in in G. Balirano e M.C. Nisco (eds) Languaging Diversity. Identities, Genres, Discourses, 16-31, 2015
The present paper will focus on the linguistic representations of the 2011 UK riots and some of t... more The present paper will focus on the linguistic representations of the 2011 UK riots and some of the participants involved, the rioters, as emerging from the British press. A corpus of newspaper articles was collected over a period of time ranging from August 1st to December 31st, 2011, from six British newspapers, i.e. The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror and The Sun.
Previous studies on past riots in the UK in 1981 and 1985 were invariably characterised by a series of recurring features in the portrayal of the rioters, among them the identification of the rioters and offenders with ethnic minorities. The only existing literature on the subject highlighted the fact that press discourse tended to construe the rioters’ identity in ethnic and racial terms by locating them within binary oppositions contrasting Britons and immigrants, whites and coloured, us and them, hence the prevailing and generalised reference to ‘race riots’.
Starting from such investigation, our corpus-based discourse analysis (Baker 2006, Baker et al. 2008, Gabrielatos and Baker 2008, Morley and Bailey 2009) will focus on the way in which the main actors of the events, the rioters, are referred to in the corpus, showing both common trends in the reporting of the 2011 events and differences among the six newspapers as far as naming strategies and collocational choices are concerned. Findings will then be interpreted taking into account the general analysis of what happened according to sociological studies and in comparison/contrast with the traditional notion of race riots.
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Papers by Marco Venuti
Press Briefings, namely, the daily meetings held by the White House Press Secretary and the news media. At the time of writing, the corpus amounts to more than 20 million words, covers a period of time of twenty-one years spanning from 1993 to 2014 and it is planned to be extended to the end of the second term of President Barack Obama. The aim of the present article is to describe the composition of the corpus and the techniques used to extract process and annotate it. Moreover, attention is paid to the use of the Temporal Random Indexing (TRI) on the corpus as a tool for linguistic analysis.
Previous studies on past riots in the UK in 1981 and 1985 were invariably characterised by a series of recurring features in the portrayal of the rioters, among them the identification of the rioters and offenders with ethnic minorities. The only existing literature on the subject highlighted the fact that press discourse tended to construe the rioters’ identity in ethnic and racial terms by locating them within binary oppositions contrasting Britons and immigrants, whites and coloured, us and them, hence the prevailing and generalised reference to ‘race riots’.
Starting from such investigation, our corpus-based discourse analysis (Baker 2006, Baker et al. 2008, Gabrielatos and Baker 2008, Morley and Bailey 2009) will focus on the way in which the main actors of the events, the rioters, are referred to in the corpus, showing both common trends in the reporting of the 2011 events and differences among the six newspapers as far as naming strategies and collocational choices are concerned. Findings will then be interpreted taking into account the general analysis of what happened according to sociological studies and in comparison/contrast with the traditional notion of race riots.
Our analysis is carried out on a corpus comprising all the Press Briefings across three presidencies from Clinton to Obama. The additional mark-up includes information about individual speakers and their role, allowing us to compare different discourse strategies adopted by the participants in the briefings at different points in time. This leads us to determine the extent of the differences in the patterns found as well as the nature of the variation from one participant to the next one.
Starting from a phraseological perspective (Granger and Meunier 2008), our analysis will focus on avoidance strategies enacted by the podium with the main purpose of preserving face and yet ‘doing the job’ (Partington 2003: 80). We will show how the cluster ‘I don’t know’ can be exploited by various podiums, mainly in accordance with strategic communication choices made by the US administrations, highlighting differences in the podium’s attitude towards the press."
Within this general framework our focus is on a specific genre of political communication, i.e. the White House press briefing. The briefings are the meetings with the press held by the White House Press Secretary, through which the White House delivers official information and announcements about the President’s daily schedule, explains the administration’s decisions and policies, responds to criticism, provides commentary on current events, and answers the questions posed by the press (Kumar 2007, 235). As reported by a number of presidency scholars (Perloff 1998; Kumar 2007), the importance of communication and media relations at the White House has been steadily growing throughout the 20th century, and nowadays “the president and the news media jointly occupy center stage” (Perloff 1998, 58).
