Alison Duguid

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.

Digital Discrimination: An Ergonomic Approach to Emotional Education for the Prevention of Cyberbullying

The aim of this study is to shed some light on the complex relationship between cognitive, socio-affective and contextual (i.e. the technology and the way in which it is used) factors, which intervene in the context of prosocial and antisocial behavior, both in the real and virtual world. Results coming from a survey with a sample of 264 subjects show that those who perform victimization on the Internet are more likely to be more dependent on the use of the Internet and stay on social networks for more time in a day. In addition, while the aggressive behavior and the disengagement seem to be more correlated with a detachment towards the victim and therefore to a lower level of affective empathy, the helping behavior seems to be characterized by a greater cognitive capacity and a greater understanding of the other.

Evaluation as Positioning in English Language World News Channels

When asked to identify world television news channels, most people mention CNN (1980), the first provider to pioneer rolling news, and familiar to any traveller who might want to find news bulletins on the hour every hour. BBC World started broadcasting regular news bulletins and other programmes of general interest in 1991 as part of the World Service and launched its dedicated news-only channel, BBC News 24, in 1997. Sky News started its dedicated channel in 1989. Like national news broadcasters they claim objectivity, impartiality and neutrality, though such notions are challenged by a range of scholars (van Dijk 1985, 1988; Biber and Finegan 1989; Bell 1991; Fowler 1991; Iedema et al. 1994; Ungerer 1997; White 1997, 1998, 2004, 2005). National news involves broadcasters addressing a geographically defined imagined community to which news items may be considered to have relevance, with local references and proximity news values, and with prime-time synchrony dictating what gets into the bulletin. In national news, the ethnocentric lens through which the world is viewed is shared between broadcaster and audience, the time frame is the same, the recency value being defined by the day (as Jon Snow makes clear in his account of how the news is planned, in Chapter 8 in this volume). When this time frame changes, as it must in the case of transnational world news, the constant, cyclical repetition suggests also that a different pattern of consumption is expected: checking-in for updates, sampling rather than watching a complete bulletin at a certain time of day; and as Montgomery says (2007: 67), ‘a different relationship between discourse and the audience and discourse and the event‘.