Lexical priming describes the processes by which listeners, by repeated exposure, first internali... more Lexical priming describes the processes by which listeners, by repeated exposure, first internalise and then reproduce the constituent elements of language, their combinatorial possibilities and the semantic and pragmatic meanings associated with them. Forced priming, on the other hand, describes a process whereby speakers or authors frequently repeat a certain form of words to deliberately ‘flood’ the discourse with messages for a particular strategic purpose (though we need to treat the word ‘deliberately’ with caution, see below). Although there are many fields where primings can be forced for particular effect, such as education, particularly in the primary school, or advertisements, here we are interested in the realm of political communication, where the composer of such insistent messages, may have been a media specialist, the addressers politicians answering questions or making statements, but with a text, pre-prepared and planned some time before, for insertion into other texts, to be used on many occasions, by many addressers, a practice often referred to as ‘singing from the same hymn-sheet’: this metaphor suggests a bringing together of addressers, message, timing, and attribution to produce a choral effect. The process is one of deliberation, composition, selection and orchestration with an attempt to present the language as a response to a question, a reaction to a remark or as a spontaneous choice of words. All this means that it departs from our everyday understanding of communication, resembling more a literary creation, crafted for a particular effect and with particular attention being paid to form and perlocutionary effect. Baker speaks of the ‘incremental effect of discourse (2005:13-14) but forced priming represents an attempt at boosting the incremental to a high frequency of occurrence. IN this chapter we look at some examples from political discourse. We use a variety of sources and corpora: White House press Briefings, A corpus of British broadsheets from 2014 an 2015, a corpus of political interviews from 2015 (the Andrew Marr show) and discuss the features of forced priming in terms of reiterated assertion, evaluation and vagueness
This paper is intended as a contribution to the investigation of evaluation in texts and in parti... more This paper is intended as a contribution to the investigation of evaluation in texts and in particular as a contribution to Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (or CADS), defined as a meeting of two disciplines, that of corpus linguistics and that of discourse analysis. One of the main points of CADS lies in the importance given to the systematic observation of naturally occurring data over and above the study of isolated data picked out from individual texts. This approach is particularly useful in the investigation of particular discourse types, text types or genres, to confirm intuitions which are part of the competent native speaker’s knowledge, but it can also help to reveal underlying attitudes and make explicit persuasive devices. Here, two small subcorpora are compared in order to identify the differences in evaluative styles with particular reference to textual interaction, priming, and the resources of engagement
This chapter investigates some patterns in the way speakers represent speech, thought, and writin... more This chapter investigates some patterns in the way speakers represent speech, thought, and writing across the CorDis Corpus with particular reference to varieties of voices in the texts. Many frequently occurring lexical items in the word lists of the corpus belong to the semantic fi elds of speech, thought, and writing (e.g., talking, conversation, thought, writes, dossier, page, line). In order to investigate how discourse representation is carried out in the corpus, a number of these were chosen and examined for the way they exemplify different text voices. These words often need lexicalization, as do general nouns such as point, thing, way, and, also like general nouns, they have a discourse organizing function (see Francis 1994). There are differences in their distribution and use in the subcorpora which make up the CorDis Corpus. Such differences refl ect not just the varieties of discourse type but also diverse interests in the representation of voice and different levels of take-up of these insistent messages from government and administration voices. The methodology of corpus-assisted discourse studies is used, as set out in the introduction to this volume. I will fi rst deal with questions of speech and thought representation and corpus methodology, with a short overview of previous research. Using Thompson’s (1996) framework for my description I will give some examples of the key features of the data related to the representation of thought, speech, and writing to be found in the CorDis Corpus. Finally I will go on to a consideration of language awareness and language management in politics, and the way in which the relationship between politicians and the media is sometimes played out via the manipulation of speech and thought representation.
