27.1506, Review: Discourse; Socioling; Text/Corpus Ling: McEnery, Baker (2015)

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Subject: 27.1506, Review: Discourse; Socioling; Text/Corpus Ling: McEnery, Baker (2015)

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Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2016 14:04:08
From: Sibo Chen [siboc at sfu.ca]
Subject: Corpora and Discourse Studies

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-3916.html

EDITOR: Paul  Baker
EDITOR: Tony  McEnery
TITLE: Corpora and Discourse Studies
SUBTITLE: Integrating Discourse and Corpora
SERIES TITLE: Palgrave Advances in Language and Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Palgrave Macmillan
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Sibo Chen, Simon Fraser University

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

The development of corpus linguistics has had remarkable impact on discourse
analysis: with the growing availability of large collections of texts and
computational methods, it is possible for discourse analysts today to use
millions of words as research data to investigate linguistic variations as
well as hidden messages underlying discursive representations. Edited by Paul
Baker and Tony McEnery, ‘Corpora and Discourse Studies’, addresses current
trends of corpus-driven discourse analysis by presenting 13 independent
studies that pay particular attention to the adoption of qualitative and
quantitative corpus methods. The main focus of this collection is the
contribution of corpora in revealing patterns of a wide range of written,
spoken, multimodal, and electronic discourses.

The book’s 14 chapters can be divided into four parts: Chapter 1 introduces
the synergy of corpora and discourse studies as well as the key research and
debates in this emerging field; then, Chapters 2-5 address modes of discourse
and how newer or under-researched forms of text can be examined through
corpus-driven methods; Chapters 6-10 consider discourse from the perspective
of social practice, showcasing corpus-driven studies on environment, health,
academic, and news discourses; finally, Chapters 11-14 broadly take a critical
discourse analysis stance, and studies presented here are concerned with
discourse as a means of constructing social identities and ideologies.

In the first part, Chapter 1 serves as an introduction, outlines the volume,
and introduces the key debates in the quickly developing field of
corpus-driven discourse analysis. The chapter begins by reviewing some basic
concepts of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, which is followed by a
brief yet informative summary of the synergy of the two fields. A major
advantage of corpus-driven approaches, as the authors argue, is that “sampling
and balance which underline corpus building help to guard against
cherry-picking […] and to avoid over-focusing on atypical aspects of our
texts” (p.5). Yet, the use of corpus methods for discourse analysis has also
met a number of challenges that instigate ongoing discussions among its
proponents. First, although corpus methods allow researchers to take a
relatively ‘naïve’ perspective on discursive data, they can only limit the
extent of potential biases and thus we need to be cautious in terms of the
inherent limits of corpus linguistics (e.g. its emphasis on statistical
difference rather than similarity). Second, findings through corpus
linguistics are often challenged by the ‘so what’ question, which drives
researchers to explore subtle and insidious ways that obvious discursive
patterns are realized. Last but not least, there is an ongoing debate
regarding copyright and ethics in how discourse analysts should treat online
data. The chapter ends with an overview of the following chapters.

The second part (Chapters 2-5) offers more details about applying corpus
methods in investigating under-researched forms of text. To be specific,
Chapter 2 explores modal verb usage in the Cambridge and Nottingham e-Language
Corpus and the study finds that the presence of modal verbs in online
discourse is related to the extent to which a text is meant to communicate to
a wider range of audience, since online discourse, despite its immediacy,
still lacks the contextual cues in face-to-face communication. Chapter 3
considers the integration of non-linguistic data into corpus analysis. By
examining how location alters spoken language use during a series of art
gallery visits, the chapter demonstrates the potential and complexity of
considering dynamic contexts during corpus compilation. In Chapter 4, two
popular types of multimodal text – film and television – are investigated and
the main focus here is how visual and verbal representations are combined to
create meanings on screen. Chapter 5 presents an analysis of the discourse
maker ‘actually’, focusing on its complex usage and multifunctional nature in
naturally occurring speech. By attending to the various meanings of
‘actually’, this analysis demonstrates corpus linguistics’ advantage in
processing large corpora as well as the necessity to go beyond the concordance
line when analyzing subtle meanings within discourse.

