Charlotte Taylor

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.

Mock politeness in English and Italian: a corpus-assisted metalanguage analysis

This volume presents an in-depth analysis of mock politeness, bringing together research from different academic fields and investigating a range of first-order metapragmatic labels for mock politeness in British English and Italian. It is the first book-length theorisation and detailed description of mock politeness and, as such, contributes to the growing field of impoliteness. The approach taken is methodologically innovative because it takes a first-order metalanguage approach, basing the analysis on behaviours which participants themselves have identified as impolite. Furthermore, it exploits the affordances of corpus pragmatics, a rapidly developing field. Mock Politeness in English and Italian: A corpus-assisted metalanguage analysis will be of interest to scholars and postgraduate students researching im/politeness and verbal aggression, in particular those interested in im/politeness implicatures and non-conventional meanings.

Establishing the EU: the representation of Europe in the press in 1993 and 2005

This paper investigates how the European Union was represented in three British newspapers over two different time periods: 1993 and 2005. The Treaty on European Union, which led to the creation of the European Union, was signed in 1992 and entered into force in 1993. The Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe was signed in 2004, and like the Maastricht Treaty was subject to ratification. However, unlike the Maastricht Treaty, it was rejected in referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005 and therefore was not implemented. These two events were chosen for their importance in the history of the European Union and because they allow for a diachronic comparison of the construal of Europe in the British press. Two sub-corpora were used in the study, the first, SiBol_93, contains approximately 92 million tokens from three broadsheet British newspapers collected in 1993 and the second, SiBol_05, contains approximately 150 million tokens collected from the same sources in 2005. Each of these corpora covers the year after the signing of the treaties and therefore the period in which the ratification was discussed. The corpora were investigated using Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) which involves a shunting between quantitative and qualitative analytical approaches and starting points (see, for example, Partington 2004, forthcoming; Baker 2006). Our findings show that while there is no simplistic positive to negative reversal of evaluation, there is certainly a marked decrease in the newsworthiness of Europe and the European Union, and the problem the European Union faces is primarily one of visibility.

Exploring Silence and Absence in Discourse

Cross-media studies as a method to uncover print media’s silencing practices and linguistic discrimination of sexual minorities in Uganda

The relationship between irony and sarcasm: Insights from a first-order metalanguage investigation

Abstract The relationship between irony and sarcasm has been much discussed and yet there is still little agreement on how the two relate at a theoretical level, as Attardo (2000: 795) notes “there is no consensus on whether irony and sarcasm are essentially the same thing […] or if they differ significantly”. The aim of this paper is to take a user-perspective and report on how participants in everyday conversations in the UK and Italy talk about irony and sarcasm and what kinds of authentic behaviors are described using these labels. These findings are discussed with reference to the academic concepts of irony and sarcasm to investigate how the lay and academic perspectives relate.