Alan Partington

Patterns and meanings in discourse: theory and practice in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS)

This work is designed, firstly, to both provoke theoretical discussion and serve as a practical guide for researchers and students in the field of corpus linguistics and, secondly, to offer a wide-ranging introduction to corpus techniques for practitioners of discourse studies. It delves into a wide variety of language topics and areas including metaphor, irony, evaluation, (im)politeness, stylistics, language change and sociopolitical issues. Each chapter begins with an outline of an area, followed by case studies which attempt both to shed light on particular themes in this area and to demonstrate the methodologies which might be fruitfully employed to investigate them. The chapters conclude with suggestions on activities which the readers may wish to undertake themselves. An Appendix contains a list of currently available resources for corpus research which were used or mentioned in the book.

Teasing at the White House: A corpus-assisted study of face work in performing and responding to teases

Abstract In this article, I examine teasing in the laughter-talk of two transcribed spoken corpora of press briefings held at the White House, one from the Democrat and one from the Republican administrations. Categorizations are developed, firstly, of types and functions of teases and, secondly, of types and functions of responses to teases, as produced by both the podium and the assembled press. Important implications for face/(im)politeness theory become apparent. Speakers appear to have two different kinds of face, competence and affective. The problem for any given individual is that the two types of face work are frequently incompatible. Bolstering the one type of face may well diminish the other, and careful considerations are necessary when indulging in teasing of others (or indeed oneself) and in calibrating how to respond to being teased. The article is intended as a contribution to the nascent interdisciplinary field of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS).

From Wodehouse to the White House: A Corpus-Assisted Study of Play, Fantasy and Dramatic Incongruity in Comic Writing and Laughter-Talk

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.

Corpus-Assisted Comparative Case Studies of Representations of the Arab World

The term representation/s is widely used in discourse analysis (see van Dijk, 2002 for a discussion on its use), and especially in relation to studies of political and/or media discourses. The adoption of this particular term, in preference to other possibilities presumably deemed less functionally appropriate, for example, report, model, description, interpretation or reconstruction, is not without some interesting repercussions.

Intimations of ‘Spring’? What Got Said and What Didn’t Get Said about the Start of the Middle Eastern/North African Uprisings: A Corpus-assisted Discourse Study of a Historical Event

This chapter examines a particular form of presence and absence, namely, that of the mention and failure to mention in political and media news reporting of messages relating to a particular historical event, namely, the outbreak of protest in the Arab Middle East and North Africa in 2011. The analyses will take a ‘before and after’ contrastive approach, comparing how particular political and media sources talked about events and people involved in the period before the start of the protests and in the period following the outbreak of the protests. The overarching preliminary research aim is to discover if the discussions changed, if so, how, and, in particular, which messages were present or absent, appeared or disappeared, completely or in relative terms, between the two periods of time. Various sets of data are examined in order to examine three subsidiary research aims contributing to this main one.