The aim of this study is to explore discoursal aspects of this institutional genre through an investigation of its phraseological clusters with a view to identifying changes in the individual podium’s strategies related to shifting roles according to communicative strategic needs."
Our analysis Embracing a diachronic perspective, our analysis aims at identifying the main features of the evolution of the briefings during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. A corpus including the about 4,000 briefings held from January 1993 to January 2009 has been collected to this purpose.
The present paper outlines the ways in which the corpus architecture helps in investigating the evolution of the genre, and presents some preliminary results, with particular reference to the evolution of phraseology within the briefings."
Press Briefings, namely, the daily meetings held by the White House Press Secretary and the news media. At the time of writing, the corpus amounts to more than 20 million words, covers a period of time of twenty-one years spanning from 1993 to 2014 and it is planned to be extended to the end of the second term of President Barack Obama. The aim of the present article is to describe the composition of the corpus and the techniques used to extract process and annotate it. Moreover, attention is paid to the use of the Temporal Random Indexing (TRI) on the corpus as a tool for linguistic analysis.
Previous studies on past riots in the UK in 1981 and 1985 were invariably characterised by a series of recurring features in the portrayal of the rioters, among them the identification of the rioters and offenders with ethnic minorities. The only existing literature on the subject highlighted the fact that press discourse tended to construe the rioters’ identity in ethnic and racial terms by locating them within binary oppositions contrasting Britons and immigrants, whites and coloured, us and them, hence the prevailing and generalised reference to ‘race riots’.
Starting from such investigation, our corpus-based discourse analysis (Baker 2006, Baker et al. 2008, Gabrielatos and Baker 2008, Morley and Bailey 2009) will focus on the way in which the main actors of the events, the rioters, are referred to in the corpus, showing both common trends in the reporting of the 2011 events and differences among the six newspapers as far as naming strategies and collocational choices are concerned. Findings will then be interpreted taking into account the general analysis of what happened according to sociological studies and in comparison/contrast with the traditional notion of race riots.
Our analysis is carried out on a corpus comprising all the Press Briefings across three presidencies from Clinton to Obama. The additional mark-up includes information about individual speakers and their role, allowing us to compare different discourse strategies adopted by the participants in the briefings at different points in time. This leads us to determine the extent of the differences in the patterns found as well as the nature of the variation from one participant to the next one.
Starting from a phraseological perspective (Granger and Meunier 2008), our analysis will focus on avoidance strategies enacted by the podium with the main purpose of preserving face and yet ‘doing the job’ (Partington 2003: 80). We will show how the cluster ‘I don’t know’ can be exploited by various podiums, mainly in accordance with strategic communication choices made by the US administrations, highlighting differences in the podium’s attitude towards the press."
Within this general framework our focus is on a specific genre of political communication, i.e. the White House press briefing. The briefings are the meetings with the press held by the White House Press Secretary, through which the White House delivers official information and announcements about the President’s daily schedule, explains the administration’s decisions and policies, responds to criticism, provides commentary on current events, and answers the questions posed by the press (Kumar 2007, 235). As reported by a number of presidency scholars (Perloff 1998; Kumar 2007), the importance of communication and media relations at the White House has been steadily growing throughout the 20th century, and nowadays “the president and the news media jointly occupy center stage” (Perloff 1998, 58).
The aim of this study is to explore discoursal aspects of this institutional genre through an investigation of its phraseological clusters with a view to identifying changes in the individual podium’s strategies related to shifting roles according to communicative strategic needs."
Our analysis Embracing a diachronic perspective, our analysis aims at identifying the main features of the evolution of the briefings during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. A corpus including the about 4,000 briefings held from January 1993 to January 2009 has been collected to this purpose.