In addition to the exploration of under-researched discourses, corpus methods
are also able to add new insights into delineating social practices within
particular discourse communities. The third part (Chapters 6-10) is dedicated
to this analytical perspective. This part begins with Chapter 6’s
investigation of environmental discourse in American president speeches
between 1961 and 2013. By addressing collocates with the term ‘environment’
and its related concepts such as ‘protect’, ‘energy’, and ‘clean’, the chapter
shows how environmental concepts shift along with changing socio-political
contexts as well as the ideologies of those in power. Chapter 7 offers a
discussion of health discourse through examining discussions on anorexia in
two online forums. While the study illustrates how particular discursive
representations of eating disorder can (dis)empower their participants, it
also highlights the digitalization of health information and corpus
linguistics’ potential in illuminating online health discourses’ implications.
Chapter 8 applies Doug Biber’s (1988) multi-dimensional approach to the study
of academic discourses by undergraduate and graduate students. In line with
the findings of traditional rhetorical/genre analysis, this study demonstrates
how students’ discursive performance can vary according to the time spent
among the academic community and their topics of study. Yet, the study
achieved the above conclusion by systemically addressing the subtle changes
(e.g. nominalization, wh-clauses, modal verb usage, etc.) underlying students’
academic progress, which adds valuable details to current discussions on
academic discourse. Chapter 9 introduces several facets of discourse
representation in a corpus of early modern English news reports. Based on a
hand-categorized dataset, the chapter compares early modern English and
present day English through analyzing early English news reporting’s
presentation of speech, writing, and thought. A particularly interesting
finding in this chapter is how early journalists’ fictionalization of people’
thoughts laid the foundation for making the dramatic effect a core news value
for modern news production. Chapter 10 attempts to draw connections between
corpus linguistics and other social research methods. Through a
multi-perspectival analysis (Candlin & Crichton, 2011) of creative practice in
tertiary art and design education, the chapter illustrates how corpus
linguistics can serve as a valuable component in a comprehensive research
project that involves various methods and a wide range of texts. A valuable
suggestion offered in the chapter is that corpus-based findings need to be
aligned with findings through other research methods as well as the
socio-cultural context that a specific social practice is taking place.

The third part (Chapters 11-14) consists of studies that offer insights into
corpus-driven critical discourse analysis (CDA), especially how corpus methods
counter the “cherry-picking” argument (Widdowson, 2004) by CDA critics. In
Chapter 11, the representation of the Arab world in a number of English
language newspapers is examined and the analysis shows that how this phrase
has been frequently used as a passive audience/recipient, reactive to outside
stimuli. The constraint of grammatical agency is then linked to negativity and
prejudice in news reporting, and the chapter shows how these two factors
function as news values. Shifting the analytical focus toward natural online
discourse, Chapter 12 analyzes a corpus of tweets on a controversial TV
documentary series ‘Benefit Streets’. The investigation of the corpus’
keywords identifies three key storylines (the ‘idle poor’ discourse, the ‘poor
as victim’ discourse, and the ‘rich get richer’ discourse). The chapter ends
by discussing how online media such as Twitter alter the ways discourses are
articulated and circulated as well as corpus methods’ potential to capture
these changes. Chapter 13 offers a very interesting literary critique of
‘Harry Potter’, in which words related to male and female body parts are
investigated through corpus methods. The chapter presents a compelling picture
of how female characters are “generally presented as physically deficient in
comparison with males and their inability to cope with physical situation is
seen as a liability in terms of plot” (p. 282). Although the same conclusion
can be achieved through traditional literary critique, the chapter provides
more details regarding how corpus methods are able to delineate subtle and
insidious discursive strategies underlying problematic representations.
Finally, Chapter 14 demonstrates how semantic tagging can be a useful
technique for examining social identity construction in news reports.

EVALUATION

As Baker and McEnery write in Chapter 1, the primary goal of this volume is to
offer a range of contemporary perspectives on the synergy of discourse studies
and corpus methods, thereby serving as an illuminating reading for current and
prospective practice for this evolving field. Given the diversified research
topics and corpus methods covered in the volume, it surely keeps all the
promises. Although this volume’s content is not easily understood by readers
without sufficient background in corpus linguistics, it succeeds in presenting
the content in an informative and thought-provoking way.
 
For researchers, the book is an up-to-date summary of corpus-driven discourse
analysis, and one may find the thorough methodological sections of each
chapter helpful in guiding his/her own research. In addition, the book also
offers a well-balanced presentation of different conceptualizations of
discourse by covering studies on linguistic variation (which broadly consider
discourse as ‘language-in-use’) as well as those on social representation
(which broadly approaches discourse from a Foucauldian perspective).
Throughout the volume, there are many interesting and useful discussions on
particular challenges raised by the integration of corpus methods and
discourse studies. Chapters 3, 4, 8, 12, 13, and 14 are particularly
impressive since they not only illustrate the great potential of corpus
methods in detecting less-obvious linguistic patterns, but also offer
informative reflections on moving corpus analysis toward a more
interdisciplinary, multimodal, and systemic horizon.
 
Taken together, the book is coherent and well-edited. It is difficult to point
out noticeable shortcomings and scholars of corpus linguistics, discourse
analysis and other contingent disciplines would find this book valuable
reading with important insights for future research practices.

REFERENCES

Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.

Candline, C. N., & Crichton, J. (2011). Introduction. In C. N. Candlin and J.
Crichton (eds.), Discourses of deficit (pp. 1-22). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan.

Widdowson, H. G. (2004). Text, context, pretext: Critical issues in discourse
analysis. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Sibo Chen is a PHD candidate in the School of Communication, Simon Fraser
University. He received his MA in Applied Linguistics from the Department of
Linguistics, University of Victoria, Canada. His major research interests
include language and communication, critical discourse analysis, and genre
theories.





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