34.513, Review: Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Text/Corpus Linguistics: Poole (2022)

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Subject: 34.513, Review: Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Text/Corpus Linguistics: Poole (2022)

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Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2023 19:44:59
From: Rebecca Madlener [vicky.madlener at gmail.com]
Subject: Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistics

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/33/33-2155.html

AUTHOR: Robert  Poole
TITLE: Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistics
SERIES TITLE: Bloomsbury Advances in Ecolinguistics
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: Rebecca Madlener

SUMMARY

“Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistics”, by Robert Poole, aims to provide readers
with an introduction to the potential of combining corpus linguistics,
specifically corpus-assisted discourse studies, with ecolinguistics in order
to investigate “linguistic practices that influence our conceptualization of
and actions towards the environment” and “challenge patterns and practices
that (re)produce attitudes, beliefs, identities, and ideologies which
contribute to ecological destruction” (p. 3). The book is intended for
ecolinguists who are interested in expanding their methodological range to
include corpus linguistics, as well as corpus linguists who are interested in
extending their work into areas of ecolinguistics.

The book is divided into seven chapters: an Introduction (Chapter 1), an
overview of previous literature in corpus-assisted ecolinguistics (Chapter 2),
four case studies exemplifying different corpus-linguistic methods and their
potential for ecolinguistics (Chapters 3-6) and a conclusion (Chapter 7). Each
chapter ends with a brief outline of possibilities for future research,
building on that chapter’s content and methodology.

The Introduction discusses important linguistic approaches and methods that
inform the approaches presented in the book. It begins by defining the key
questions and aims of ecolinguistics and then moves on to give a brief
historical overview of pervious ecolinguistic research, starting with the work
of Alexander von Humboldt in the early 19th century and moving through key
figures and works in the field, such as Einar Haugen’s work from the 1970s, on
to present day research by scholars associated with the International
Ecolinguistics Association (IEA). The chapter then moves on to introduce the
key concepts of corpus linguistics in general and corpus-assisted discourse
studies and critical discourse studies in particular, in order to ground the
book within previous research. Then, the ideas of ecolinguistics and corpus
studies are combined to outline the potential of corpus-assisted
ecolinguistics and to set the stage for the rest of the book.

Chapter 2 introduces corpus-assisted ecolinguistics more thoroughly in the
form of a literature review. The author first outlines his criteria for
including previous research in the book and briefly outlines different types
of corpora that can be investigated. He then presents previous research
grouped by thematic issues and type of discourse investigated: climate crisis
discourse, representations of nonhuman animals, corporate and political
discourse, eco-relevant terms, disasters and crises, places, and other
studies. 

The first case study (Chapter 3), is a diachronic analysis of representations
of wilderness through its collocating adjectives in the Corpus of Historical
American English (COHA) and the Google Books Corpus. The aim of this study is
to trace changes in the relationship with and perception of wilderness in
American discourse. The chapter begins with reviews of previous literature in
diachronic corpus-assisted discourse studies and diachronic ecolinguistics
studies and then moves on to the methods used in the case study: evaluation
and collocation analysis and the use of Kendall’s Tau correlation coefficient
for assessing the strength of diachronic language use trends. The
investigation of the evolving evaluations of wilderness in the two corpora is
based on searches for adjective + wilderness. The overall top 10 adjectives
and their evaluative patterns (e.g. positive evaluation: vast, great, unbroken
vs. negative evaluation: desolate, barren) are then discussed. Kendall’s Tau
correlation coefficient is employed to investigate the rising and falling of
evaluative framings. The top increasing adjectives reflect a legal status for
wilderness (e.g. national, federal), while many of the decreasing adjectives
reflect a negative evaluation (e.g. desolate, barren). The author takes this
as an indication of a positive discourse trend reflecting an emergent
environmental ethic.

The second case study (Chapter 4) consists of a keyness analysis of a literary
text, Richard Powers’s “The Overstory”. Keyness analysis compares the corpus
under investigation to a larger reference corpus in order to identify features
that occur significantly more or less frequently in the investigated corpus
than would be expected. The chapter begins with brief introductions to
environmental writing, corpus stylistics, previous ecolinguistics analyses of
literary texts, and keyness analysis. The most significant trend in “The
Overstory” is the representation of trees and forests as animated and agents.
This can be seen in the frequent collocation of, for instance, tree + verbs
such as ‘listens’, ‘travels’, and ‘feels’. Such collocations are not frequent
in the reference corpus. “The Overstory” thus represents positive discourse
that cultivates a deeper ecological consciousness.

