplarily employed to analyze several modern variants of the ontological argument on the computer. Several novel findings are reported which contribute to the clarification of a long-standing dispute between Anderson and Hájek. The technology employed in this work, which to some degree realizes Leibniz’s dream of a characteristica universalis and a calculus ratiocinator for solving philosophical controversies, is ready to be fruitfully adopted (...) in larger scale by philosophers. (shrink)

This article examines representations of Mermaids, a charity that supports trans young people and their families, in the British press. Using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, we identify and chart patterns in reporting between Mermaids’ inception as a charity in 2015, and 2022, a turbulent year for both the charity and trans people in the UK more generally. The findings show that, in the early years, there is relatively little attention to Mermaids in the press. Where they are (...) mentioned, the charity is represented as a useful source of advice and support, and their service users as happy and united. However, 2018 represents a turning point, with increasingly negative and misleading portrayals of Mermaids coinciding with a rise in public interest and funding. By 2019, media interest in the charity has surged and the impression of Mermaids as a support group for families is supplanted by the image of a powerful, dangerous and controversial organisation. We argue that the increasingly excessive, negative and polarised reporting around Mermaids is a strategy for indirectly delegitimising and attacking the lives of trans young people themselves. In a burgeoning culture war, Mermaids is used as a weapon against the very people they seek to support. (shrink)

In her 2010 study of the Shi zhu duan jie jing T309, Jan Nattier found that several passages in T309 were copied from earlier Chinese Buddhist texts. She thus proposed that T309 is not a translation from an Indian text, but a “forgery” by Zhu Fonian. Extending Nattier’s analysis with the help of TACL, a tool for computational textual analysis, we conducted a more thorough analysis of Zhu Fonian’s four Mahayana texts, namely, T309, the Pusa chu tai (...) jing T384, the Zhongyin jin T385, and the Pusa yingluo jing T656, and found in T309 and T656 additional content deriving from earlier Chinese texts. On the basis of this analysis of these features of the texts, we propose that all four were likely compiled by Zhu Fonian himself. (shrink)

This article, using methods from corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, reports the findings of a research project that aimed to explore the representations of Syrian asylum seekers in the Turkish press from March 2011, when the first Syrians arrived in Turkey, to December 2015, when the project ended. Using a corpus of 2321 texts collected from five Turkish daily newspapers, concordances of the words Syrian, refugee and asylum seeker were examined and grouped along patterns through which (...) discourses on and around Syrian asylum seekers were uncovered. We found differing discourses that framed asylum seekers as ‘our brothers’, ‘victims’, ‘needy people’ and/or ‘threat’, ‘criminals’ and so on. Newspapers maintained one or a combination of these discourses to construct their own reality about the refugee crisis in Turkey. The analysis also reveals that Turkish newspapers use pertinent terms interchangeably, leading to an ambiguity which reflects the political as well as daily usage of the terms. (shrink)

This article presents a corpus-assisted discourse study of the representations of China’s smog in one Chinese and three Anglo-American English-language newspapers from 2011 to 2014. The findings suggest that they converge in representing China’s smog as a kind of severe air pollution that has some consequences on residents in China and poses a problem that the government must tackle. However, the Chinese English-language newspaper prefers to represent it as a kind of weather phenomenon without serious impact on public (...) health and to construct a positive and responsible image of the Chinese central government. The Anglo-American English-language newspapers are inclined to dramatize it as a disaster with a huge health impact, and construct a negative image of the Chinese government with a view to pressurizing it to take responsibility in the context of climate change. (shrink)

Laymen occasionally have to write texts in specialized domains, such as when interacting with the public administration. However, in Spanish, most studies related to administrative texts have focused on texts written by the administration for laymen rather than texts that average citizens write to the administration. Against this backdrop, this article aims to carry out the following: a linguistic analysis on a corpus of Spanish-language texts from five textual genres written by laymen and addressed to the public administration (...) on the textual, lexical and discourse levels; a contrastive analysis that applies statistical techniques to quantitative data to identify significant differences among these textual genres. The results show a detailed and comprehensive understanding of the characteristics of each genre. Also, the statistical results indicate that there are significant differences among some of the analyzed genres. (shrink)

The aesthetically optimistic view of life in the last paragraph of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species contrasts with the evidence in his autobiography of a supposed perceptive colour blindness to the magnificence of nature. Accepting the theory of evolution as one of the scientific theories that has contributed to disenchantment, my aim is to delve into the Darwinian perception of natural beauty and solve this contrast of perceptions within the framework of the Weberian concept of “disenchantment of the world.” (...) To do this, I have carried out a computer-assisted study of Darwin’s language focusing on the frequency of aesthetic-emotional and religious adjectives and adverbs in the six editions of the Origin. A semantic analysis of the lexicon shows that, although disenchanted, Darwin perceives nature as aesthetically enhanced. I arrive at the conclusion that Darwin’s alleged colour blindness does not come from a loss of his capacity to aesthetically perceive nature, but from his loss of religious belief. (shrink)

We explore the nature of forgetting in a corpus of 125,000 students learning Spanish using the Rosetta Stone® foreign-language instruction software across 48 lessons. Students are tested on a lesson after its initial study and are then retested after a variable time lag. We observe forgetting consistent with power function decay at a rate that varies across lessons but not across students. We find that lessons which are better learned initially are forgotten more slowly, a correlation which likely reflects (...) a latent cause such as the quality or difficulty of the lesson. We obtain improved predictive accuracy of the forgetting model by augmenting it with features that encode characteristics of a student's initial study of the lesson and the activities the student engaged in between the initial and delayed tests. The augmented model can predict 23.9% of the variance in an individual's score on the delayed test. We analyze which features best explain individual performance. (shrink)

With its connotations of superior moral integrity, exceptional leadership qualities and expertise in the science of government, the modern ideal of statesmanship is most commonly traced back to the ancient Greek concept of πολιτικός and the work of Plato and Aristotle in particular. Through an analysis of a large corpus of modern English translations of political works, built as part of the AHRC Genealogies of Knowledge project, this case-study aims to explore patterns that are specific to this translated (...) discourse, with a view to understanding the crucial role played by translators in shaping its development and reception in society. It ultimately seeks to argue that the model of statesmanship presented in translations from ancient Greek is just as much a product of the receiving culture as it is inherited from the classical world. (shrink)