The call for papers for this volume was thematic, but also had as its basis a multi-word lexical ... more The call for papers for this volume was thematic, but also had as its basis a multi-word lexical unit women in love.this paper takes the opportunity to profile the phrase, and in the process reveal cultural patterns in newspaper discourse using the methodologies typically employed in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), particularly the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis, that is, the moving backwards and forwards between statistical analysis and close reading, effective in investigating those textual patterns which reveal cultural patterns
The intentions of this paper are to show how Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (hereafter CADS) c... more The intentions of this paper are to show how Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (hereafter CADS) can reveal the ways in which the construction of a working identity is achieved through language. External perceptions of the Number 10 team and their roles are considered and then, by analysing a small corpus (39,000 words) of transcribed data from the Hutton Inquiry, we attempt to discover the construction of their working identity through their own words and the use of particular patterns of linguistic resources
Since its inception the issue of absence has preoccupied both the practitioners of corpus linguis... more Since its inception the issue of absence has preoccupied both the practitioners of corpus linguistics and its detractors. To the latter it is self-evident, a truism, that a corpus can yield no information about phenomena it does not contain, a criticism which we hope to demonstrate is based on a failure to grasp the complexity of the notion of absences and an ignorance of the flexibility of corpus techniques. However the former, the exponents of CL, have also worried greatly about the significance of not finding something, say, a particular set of lexical items or a certain syntactic structure in their corpus. Is this (non) discovery telling me something about the discourse type(s) under study or about what is usually termed the ‘representativity’ of the corpus (i.e. how typical of the discourse type is the subset of it contained in the corpus)? And the CL literature is replete with warnings ‘not confuse corpus data with language itself’ (McEnery & Hardie 2012: 26), to which we would add that observations arising from corpus data can only be generalised with the utmost care. Following Kant, we must not confuse the tangible, the phenomenal (corpus) with the intangible noumenal (language). In this chapter we will discuss, on the basis of a number of case studies, what can reasonably be inferred about discourses from corpus analysis, particularly with regards to absences. Along with Scott, we maintain ‘much can be inferred from what is absent’ (2004), and following Taylor (2012) we will argue that corpus tools provide an ‘armory’ for locating and verifying absence. In particular, the comparison and contrast among different corpora can firstly reveal absences, both those being searched for and others accidentally stumbled upon, and then allow the analyst to track the appearance and disappearance of linguistic elements or discoursal notions once they have come in some way to the analyst’s attention. Finally, since most things are absent from most places most of the time we need to decide the parameters of relevant or salient or meaningful absence/s, those which are worth either looking for if somehow suspected or instead, if stumbled upon, are worthy of further investigation. One indication could be unexpectedness or non-obviousness, that is, discovering absence when a presence is expected. This however raises the question of expected by whom and why, especially since researchers have their own unique past primings (Hoey 2005) which influence expectations in the present. And then, when an absence is discovered, how does one decide whether the absence is intentional or otherwise, especially given, as already stated, that absence is the norm? Far too often, particularly in the field of critical discourse analysis, it is taken for granted that a silence or absent message or voice must have been deliberately suppressed with little evidence of intentionality. Finally, once an absence is adjudged relevant and worthy of investigation, do we attempt to explain it? If so, what kinds of explanations are valid and interesting? Which are trivial and which non-trivial, that is, are themselves non-obvious and unexpected
As part of an ongoing project I offer a preliminary study looking at some of the terms which refe... more As part of an ongoing project I offer a preliminary study looking at some of the terms which refer to class to see how the representation has changed if at all over the last 20 years; the preliminary study concentrates on the profiles of evaluation resulting from an examination of collocational profiles and textual preferences of a few chosen phraseologies using the SiBol corpus. Stubbs’ (1996, 2002) approach is to start with a pre-existing or an intuitively compiled list of words, and then use corpus tools to understand more about their meaning(s). Collocates are used as a tool to sort the data into homogeneous groups and make any recurrent patterns visible. Corpora allow researchers to objectively identify widespread patterns of naturally occurring language but also rare but telling examples, both of which may be over-looked in a small-scale analysis