The third case study (Chapter 5) investigates wordplay in the reporting of
animal escapes through a small, specialized corpus, consisting of eight
articles (overall approximately 5,000 words) from different national US
publications. The chapter begins with a brief review of previous literature on
representations of nonhuman animals and then outlines the linguistic notions
of lexical priming and framing and their relevance for humour studies. Priming
and framing are often applied in humour studies as they provide insight into
the comedic effect of subverting the reader’s expectations. The author then
discusses the use of puns (e.g. “mooving”) and their frequency in the
investigated corpus in contrast with their frequency in the Corpus of
Contemporary American English (COCA) and the News on the Web Corpus (NOW).
Then the author moves on to discuss the frequent allusions to criminal
activities that portray the animals as criminals. The author interprets the
function of the humour in the articles as the “trivializ[ing of] escape events
and thus the minimiz[ation of] the suffering of the animals” (p. 129). This
negative discourse is characteristic of seven of the eight investigated
articles; the only exception being an article from “Vegan Life”.

The final case study (Chapter 6) highlights the potential of geographical text
analysis for corpus-assisted ecolinguistics by analysing the places and their
discursive productions of blog posts about two mining projects. This case
study is informed by a new focus in the humanities – the desire to understand
the relationship between humans and places. The chapter begins with brief
overviews of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), geographical text
analysis, and previous ecolinguistics studies of place. The corpus consists of
blog posts written by four environmental groups between 2010 and 2020. Place
names that occurred at least 5 times in the overall corpus were geo-referenced
and mapped. The map shows that place references tend to cluster within close
proximity of the respective mining location. Additionally, the corpora were
annotated with semantic tags within a collocational window of four positions
to the right or left, in order to map the discourse onto the places. The
resulting maps show the complexity of the discursive production of place. For
instance, semantic tags of money cluster around the areas advocated for in two
of the blogs, while another blog assigns money tags to places further away
from the proposed mine. Semantic tags relating to life and living things also
cluster near the respective mining locations, where they frequently invoke
wildlife in need of protection. The same tags refer to the opposite phenomenon
when found with international places: there are frequent references to lives
lost or displaced. The primary rhetorical aims of the individual blogs seem to
strongly influence their place naming and discursive practices.

The final chapter briefly summarizes the book’s content and presents
additional possibilities for future research in corpus-assisted
ecolinguistics, as well as additional corpora that can be used for such
studies.

EVALUATION

Overall, “Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistics” offers a good introduction to the
potential of applying corpus linguistic methods when pursuing ecolinguistic
research. The thorough literature review in Chapter 2 gives a good
introduction to the field and the shorter literature reviews in the other
chapters help situate the case studies within the respective areas of corpus
linguistics and ecolinguistics. The four case studies investigate different
types of corpora, posing and answering entirely different research questions.
This shows the large potential range of corpus-assisted ecolinguistics
studies, covering synchronic as well as diachronic questions and investigating
anything from large general corpora to small specialized ones.

As the book continually gives overviews and explanations of key concepts from
both corpus linguistics and ecolinguistics, it is suitable for readers from
both linguistic fields – or any other area of linguistics. 

There are, however, a few issues. While the book is well written and easy to
follow, the author does not always neutrally report his findings, but rather
often takes a clear stance on whether or not discourse is ‘positive’ or
‘negative’ with regards to his personal “ecosophy” (as outlined in the
Preface). To some readers some of the phrasing might seem like an accusation
or the assigning of guilt (e.g. using the phrase “flesh of sentient beings”
for “meat”; p. 37). Due to the ambitious goal of wanting to show a large range
of potential applications of corpus linguistic methods for the study of
ecolinguistic questions, each case study only offers a small glimpse into the
possibilities of the respective method. The chapters put more focus on the
previous literature and methodology than the actual case study, leaving the
reader curious to see more of the data, analysis, and discussion each time.

The corpus linguistic methods employed in the case studies are thoroughly
thought through and represent state-of-the-art approaches in corpus
linguistics; however, corpus linguists might take issue with the compilation
of the small, specialized corpus employed in the case study on animal escapes
(Chapter 5). The corpus seems biased, which raises the question of whether the
same trends would be observable in a different corpus. As several of the texts
were selected specifically for classroom activities aimed at training
students’ critical language awareness, the case study seems to run the risk of
confirmation bias – the majority of the texts will exhibit a negative attitude
towards escaped animals, because they were selected for exhibiting said
attitude. Concerning the analysis, the author occasionally glosses over how he
arrived at his judgments concerning what is ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. As the
judgments are based on his own ecosophy, analyses by other researchers might
yield differing interpretations of the data.

Combining corpus linguistics and ecolinguistics clearly has a lot of potential
for future studies. The author himself admits that his study is geographically
limited to the US and, therefore, his findings cannot be generalized to other
contexts. Similar studies carried out in other parts of the English speaking
world, as well as in other language communities around the world, would surely
provide interesting grounds for comparisons and invite further research and
discussion.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Rebecca Madlener has recently finished an MA in General Linguistics at Uppsala
University. Her research interests mainly cover corpus linguistic approaches
to historical semantics and landscape semantics and her work focuses on Celtic
languages.





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