The present paper outlines the ways in which the corpus architecture helps in investigating the evolution of the genre, and presents some preliminary results, with particular reference to the evolution of phraseology within the briefings."
Starting from these premises, the present paper sets out to investigate the attribution of socially constructed and accepted gender roles in same-sex lesbian relationships. To this purpose, three satellite corpora were collected. The first consists of the publications by Rachel H. Cleves; the second of reviews on the book published in newspaper, journals and blogs. The third was collected with bootcat using as seeds keywords identified in the other two corpora.
Through the tools and methodology of corpus-based discourse analysis (Baker 2014), the comparison of the three satellite corpora aims at identifying the evolution over time of masculinity and femininity traits in the representation of lesbian couples.
It has been revealed that metaphors are powerful tools appealing to the shared beliefs and values of potential students and that they are an open window on the perceptions and experiences of the participants of a given community. It has emerged that growth, market and family metaphors are common conceptual frames when talking of learning, teaching and education. In fact, it has been shown that schools are conceived in terms of prisons, gardens, factories, societies and families, teachers are portrayed as parents, guides, directors, actors, animal trainers, students are perceived as containers, plants, animals to be controlled, and learning is described in terms of growth, life, acquisition of goods.
Against this framework, the present paper aims to compare, through a qualitative and a quantitative approach, how Italian universities and English/Irish universities employ movement metaphors on their istitutional websites. The study wants to examine to what extent Italian universities tend to use the conceptual frame of movement with a self-promotional purpose as English and Irish universities seem to do. It also intends to explore whether Italian universities are competing in a globalized era to attract a greater number of international students and are boosting the implementation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) set by the regulatory framework of the Bologna Process.
The Bologna Declaration with its focus on a common European higher education area, has encouraged trends to teach courses exclusively in English, has promoted students and staff mobility and has forced universities to change and implement reforms at a local, national and European level. In order to comply with this international regulatory framework, European universities had to change the way they communicate and disseminate information through the web by using English as Lingua Franca, which has found in the academia a breeding ground (Mauranen 2010).
The corpus under examination is the acWac-EU corpus which is a collection of Irish, British and Maltese universities’ websites and European universities’ websites in English. The corpus was developed by some scholars of the University of Bologna through the web-as-a-corpus method and is itself part of a larger project (Bernardini & Ferraresi 2013).
A previous study (Venuti & Nasti 2013) conducted on the corpus has proved that native universities use a more descriptive, promotional language with a focus on students’ needs while European universities seem to be more interested in universities’ matters and in the internationalization process without considering students’ concerns. Within this framework, the present paper confines its analysis to the Italian case in order to investigate to what extent these universities use English only to comply with the international rules or they are actually interested in entering the European High education system, addressing and attracting a greater number of international students. This paper wants to explore whether Italian universities are competing at a global level or are just providing a mere web-mediated translation of their curricula and activities.
A corpus of about 1.700 articles published between August 1st and December 31st 2011 has been analyzed with the aim to shed light on how newspapers perform their dual function to construe reality and construct a persuasive argument, while directly addressing their readership. An approach combining corpus analysis and discourse analysis (Baker et al. 2013, Partington et al. 2013) has been adopted. After collecting a reference corpus consisting of articles published by the same newspapers in the same time span and comprising all the articles of a daily edition, our first step was the identification of keywords (Scott and Tribble 2006, Scott 2008) for each newspaper. Keywords were then classified according to four categories (participants, their pre-modifiers, processes and their goals) in order to identify the main actors and their role in the media representation of the events, investigating lexical choices in terms of varying degrees of connotation.
The analysis of the keywords has shown that there are marked differences but also similarities among the six newspapers. They all report on the violent and criminal nature of the events and on the trials that followed. However, tabloids focus mainly on the sensational aspects of individual stories and on the representation of rioters as ‘young thugs’. Within the broadsheets the right leaning ones share some of the features identified in the popular press, while The Guardian is the only newspaper offering a wider and more comprehensive account of the events, their causes and their outcomes.
