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1 – 10 of 26The purpose of this study is to apply a corpus-assisted analysis of keywords and their collocations in the US presidential discourse from Clinton to Trump to discover the meanings…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to apply a corpus-assisted analysis of keywords and their collocations in the US presidential discourse from Clinton to Trump to discover the meanings of these words and the collocates they have. Keywords are salient words in a corpus whose frequency is unusually high (positive keywords) or low (negative keywords) in comparison with a reference corpus. Collocation is the co-occurrence of words.
Design/methodology/approach
To achieve this purpose, the investigation of keywords and collocations is generated by AntConc, a corpus processing software.
Findings
This analysis leads to shed light on the similarities and/or differences amongst the past four American presidents concerning their key topics. Keyword analysis through keyness makes it evident that Clinton and Obama, being Democrats, demonstrate a clear tendency to improve Americans’ life inside their social sphere. Obama surpasses Clinton as regard foreign affairs. Clinton and Obama’s infrequent subjects have to do with terrorism and immigration. This complies with their condensed focus on social and economic improvements. Bush, a republican, concentrates only on external issues. This is proven by his keywords signifying war against terrorism. Bush’s negative use of words marking cooperative actions conforms to his positive use of words indicating external war. Trump’s positive keywords are about exaggerated descriptions without a defined target. He also shows an unusual frequency in referring to his name and position. His words used with negative keyness refer to reforming programs and external issues. Collocations around each top content keyword clarify the word and harmonize with the presidential orientation negotiated by the keywords.
Research limitations/implications
Limitations have to do with the issue of the accurate representation of the samples.
Originality/value
This research is original in its methodology of applying corpus linguistics tools in the analysis of presidential discourses.
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Keywords
Rosita Belinda Maglie and Laura Centonze
The purpose of this paper is to explore two channels of communication (i.e. texts and images) from a non-governmental organization website called #DisruptAging with the aim of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore two channels of communication (i.e. texts and images) from a non-governmental organization website called #DisruptAging with the aim of finding how multimodal knowledge dissemination contributes to dismantling misconceptions about the aging process.
Design/methodology/approach
This analysis is based on an integrated approach that combines corpus-assisted discourse analysis (cf. Semino and Short, 2004; Baker et al., 2008, Baker, 2010) and multimodal critical discourse analysis (Machin and Mayr, 2012) via the American Medical Association format (2007) and the suite of FrameWorks tools (2015, 2017), which are applied to the collection of texts and images taken from #DisruptAging.
Findings
A total of 69 stories corresponding with 218 images of older adults have shown to be powerful textual and semiotic resources, designed both for educational and awareness-raising purposes, to promote the so-called “aging well discourse” (cf. Loos et al., 2017).
Social implications
This discursive approach to the textual and visual material found in #DisruptAging hopes to influence the governing institutions that we construct, and the people who are given power to run them, with the goal of fostering fair treatment of older people within society.
Originality/value
There is a lack of studies investigating counter-discourse forms available online, which use textual and visual language to change the way society conceives the idea of aging.
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Keywords
Victoria Wells, Navdeep Athwal, Esterina Nervino and Marylyn Carrigan
By responding to scholarly calls, this study examines the environmental reports of LVMH and Kering. The study extends legitimacy theory to ascertain the credibility of the…
Abstract
Purpose
By responding to scholarly calls, this study examines the environmental reports of LVMH and Kering. The study extends legitimacy theory to ascertain the credibility of the aforementioned luxury conglomerates' commitment to environmental sustainability.
Design/methodology/approach
A corpus-assisted discourse analysis centred upon the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines is used to examine the environmental disclosures of LVMH and Kering.
Findings
The findings show inconsistencies due to the lack of brand-level reporting and reporting quality falls short of comparable sustainability reporting within each conglomerate and with one another. Selective and unbalanced reporting along with symbolic management undermines the legitimacy of sustainability efforts by LVMH and Kering.
Originality/value
Despite the increased attention paid to sustainable luxury, few studies critically analyse how luxury brands formally report on sustainability.
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Keywords
The referendum debate in Ireland on whether voting in favour of the Lisbon Treaty has filled the pages of newspapers and the online media. Several anti-EU campaigns have emerged…
Abstract
The referendum debate in Ireland on whether voting in favour of the Lisbon Treaty has filled the pages of newspapers and the online media. Several anti-EU campaigns have emerged and politicians have shown their own attitudes towards the ratification process. Being our first contact with reality newspapers enable potential readers to better understand their lives and socio-political events (Van Dijk, 1991; Richardson, 2007). It has been argued that newspapers construe public identities for individuals and social groups through specific textual strategies and contribute to our understanding of belonging to a community (Fairclough, 1995a). Some scholars have proved that, in reporting on European matters, British newspapers are mainly Eurosceptic and tend to depict EU leaders in a negative light (Musolff, 2004; Nasti, 2012). It has also been demonstrated that when reporting on European integration newspapers tend to define what it means to be a European citizen by construing their own images of Europe. By doing so, newspapers have the power to support or subvert the feeling of European belonging by showing desired or unwanted scenarios. In his analysis of newspaper discourse, Fowler (1991) points out how transitivity is of great interest in newspaper analysis as it is a potential tool to investigate the same event in different ways, thus providing different views on the social and political events reported.
