Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies

Linguistic research into online grooming is scarce despite both the communicative essence of this form of online child sexual abuse and a substantial body of literature into it across other Social Sciences. Most of this literature has examined small data sets via qualitative methods, primarily thematic analysis; the exception being a couple of studies that have used automated software (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count - LIWC) that operates at a single-word level. This study evaluates the contribution that a Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) approach can make to this body of literature, with a focus on online groomers' language. The corpus consists of >600 grooming chat logs taken from the Perverted Justice Foundation archive, from which the groomers' language was extracted (c. 3.3 million words). Lexical dispersion (DPNorm), collocation and concordance analyses were conducted. The corpus was also run through LIWC. Our analysis shows that LIWC may not be the most efficient software to analyse online grooming language due to a lack of general language comparison scores, the non-transparency of some of its analytic variables and a focus on de-contextualised words. Comparatively, CADS methods can shed light upon online groomers' strategic use of language. They can also reveal the complex and nuanced ways in which discourse features such as (im)explicitness and interpersonal (in)directness operate alongside these strategies.

Nuria Lorenzo-Dus

Anina Kinzel

‘So is your mom as cute as you?’: Examining patterns of language use in online sexual grooming of children

“所以你妈妈和你一样可爱吗？”：在线性诱骗儿童的语言使用模式研究

Combining theories and methods from Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, this article examined grammatical collocates of the lemma SCHIZOPHRENIC (n.) relating to violence in a 15 million word corpus of U.K. national newspaper texts. Using the Word Sketch tool via the online toolbox SketchEngine, it isolated several relatively formulaic lexico-grammatical patterns. SCHIZOPHRENIC co-occurred unusually frequently with modifiers relating to perceived dangerousness and, when grammatical subject, with verbs referring to violent actions. The analysis noted incidentally that, when predicated by the intransitive verb DIE, some examples referred to stories where schizophrenics were killed by police or medical staff, and grammatical agency was obscured.). Other modifiers of SCHIZOPRENIC referred to examples of ‘lay diagnoses’ which were based solely on evidence of violent behaviour. Almost all instances of reported speech ascribed to SCHIZOPHRENIC referred to the admission of violent crime or the lurid and inaccurate representation of psychotic symptoms. Lastly, SCHIZOPHRENIC was grammatically co-ordinated unusually frequently with social groups defined by their violent behaviour. The article concluded by arguing that while the label SCHIZOPHRENIC (n.) is problematic owing to its evident negative semantic prosody, charities and medical professionals should work towards changing the negative misconceptions revealed by identified patterns rather than simply discouraging use of the label.

James Balfour

'The mythological marauding violent schizophrenic': Using the word sketch tool to examine representations of schizophrenic people as violent in the British press

“神话般的掠夺性暴力精神分裂症患者”：使用词语素描工具分析英国媒体中精神分裂症患者被描绘为暴力的表征

This paper investigates the representation of poverty during the 2015 UK general election campaign. The analysis is based on a corpus of articles published in the daily, Sunday and online editions of nine national newspapers. A framework combining the mainly qualitative approach of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with corpus-based techniques is used to address the following questions: which themes did the press foreground and background a) when poverty was mentioned explicitly, b) when it was referred to in terms of the welfare system and c) when the two were mentioned together in the same article? The main claim of this study is that explicit discussion of poverty in the media was infrequent during the campaign period, reflecting a lack of attention paid to poverty by politicians. Moreover, when poverty was mentioned, it was talked about as an international issue without tangible public impacts; this placed it firmly outside the arena of the general election campaign. Poverty was presented as a moral issue that must be ended, while the reduction of expenditure on benefits through welfare reform was posed as a necessity for the reduction of debt, and central to the general election campaign. I further argue that the press was able to send such contradictory messages about poverty and the welfare state by separating them into two parallel debates.

Alessia Tranchese

Using corpora to investigate the representation of poverty in the 2015 UK general election campaign

利用语料库研究2015年英国大选竞选中贫困问题的表征

Recent scholarship suggests that social norms are becoming more permissive of prejudicial talk about immigrants in the United States (Crandall, Miller, &amp; White, 2018). This is in keeping with trends observed internationally (e.g., Krzyżanowski, 2018; Vollmer &amp; Karakayali, 2018). Past studies of discourse about immigration in the United States have identified a number of patterns — most notably those relating immigrants to threat (e.g., Santa Ana, 2002) — though some have found patterns framing immigration as beneficial (e.g., Strauss, 2012). This study explores discursive patterns about immigrant education in online comments from American newspapers. It focuses on change exhibited by exploring salient lexical and thematic patterns in 2016 comments relative to such patterns in 2009 comments. Using a corpus linguistics design, keyword, thematic, and other analytical techniques were applied to identify and describe the most prominent new patterns in the 2016 comments. Seven themes, through which immigration was framed negatively, emerged as new and salient in 2016. The article also includes discussion of cross-thematic patterns (e.g., a zero-sum framework) identified in the analysis.