The widespread use of the media, the Bologna Declaration, which aims to create a common European higher education area (EHEA), and a greater students mobility have caused a certain need to change the way universities disseminate knowledge. As a matter of fact, knowledge production and dissemination (research and teaching) can no longer be carried out in a relative institutional isolation. Universities have to accommodate the information provided via web to their international audience and take into account the difficulties students encounter to understand complex academic discourse (Biber 2006). As a result, English (as Lingua Franca) has become a common means of communication in academic settings (Mauranen 2010).
Against this framework, the present paper analyses a section of a corpus (Bernardini & Ferraresi 2013) containing web pages in English of UK/Irish universities and European universities. It aims to identify specific lexico-grammatical features of the non-native varieties compared to those of the native texts to try to asses their communicative effectiveness.
Our analysis is carried out on a corpus comprising all the Press Briefings across three presidencies, from Bill Clinton to Barak Obama. The additional mark-up includes information about individual speakers and their role, allowing us to compare different discourse strategies adopted by the participants in the briefings at different points in time.
Security has always been a key concept in political debate (Buzan 2000), particularly after the events of 9/11 and the rising of a ‘new regime of international security’ (Fairclough 2007). Indeed, international terrorism, the changing patterns of state-to-state relationships as well as the threats posed by the information technology era have contributed to overshadow the traditional idea of ‘security’. Our analysis will focus on the lexical item ‘security’ relying on the Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies approach (Partington 2010). Starting from a phraseological perspective (Granger and Meunier 2008), the analysis of the collocational profile of ‘security’ across time will make it possible to assess the evolution of the senses the term following the evolution of the concept in US political debate from “social security” (during Bill Clinton presidencies) to “homeland security” (especially during the first George W. Bush administration), to “national security” (in Obama’s presidential term).
Our analysis is carried out on a corpus comprising all the Press Briefings across three presidencies from Clinton to Obama (January 1993 – May 2011). The additional mark-up includes information about individual speakers and their role, allowing us to compare different discourse strategies adopted by the participants in the briefings at different points in time. This leads us to determine the extent of the differences in the patterns found as well as the nature of the variation from one participant to the next one.
Starting from a phraseological perspective (Granger and Meunier 2008), our analysis will focus on avoidance strategies enacted by the podium with the main purpose of preserving face and yet “doing the job” (Partington 2003: 80). We will show how different phraseological units (I don’t know, I’m not aware, I don’t believe) are exploited by various podiums over an 18-year span, mainly in accordance with strategic communication choices made by the US administrations. The analysis will highlight differences in the podium’s attitude towards the press with particular reference to the first George W. Bush’ presidency.
In particular, institutional communication genres have been experiencing in-depth transformation in the last few decades, mainly due to evolutions in the media market, fuelled by technological developments and by the economic globalisation (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999).
Since text is nothing but phraseology of one kind or another (Sinclair 2008), our aim is to uncover recurrent phrases in the White House Press Briefings to look at their diachronic variation and at the variables determining it. In other words, our main objective is to analyse how the discourse preferences constructing the podiums and the press in their way of projecting the referenced context and their subjectivity vary across 18 years. These briefings - the “political chess game” where the two main participants the podium/soldier and the wild press/animal face a “wrestling match”- (Partington 2006: 16) are the main information conduit for the White House.
The data come from a monolingual corpus which includes all the Press briefings across three presidencies from Clinton to Obama (January 1993 – May 2011). The addition of XML mark-up to the whole corpus, including information about individual speakers and their role, allows us to compare different discourse strategies adopted by the participants in the briefings at different points in time. This leads us to determine the extent of the differences in the patterns found as well as the nature of the variation from one participant to the next one.
From the methodological point of view, keywords is the utility used to mark the “aboutness” and the style in each presidency (Scott & Tribble 2006). More particularly, the use of the key-clusters allows the access to the identification of “pointers to the typical structure of discourse” (Bondi 2010: 10) highlighting static strategic communicative clusters (I don’t know the answer) and organizational phrases (as it relates to; I would point you; that’s why) as well as dynamic markers of authorial stance (there’s no doubt) and content clusters (weapons of mass destruction).