Against this framework, the present chapter aims to analyse, by combining a quantitative and a qualitative approach, how newspapers construct professional, social and private identity of the European politicians involved in the Lisbon Treaty debate following the features introduced by Fairclough (1995b) and Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) transitivity model. This study also investigates what qualities and features are attributed to EU leaders and to what extent the stereotyped roles of previous studies are also revealed through the analysis of material, mental and verbal processes.
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Linda S. Al-Abbas and Ahmad S. Haider
The purpose of this study is to examine the most frequent countries and prevalent discourses in the context of homosexuality in the headlines of Arabic-language media outlets.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to examine the most frequent countries and prevalent discourses in the context of homosexuality in the headlines of Arabic-language media outlets.
Design/methodology/approach
This study combined both corpus linguistic (CL) quantitative and critical discourse analysis (CDA) qualitative approaches to analyse five thousand two hundred news headlines that were retrieved from the Factiva news database from 2010 to 2019.
Findings
There were six main categories of subjects covered by the media in the context of homosexuality, namely crime, extremist groups, legislation, authority figures and scandals, culture and countries. The analysis showed that the countries whose laws criminalize homosexuals were more frequent than those seen to be supportive of homosexuals. The findings revealed that homosexuals are under-covered in the Arab media, and whenever they are present in the news reports, they are depicted negatively.
Research limitations/implications
This study examined the representation of homosexuals in Arabic headlines from 2010 to 2019. Future researchers may investigate their construction in the body of the articles in different periods and languages.
Practical implications
The present research has implications regarding the necessity of objectivity in covering news about minority groups without being influenced by the stock of ideas circulating in the culture where media outlets report.
Social implications
The social implications include enhancing the principles and values of solidarity and respecting all groups in society.
Originality/value
Although there is considerable literature on the representation of homosexuals in media outlets, the number of articles that investigated the same concept in the Arab region is relatively limited to the best knowledge of the researchers. Therefore, this study can add great significance to existing knowledge as it tackles a limitedly investigated topic in the Arab world.
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Mohamad Javad Baghiat Esfahani and Saeed Ketabi
This study attempts to evaluate the effect of the corpus-based inductive teaching approach with multiple academic corpora (PICA, CAEC and Oxford Corpus of Academic English) and…
Abstract
Purpose
This study attempts to evaluate the effect of the corpus-based inductive teaching approach with multiple academic corpora (PICA, CAEC and Oxford Corpus of Academic English) and conventional deductive teaching approach (i.e., multiple-choice items, filling the gap, matching and underlining) on learning academic collocations by Iranian advanced EFL learners (students learning English as a foreign language).
Design/methodology/approach
This is a quasi-experimental, quantitative and qualitative study.
Findings
The result showed the experimental group outperformed significantly compared with the control group. The experimental group also shared their perception of the advantages and disadvantages of the corpus-assisted language teaching approach.
Originality/value
Despite growing progress in language pedagogy, methodologies and language curriculum design, there are still many teachers who experience poor performance in their students' vocabulary, whether in comprehension or production. In Iran, for example, even though mandatory English education begins at the age of 13, which is junior and senior high school, students still have serious problems in language production and comprehension when they reach university levels.
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Keywords
The growth in cryptomarkets has reinvigorated the research on illicit drug distribution due to the availability of large-scale data. This data has enabled researchers to ask new…
Abstract
The growth in cryptomarkets has reinvigorated the research on illicit drug distribution due to the availability of large-scale data. This data has enabled researchers to ask new and detailed questions about how participants in these markets trust each other enough for the market not to collapse. This question deserves more attention because it has become a taken-for-granted notion that repeated transactions and social categories create trust. Whether online or on the street, economic exchanges under illegality are more uncertain than transactions in the legal economy. This puts higher demands on trust, as there is less information and the stakes are higher. In this chapter, the author presents definitions, typologies, and disciplinary contributions to the study of trust and examine how it has been operationalised in a sample of 13 peer-reviewed articles. These articles focus on three dimensions of trust: process-based trust that derives from repeated transactions with known partners; character-based trust measured by the networked reputation scores; and institutional-based trust in the platform and its administrators. In practice, the trust bases are intertwined. Drawing on the broader social science literature on trust, a mesolevel operationalisation that centres on networked reputation scores as embedded in processes and institutions can draw the research together in a multidisciplinary framework.
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