Shannon Fitzsimmons-Doolan

Taxpaying, Importing, Enforcing: Emerging discourse patterns in online newspaper comments about US immigrant education

纳税、进口、执行：关于美国移民教育的网络新闻评论中的新兴话语模式

Based on a video recording of conversational British English, this paper tests within the framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis whether two different subordinate structures are evenly integrated to their environment. Subordinate constructions have been described in linguistics as dependent forms elaborating on primary elements of discourse. Although their verbal characteristics have been deeply analysed, few studies have focused on the articulation of the different communicative modalities in their production or provided a qualified picture of their integration. The main hypothesis is based on the capacity of subordinate constructions to show distinct forms of autonomy depending on their syntactic type, thus expressing different degrees of break. Beyond showing that subordinate constructions are not evenly dependent on their environment depending on how speakers use the prosodic and kinetic modalities to express greater (in)dependency, the results suggest that the creation of a break mainly relies on prosodic cues. Changes in the modal configuration throughout the sequence suggest modalities are dynamic and flexible resources for integrating or demarcating subordinate constructions in function of their syntactic type.

Manon Lelandais

Gaëlle Ferré

The verbal, vocal, and gestural expression of (in)dependency in two types of subordinate constructions

从属结构中依赖性与独立性的言语、语音和手势表达

Corpus studies have taught us that many lexical items regularly co-occur with specific evaluative meanings, to the extent that those items themselves can imply attitude. Examples can be obvious, such as ‘recover from + something bad’, or less obvious, such as ‘cause + something bad’. When such an item co-occurs with an opposite meaning, it has been argued that the reader may draw the conclusion that the speaker is being insincere or ironic. Phrases such as ‘come to terms with’ are interesting in this regard. The Cobuild dictionary asserts that ‘come to terms with’ co-occurs with negative meaning (as in ‘come to terms with failure’). In at least half the cases found, however, and even in the example quoted in that dictionary, ‘come to terms with’ is used with an item that appears to be positive, such as ‘success’. In this paper it is argued that this cannot be interpreted as insincerity or irony, but that it forces a reinterpretation of the positive term, along the lines of ‘success may seem to be a good thing but it necessitates considerable life adjustment’. In more interesting cases, the item following ‘come to terms with’ relates to another individual and thus an interpretation of conflicting points of view is required. An invented example would be ‘Joe has to come to terms with Mary’s success’, where ‘success’ may be positive for Mary but negative for Joe. A genuine example, from a White House press conference, is ‘The US must come to terms with China’s industrial development’, where a divergence in viewpoint is imposed on the US and China. This paper develops this argument, discusses how similar phrases might be found, and illustrates how the imposition of conflicting points of view is used in discourse.

Susan Hunston

Coming to terms with success

成功之道

The abstract must not exceed 300 words (among other reasons, because the text box will not accommodate it) The existing literature on newspaper discourse from a CAD (Critical Discourse Analysis) or CADS (Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies) perspective is extensive and there is a large volume of published studies that mention the noun representation in their titles or who put the representation in the press as the main object of investigation. Generally, these works focus on the use of language to represent a social phenomenon like migration, Islam, Europe, homelessness, obesity, and many other events. However, except for some works, the explanation of what the act of representation means is often not directly and overtly addressed. However, the fact that the notion of representation is not often clearly defined in many works (generally for a matter of space) does not mean that the notion is taken for granted or the implications are not considered. For this reason, this paper investigates how the notion of representation is presented. On the basis that the meaning of an expression derives from its use in context, which is intended as all its manifestations through which the expression itself acquires its meaning, the aim of this work is to give a corpus-assisted discourse perspective on the use of the lexical item representation in the academic discourse focused on the news media.

Dario Del Fante

A corpus-assisted semantic profile of the noun representation in CAD and CADS studies on newspaper discourse

报纸话语中CAD与CADS研究名词表征的语料库辅助语义概貌

Ten years ago, I highlighted challenges arising from the application of CADS to multilingual datasets in an approach called “cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse studies” (Vessey, 2013). In the intervening years, the notions of superdiversity and translanguaging have been largely transformative in the fields of applied and sociolinguistics; research applying these notions has raised important questions about boundaries between languages and the nature of diversity in contemporary social contexts (e.g., Blommaert and Rampton, 2011). Drawing and building on these theoretical advances, in this paper I propose to resituate cross-linguistic CADS within a broader intersectional CADS framework (Candelas de la Ossa, 2019; Jaworska and Hunt, 2017; Hunt and Jaworska, 2019; Kitis, Milani and Levon, 2018; Subtirelu, 2015). Specifically, I underscore the methodological contributions that CADS research can make to the study of intersectionality (Nash, 2008) and I suggest how intersectional theories can support and enrich CADS researchers’ arguments about “non-obvious” meaning (Partington, 2017).

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Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies

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