The analysis relies on two pieces of software: Wordsmith Tools (Scott 2007) to retrieve the clusters and Xaira to study their distribution across the years."
Nevertheless, genre-specific features are subject to changes due to the ongoing processes of internationalisation and globalisation (Candlin and Gotti 2004; Cortese and Duszak 2005; Crystal 1997). In particular, political and institutional communication genres have been experiencing in-depth transformation in the last few decades, mainly due to evolutions in the media market, fuelled by technological developments and by the economic globalisation (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999).
This paper looks in particular at the stance clusters or, to put it differently, it deals with the speaker-positioning phrases in the discourse structure of White House press briefings. The data come from a monolingual corpus which includes all the Press briefings across three presidencies (January 1993 – October 2010). The addition of XML mark-up to the whole corpus, including information about individual speakers and their role, as well as providing a chronological subdivision within the corpus, allows us to compare different discourse strategies adopted by different speakers in the briefings at different points in time. This leads us to determine the extent of the differences in the patterns found as well as the nature of the variation from one podium to the next one and to establish if these patterns are semantically primed (Hoey 2005).
The perspective of the analysis is phraseological in that, as Hopper argues (1987: 150), linguistic form, often in prefabricated chunks, is shaped by discourse use.
The analysis relies on two pieces of software: Wordsmith Tools (Scott 2007) to retrieve the clusters and Xaira to study their distribution across the years.
What we aim to demonstrate from a methodological point of view is that clusters, which are here categorized according to functional criteria (see Mahlberg 2007), can be revealing for identifying specificity of this particular genre and the changes stance clusters in particular are experiencing from Clinton to Obama.
References
Baker, P. (2006). Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum.
Bhatia,V. K. (2004). Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-Based View. London: Continuum International Publishing GroupLtd.
Blumler J.G. and Kavanagh, D. (1999) “The third age of political communication: influences and features”. Political Communication, 16, (3): 209–230.
Candlin, C and Gotti, M. (2004) (eds). Intercultural Aspects of Specialized Communication. Bern: Peter Lang.
Cortese, G. and Duszak, A. (2005) (Eds). Identity, Community, Discourse. Bern: Peter Lang. 139-166.
Hoey; M. 2005. Lexical Priming. Abingdon: Routledge.
Hopper, P.J. 1987. “Emergent grammar”. Berkeley Linguistics Society 13:139-157.
Kumar, M. J. (2007). Managing the President’s Message. The White House Communications Operation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Kurtz, H. (1998). Spin Cycle. Inside the Clinton propaganda machine. New York: The Free Press.
Mahlberg, M. (2007). “Clusters, key clusters and local textual functions in Dickens in Corpora” in Corpora Vol. 2 (1) 1-31.
Partington, A. (2003). The Linguistics of Political Argumentation: The Spin-doctor and the Wolf-pack at the White House. London: Routledge.
Scott, M. (2007). WordSmith Tools. Version 5.0. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sinclair, J. (2005). The phrase, the whole phrase, and nothing but the phrase. Paper presented at the Phraseology 2005 conference: The many faces of Phraseology. Université catholique de Louvain, 13-15 October.
Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The study of “accessed voices” in TV news reports can shed light on the perception of EU institutions by citizens, since they still regard TV as the most important source of information (Eurobarometer 55 2001). Our belief is that the role of LPs and VOXs differently affects the audience consumption and re-interpretation of news stories. LPs are authoritative sources (Montgomery 2007), but they convey a message which may be regarded as distant from the layperson, while VOXs are recognised as “one of us” and may lead to a more direct identification.