This paper is concerned with the representation of public apologies in the media and the way the ... more This paper is concerned with the representation of public apologies in the media and the way the apologies are framed and evaluated. Using a series of corpora from written and spoken sources, namely, the SiBol corpus comprising c.300,000,000 words of UK broadsheet newspaper texts, a corpus of White House briefings (c.1,500,000 words) a TV news corpus (c. 600,000 words) and an ad hoc search-word-generated corpus of tabloid newspapers in their online form with apology as the search term (circa 194,000 tokens). Using the CADS methodology a number of preferred patterns of representation were found which evaluate public apologies, mostly negatively, through a number of parameters: timeliness, sincerity, spontaneity and what might be called the humiliation facto
Lexical priming describes the processes by which listeners, by repeated exposure, first internali... more Lexical priming describes the processes by which listeners, by repeated exposure, first internalise and then reproduce the constituent elements of language, their combinatorial possibilities and the semantic and pragmatic meanings associated with them. Forced priming, on the other hand, describes a process whereby speakers or authors frequently repeat a certain form of words to deliberately ‘flood’ the discourse with messages for a particular strategic purpose (though we need to treat the word ‘deliberately’ with caution, see below). Although there are many fields where primings can be forced for particular effect, such as education, particularly in the primary school, or advertisements, here we are interested in the realm of political communication, where the composer of such insistent messages, may have been a media specialist, the addressers politicians answering questions or making statements, but with a text, pre-prepared and planned some time before, for insertion into other texts, to be used on many occasions, by many addressers, a practice often referred to as ‘singing from the same hymn-sheet’: this metaphor suggests a bringing together of addressers, message, timing, and attribution to produce a choral effect. The process is one of deliberation, composition, selection and orchestration with an attempt to present the language as a response to a question, a reaction to a remark or as a spontaneous choice of words. All this means that it departs from our everyday understanding of communication, resembling more a literary creation, crafted for a particular effect and with particular attention being paid to form and perlocutionary effect. Baker speaks of the ‘incremental effect of discourse (2005:13-14) but forced priming represents an attempt at boosting the incremental to a high frequency of occurrence. IN this chapter we look at some examples from political discourse. We use a variety of sources and corpora: White House press Briefings, A corpus of British broadsheets from 2014 an 2015, a corpus of political interviews from 2015 (the Andrew Marr show) and discuss the features of forced priming in terms of reiterated assertion, evaluation and vagueness
This paper is intended as a contribution to the investigation of evaluation in texts and in parti... more This paper is intended as a contribution to the investigation of evaluation in texts and in particular as a contribution to Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (or CADS), defined as a meeting of two disciplines, that of corpus linguistics and that of discourse analysis. One of the main points of CADS lies in the importance given to the systematic observation of naturally occurring data over and above the study of isolated data picked out from individual texts. This approach is particularly useful in the investigation of particular discourse types, text types or genres, to confirm intuitions which are part of the competent native speaker’s knowledge, but it can also help to reveal underlying attitudes and make explicit persuasive devices. Here, two small subcorpora are compared in order to identify the differences in evaluative styles with particular reference to textual interaction, priming, and the resources of engagement
This chapter investigates some patterns in the way speakers represent speech, thought, and writin... more This chapter investigates some patterns in the way speakers represent speech, thought, and writing across the CorDis Corpus with particular reference to varieties of voices in the texts. Many frequently occurring lexical items in the word lists of the corpus belong to the semantic fi elds of speech, thought, and writing (e.g., talking, conversation, thought, writes, dossier, page, line). In order to investigate how discourse representation is carried out in the corpus, a number of these were chosen and examined for the way they exemplify different text voices. These words often need lexicalization, as do general nouns such as point, thing, way, and, also like general nouns, they have a discourse organizing function (see Francis 1994). There are differences in their distribution and use in the subcorpora which make up the CorDis Corpus. Such differences refl ect not just the varieties of discourse type but also diverse interests in the representation of voice and different levels of take-up of these insistent messages from government and administration voices. The methodology of corpus-assisted discourse studies is used, as set out in the introduction to this volume. I will fi rst deal with questions of speech and thought representation and corpus methodology, with a short overview of previous research. Using Thompson’s (1996) framework for my description I will give some examples of the key features of the data related to the representation of thought, speech, and writing to be found in the CorDis Corpus. Finally I will go on to a consideration of language awareness and language management in politics, and the way in which the relationship between politicians and the media is sometimes played out via the manipulation of speech and thought representation.