The present study investigates the role of LPs and VOXs in British, Italian and Polish TV news reports through the analysis of a comparable multilingual corpus consisting of transcripts of TV news programmes (both public and commercial channels). All news stories included in the corpus have been divided into items related to ‘EU affairs’ and ‘European countries’ on the one hand, and ‘other’(both domestic news and international non-European stories) on the other. We will focus on the role of attribution, mainly drawing on the Appraisal System (Martin & White 2005), in utterances by LPs and VOXs, and the rhetorical effects deriving from such positioning. In order to carry out the comparison, the corpus will be queried exploiting the XML annotation which allows for detailed comparisons between countries and voices.
A quantitative analysis will make it possible to compare different uses of sources in TV news programmes when news items deal with the EU and European Countries vis-à-vis other topics in order to describe the way different forms of attribution are used when Europe related topics are dealt with, providing insights on the representation of Europe in TV news programmes in the three Countries. The quantitative analysis will be complemented with a more qualitative one of a news item available in all TV news programmes which will help shed light on the differences in attitude towards Europe across the three countries and between state/commercial broadcasters.
References
Hartley, J.(1982), Understanding News, London & New York, Routledge.
Montgomery, M. (2007), The discourse of Broadcast News: a linguistic approach. London: Routledge.
Martin J.R. & White P.R.R. (2005), The Language of Evaluation. Appraisal in English. London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Eurobarometer 55 (2001) http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/eb/eb55/eb55_en.htm (last accessed 14 January 2010)
or their feelings about entities and propositions (Hunston and Thompson 2000). Bednarek (2006) argues that evaluation pervades human behaviour and is linked to our beliefs. She also points out the importance of evaluation in actual discourse as it is impossible for any human being not to judge or be completely objective on a particular event. Given the nature of evaluation to be linked to our beliefs, it can be argued that there is a close relationship between evaluation and metaphor as metaphor analysis ‘‘is often, then, an exploration of the inner subjectivity of speakers – what it is that is unique to their perception of the world – and forms the basis for their response to particular situations and particular ideas’’ (Charteris-Black 2004: 11).
Against this background, the present paper starts from the findings of a research project on conceptual metaphor analysis in the British press related to the Lisbon Treaty debate and focuses on the evaluative lexis that has often been found to collocate or co-occur with the linguistic expressions of the conceptual conflict and movement metaphors analysed. The evaluative adjectives we are particularly interested in are bullying, desperate, reluctant, arrogant, frightening, surprised, insistent. The evaluative verbs that we intend to explore are admit, blast, praise. However, all the other evaluative terms that might come up to light and have a significant role in the analysis of the event will be taken into account.
The aim of this paper is to explore, through the methodology of Corpus Linguistics, how the British press uses the evaluative resources to construe the event of ratification and to what extent it presents a similar description or attributes similar roles to the European leaders and uses both metaphors and evaluation to create a coherent text and image of the ratification issue.
The study of “accessed voices” in TV news reports can shed light on the perception of EU institutions by citizens, since they still regard TV as most important source of information (Eurobarometer 55 2001). Our belief is that the role of LPs and VOXs differently affects the audience consumption and re-interpretation of news stories. LPs are authoritative sources (Montgomery 2007), but they convey a message which may be regarded as distant from the layperson, while VOXs are recognised as “one of us” and may lead to a more direct identification.
The present study investigates the role of LPs and VOXs in British and Italian TV news reports through the analysis of two comparable corpora consisting of transcripts of TV news programmes (both public and commercial channels) The news stories included in the corpora have been divided into three categories: items related to the ‘EU affairs’, ‘EU countries’, and ‘other’, both domestic news and international (non-European) stories. We will focus on the role of attribution, mainly drawing on the Appraisal System (Martin & White), in utterances by LPs and VOXs, and the rhetorical effects deriving from such positionings.
In order to carry out the comparison, the corpus will be queried exploiting the XML annotation which allows for detailed comparisons between countries and voices. A more quantitative analysis will make it possible to compare different uses of sources in TV news programmes when news items deal with the EU and European Countries vis-à-vis other topics in order to describe the way different forms of attribution are used when Europe related topics are dealt with. The quantitative analysis will be complemented with a more qualitative analysis of a news item available in all TV news programmes which will help shed light on the differences in attitude towards Europe across the three countries and between state/commercial broadcasters.
Nevertheless, genre-specific features are subject to changes due to the ongoing processes of internationalisation and globalisation (Candlin and Gotti 2004; Cortese and Duszak 2005; Crystal 1997). In particular, political and institutional communication genres have been experiencing in-depth transformation in the last few decades, mainly due to evolutions in the media market, fuelled by technological developments and by the economic globalisation (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999).
Within the framework of a wider research project “Tension and change in English domain-specific genres” funded by the Italian Ministry of Research, the present paper aims to outline, through a corpus-based analysis of lexico-grammatical and linguistic features (Baker 2006), in what ways the White House press briefings, as a genre, have evolved in the last 16 years under the pressure of technological developments and of media market transformation.
White House press briefings are meetings between the White House press secretary and the press, held on an almost daily basis. They may be regarded as the main official channel of communication for the White House and therefore play a crucial role in the communication strategies on the world’s most powerful institution (Kumar 2007).
Embracing a diachronic perspective, our analysis aims at identifying the main features of the evolution of the briefings as a genre, during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. A corpus (DiaWHoB) including all the briefings from January 1993 to January 2009, available on the American Presidency Project website (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/press_briefings.php), has been collected in order to carry out the analysis.
The corpus consists of 4,000 briefings and is made up of more than 18 million words. The scope and size of a specialised corpus of this kind make it a powerful tool to investigate the evolution of the White House press briefing. In order to manage the data more efficiently, the corpus has been annotated. The XML mark-up includes information about individual speakers and their roles, date, briefing details and text structure. Our intent is to compare different discourse strategies adopted by speakers in the briefings at different points in time, and also to identify differences between discourse features employed by the press secretary and those more typical of the press.
The present research paper draws up the corpus structure and in what ways the corpus architecture helps in investigating the evolution of the genre, and also presents some preliminary results. In particular, focus is on some examples of evolution in phraseology within the genre of briefings in order to support the hypothesis that a diachronic corpus-based investigation facilitates comparisons among different speakers thanks to the XML mark-up while providing interesting insight into the evolution of a genre.
In line with one of the objectives of the CorDis project, which aims to demonstrate that the combination of qualitative and quantitative linguistic analysis enhances researchers’ analytical capacity, the present paper exploits the corpus in order to show how the lexical item war – obviously a highly relevant word in a corpus relating to the Iraqi conflict – points to different discourse strategies in each of the discourse types included in the corpus.
Different collocational profiles are thus shown as being associated to war in different discourse types as well as in different countries (i.e. in the United Kingdom vs. in the United States). The investigation conducted on the corpus shows that, despite its being a very frequent word, war is generally not chosen to refer to the conflict in Iraq. Especially in some discourse types, war actually refers either to previously fought wars (e.g. the two World Wars) or to the war on terror as a justification of the military action. Therefore, other ways of representing the military operations taking place in Saddam Hussein’s country in the discourse types under investigation will be examined.
All papers will be allocated 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for questions. The language of the conference is English.
Abstracts of 250-350 words excluding references should be sent as MS Word attachment to [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], before 10 January 2016. Please include in the body of the email but not in the abstract itself (1) your name, (2) affiliation and (3) email address. Notifications of acceptance will be communicated by 1 March 2016.
CADAAD conferences are intended to promote current directions and new developments in cross-disciplinary critical discourse research
Susan Bassnett: Professor at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Warwick.
Don Kulick: Distinguished University Professor at the University of Uppsala.
David Katan: Full professor at the Department of Humanities, University of Salento.
Gerard Steen: Full professor at the Department of Dutch, University of Amsterdam.