The call for papers for this volume was thematic, but also had as its basis a multi-word lexical ... more The call for papers for this volume was thematic, but also had as its basis a multi-word lexical unit women in love.this paper takes the opportunity to profile the phrase, and in the process reveal cultural patterns in newspaper discourse using the methodologies typically employed in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), particularly the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis, that is, the moving backwards and forwards between statistical analysis and close reading, effective in investigating those textual patterns which reveal cultural patterns
The intentions of this paper are to show how Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (hereafter CADS) c... more The intentions of this paper are to show how Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (hereafter CADS) can reveal the ways in which the construction of a working identity is achieved through language. External perceptions of the Number 10 team and their roles are considered and then, by analysing a small corpus (39,000 words) of transcribed data from the Hutton Inquiry, we attempt to discover the construction of their working identity through their own words and the use of particular patterns of linguistic resources
Since its inception the issue of absence has preoccupied both the practitioners of corpus linguis... more Since its inception the issue of absence has preoccupied both the practitioners of corpus linguistics and its detractors. To the latter it is self-evident, a truism, that a corpus can yield no information about phenomena it does not contain, a criticism which we hope to demonstrate is based on a failure to grasp the complexity of the notion of absences and an ignorance of the flexibility of corpus techniques. However the former, the exponents of CL, have also worried greatly about the significance of not finding something, say, a particular set of lexical items or a certain syntactic structure in their corpus. Is this (non) discovery telling me something about the discourse type(s) under study or about what is usually termed the ‘representativity’ of the corpus (i.e. how typical of the discourse type is the subset of it contained in the corpus)? And the CL literature is replete with warnings ‘not confuse corpus data with language itself’ (McEnery & Hardie 2012: 26), to which we would add that observations arising from corpus data can only be generalised with the utmost care. Following Kant, we must not confuse the tangible, the phenomenal (corpus) with the intangible noumenal (language). In this chapter we will discuss, on the basis of a number of case studies, what can reasonably be inferred about discourses from corpus analysis, particularly with regards to absences. Along with Scott, we maintain ‘much can be inferred from what is absent’ (2004), and following Taylor (2012) we will argue that corpus tools provide an ‘armory’ for locating and verifying absence. In particular, the comparison and contrast among different corpora can firstly reveal absences, both those being searched for and others accidentally stumbled upon, and then allow the analyst to track the appearance and disappearance of linguistic elements or discoursal notions once they have come in some way to the analyst’s attention. Finally, since most things are absent from most places most of the time we need to decide the parameters of relevant or salient or meaningful absence/s, those which are worth either looking for if somehow suspected or instead, if stumbled upon, are worthy of further investigation. One indication could be unexpectedness or non-obviousness, that is, discovering absence when a presence is expected. This however raises the question of expected by whom and why, especially since researchers have their own unique past primings (Hoey 2005) which influence expectations in the present. And then, when an absence is discovered, how does one decide whether the absence is intentional or otherwise, especially given, as already stated, that absence is the norm? Far too often, particularly in the field of critical discourse analysis, it is taken for granted that a silence or absent message or voice must have been deliberately suppressed with little evidence of intentionality. Finally, once an absence is adjudged relevant and worthy of investigation, do we attempt to explain it? If so, what kinds of explanations are valid and interesting? Which are trivial and which non-trivial, that is, are themselves non-obvious and unexpected
As part of an ongoing project I offer a preliminary study looking at some of the terms which refe... more As part of an ongoing project I offer a preliminary study looking at some of the terms which refer to class to see how the representation has changed if at all over the last 20 years; the preliminary study concentrates on the profiles of evaluation resulting from an examination of collocational profiles and textual preferences of a few chosen phraseologies using the SiBol corpus. Stubbs’ (1996, 2002) approach is to start with a pre-existing or an intuitively compiled list of words, and then use corpus tools to understand more about their meaning(s). Collocates are used as a tool to sort the data into homogeneous groups and make any recurrent patterns visible. Corpora allow researchers to objectively identify widespread patterns of naturally occurring language but also rare but telling examples, both of which may be over-looked in a small-scale analysis
This paper is concerned with the representation of public apologies in the media and the way the ... more This paper is concerned with the representation of public apologies in the media and the way the apologies are framed and evaluated. Using a series of corpora from written and spoken sources, namely, the SiBol corpus comprising c.300,000,000 words of UK broadsheet newspaper texts, a corpus of White House briefings (c.1,500,000 words) a TV news corpus (c. 600,000 words) and an ad hoc search-word-generated corpus of tabloid newspapers in their online form with apology as the search term (circa 194,000 tokens). Using the CADS methodology a number of preferred patterns of representation were found which evaluate public apologies, mostly negatively, through a number of parameters: timeliness, sincerity, spontaneity and what might be called the humiliation facto
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