CADAAD conferences are intended to promote current directions and new developments in cross-disciplinary critical discourse research
The media coverage and its worldwide resonance resulted in an involuntary deviance amplification effect (Cohen 2002), framing the event in such a way that moral panic was an inevitable consequence (Hall et al. 1978; McEnery 2006). Indeed, if the fear of isolation due to spirals of silence (Noelle-Neumann 1974) is increasingly subdued thanks to the online environment, studying how users communicate on social media platforms can help researchers highlight how discourses on given minorities are linguistically conveyed in this fluid environment (Zappavigna 2012, 2014).
Drawing on these observations, our investigation will firstly focus on the discursive representation (Bednarek and Caple 2012a, 2012b; Potts, Bednarek and Caple 2015) of the main actors and events concerning the US Supreme Court ruling in US, UK and Italian leading newspapers. Additionally, in order to see how the event was framed by social media users, a corpus was collected of all Facebook comments related to the first news story published online by the leading newspapers under investigation. This Facebook user-generated corpus on marriage equality (FUGmar) comprises three subcorpora: the Italian subcorpus (FUGmar_it, which contains 1,246 comments and 2,421 replies, for a total number of 92,011 tokens); the UK subcorpus (FUGmar_uk, which comprises 797 comments and 1,140 replies, for a total number of 52,252 tokens); and the US subcorpus (FUGmar_us, which lists 3,065 comments and 3,295 replies, for a total number of 137,482 tokens). The FUGmar corpus was then uploaded to the corpus analysis platform Sketch Engine to analyse the discourses surrounding the event in a fluid and boundary-free environment such as that provided by new digital media in relation to news framing.
References
Bednarek, M. and Caple, H. 2012a. News Discourse. London & New York: Bloomsbury.
Bednarek, M. and Caple, H. 2012b. ‘Value added’: Language, image and news values. Discourse, Content & the Media 1, 103–113.
Cohen, S. 20023. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London & New York: Routledge.
McEnery, T. 2004. Swearing in English: Bad language, purity and power from 1586 to the present. London & New York: Routledge.
Noelle-Neumann, E. 1974. The spiral of silence: A theory of public opinion. Journal of Communication 24(2): 43–51.
Potts, A., Bednarek, M. and Caple, H. 2015. How can computer-based methods help researchers to investigate news values in large datasets? A corpus linguistic study of the construction of newsworthiness in the reporting on Hurricane Katrina. Discourse & Communication 9(2): 149–172.
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As Bednarek and Caple argue, “news values are typically defined as […] criteria/principles that are applied by news workers in order to select events or stories as news or to choose the structure and order of reporting” (Bednarek and Caple 2014: 136). Since news values are not neutral, reflecting the ideologies and value system of a given newspaper, highlighting them can help researchers uncover the representation of the actors and events reported in the news story (Bell 1991; Cotter 2010).
Drawing on this definition of news values (Bednarek and Caple 2012a, 2012b) our investigation will focus on the representation of the main actors and events concerning the US Supreme Court ruling in US, UK and Italian leading newspapers. In particular, our contribution is based on the analysis of the first article published online by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times in the US, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and The Times in the UK and la Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, Il Messaggero, il Giornale, il Fatto Quotidiano, and Libero in Italy. The selection was made both on the basis of the printed and online circulation of each newspaper in the respective countries and of their widespread use of digital media.
The analysis will focus on the discursive construction of news values both in the textual and visual elements of the selected news stories. The aim of this contribution is to identify differences in terms of negativity, prominence, consonance, and personalisation (amongst the others) in the three countries and different newspapers under investigation.
References
Bednarek, M. and Caple, H. 2012a. News Discourse. London/New York: Bloomsbury.
Bednarek, M. and Caple, H. 2012b. ‘Value added’: Language, image and news values. Discourse, Content & the Media 1, 103-113.
Bednarek, M. and Caple, H. 2014. Why do news values matter? Towards a new methodological framework for analysing news discourse in Critical Discourse Analysis and beyond. Discourse and Society 25/2, 135-158.
Bell, A. 1991. Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Cotter, C. 2010. News Talk. Investigating the Language of Journalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.