This paper analyses a corpus of articles on GM crops and food which appeared in six UK newspapers in the first three months of 2004, the year following the GM Nation? debate (2003). Using the methods of critical discourse analysis we focus on how specific and pervasive representations of the major stakeholders in the national debate on GM--the British public, the British government, the science of GM, and biotechnology companies--served significant rhetorical functions in the controversy. Of particular significance was the pervasive representation of the British public as uniformly opposed to GM crops and food which served rhetorically to position the British government as undemocratic and as being beholden to powerful political and economic interests. Of significance also in our analysis, is how the science of GM farming itself became a highly contested arena. In short, our analysis demonstrates how the GM debate was represented in the newsprint media as a "battleground" of competing interests. We conclude by considering the possible implications of this representation given the increasing emphasis placed on the importance of deliberative and inclusive forms of science policy decision-making.

A corpus-based analysis of discourses of refugees and asylum seekers was carried out on data taken from a range of British newspapers and texts from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees website, both published in 2003. Concordances of the terms refugee(s) and asylum seeker(s) were examined and grouped along patterns which revealed linguistic traces of discourses. Discourses which framed refugees as packages, invaders, pests or water were found in newspaper texts, although there were also cases of negative discourses found in the UNHCR texts, revealing how difficult it is to disregard dominant discourses. Lexical choice was found to be an essential aspect of maintaining discourses of asylum seekers 鈥 collocational analyses of terms like failed vs. rejected revealed the underlying attitudes of the writers towards the subject.

This article discusses the extent to which methods normally associated with corpus linguistics can be effectively used by critical discourse analysts. Our research is based on the analysis of a 140-million-word corpus of British news articles about refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (collectively RASIM). We discuss how processes such as collocation and concordance analysis were able to identify common categories of representation of RASIM as well as directing analysts to representative texts in order to carry out qualitative analysis. The article suggests a framework for adopting corpus approaches in critical discourse analysis.

This article studies the Western perceptions of and relations with Hong Kong a decade after the reversion of the sovereignty from Britain to China in 1997. Previous studies have demonstrated that the West had a significantly negative view on the future of Hong Kong with respect to the handover. According to recent observations, however, the perceptions of the West have undergone a noticeable change. This article aims at investigating the West's understanding, opinions and positions regarding Hong Kong today compared with those in 1997. The possible reasons for any changes are also investigated. Through the integration of the theories and methods of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis and the use of two corpus linguistic software, ConcGram and Wmatrix, the present article examines a range of Western public discourse of Hong Kong concerning the handover. The purpose of the article is to yield insights into the New Hong Kong in the eyes of the West, which in turn contributes to a re-examination of the relations and power balance between the West and China.

Using the controversial 1998 Karla Faye Tucker execution and its local newspaper coverage as an illustration, this paper investigates the applicability of the notion of discourse pattern (00stman, 1999) in a situation where, at first sight, the well-known, accepted, and familiar discourse pattern could be expected to fail. The local newspaper in the town where all Texas executions are carried out, has developed a highly predictable pattern of reporting about routine executions (Halmari, 1999). Our paper shows that even in the case where the routine pattern is expected to change (in this case because the person executed was a woman and a born-again Christian — two issues to cause plenty of controversy) the newspaper uses implicit means in order to ‘secretly’ adhere to the expected discourse pattern. While at the explicit level the news reports convey a balanced view (Karla is portrayed both as angelic and as a pickax killer), at an implicit level, the reports nevertheless also manage to fulfill the expectations of the members of the local community, which the newspaper — from its own perspective, rightly so — sees as its primary audience. The study supports the notion of discourse pattern as a force contributing to discourse coherence and aiding the cognitive processing of textual interpretation.

A quantitative, corpus-based approach is most illuminating for describing collocational and other recurrent patterns associated with specific lexical items acro...

Adopting the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach, this study analyzes and discusses the news report related to Taiwan's first lady Wu Shu-chen's interview with the media which appeared in two ideologically opposed newspapers, i.e. the pro-reunification United Daily News and the pro-independence Liberty Times. Both news articles are translated from an identical English text. However, based on analysis of headlines, editorial deletion and addition, syntactic and lexical variations, as well as stylistic differences in paragraph/thematic combination, we have found that noticeable changes are made by the two translated Chinese versions. We argue that these transformations and differences found in the two Chinese texts are not arbitrary, but rather are ideologically motivated, that is, they reflect and construct the underlying opposed ideologies between the two newspapers.

In transitional societies where political pressure on the press is coupled with a commercial media system and a professional journalistic culture, the politics of self-censorship is likely to involve a strategic contest between the media and political actors. Language plays a significant role in this contest. The present study focuses on the case of Hong Kong. It analyzes how two local newspapers, facing an important yet sensitive political issue, constructed two different overall storylines and used two different sets of discursive strategies in their editorials to handle political pressure, market credibility, and journalistic integrity simultaneously. The elite-oriented Ming Pao constructed a storyline of the debate as a factional struggle in order to posit itself as an impartial arbitrator. This approach was further sustained and justified by the discursive strategies of balanced and qualified criticisms and the rhetoric of rational discussion. The mass-oriented Apple Daily, on the other hand, constructed a storyline of a sovereign people whose rights are encroached upon by a powerful entity. The paper was therefore much more critical towards the power center. Nevertheless, it also appropriated the dominant discourse, constructed internal contradictions, and decentralized the Chinese central government to smooth out the radicalism of its criticisms. Copyright 漏 2006 SAGE Publication.

This article compares and contrasts the discourse of whaling in British and Japanese newspaper reports. It investigates the ways in which pro- and anti-whaling discourses are formulated in the press by examining, in particular, the following features: (1) the use of specific lexis and syntactic structures, (2) the use of rhetorical devices, and (3) the control and organization of information at a discourse level. The article claims that British and Japanese news reports use very different strategies in expressing their anti- and pro-whaling stances; the former tend to use a more emotive and provocative tone, whereas the latter use a more restrained and factual tone. The article also claims that the issue of whaling tends to be discussed under different cultural assumptions and values in the respective discourses; and thus, suggests the possibility that readers may be influenced by the cumulative effects of these different discourses.

This paper examines the semantic associations of words found in the business lexical environment by using a one-million word corpus of both spoken and written Business English. The key method of analysis is that of semantic prosody or semantic association; the notion that words associate with collocates that are themselves related, often either negatively or positively or belonging to a specific semantic set. The paper thus shows how words in the Business English environment interact with each other on a semantic level. After a brief introduction and literature review on semantic prosody, the main research based on an analysis of corpus data is presented. It shows that not only do words in the business environment have semantic prosodies, that is they are found to regularly collocate with word groups that share semantic similarity, they also have prosodies that are unique to business, separate from the prosodies they generate in the 鈥榞eneral English鈥 environment. It was also noted, however, that these prosodies are not all-consuming, and often only represent strong tendencies for lexical relations, rather than a firmly fixed relationship. The article ends by discussing the pedagogical consequences that this research may have when the results are introduced into the classroom.

Studies dealing with media coverage of climate change have increased steadily over the last decade or so, alongside the media coverage of climate change itself. This article aims to contribute to this growing literature on two levels: to deepen understanding of distinctive patterns of language use across nations speaking a common language and to demonstrate the usefulness of a new approach for finding such patterns. Articles in The (London) Times and the New York Times, published between 2000 and 2009, were analyzed using methods related to computational linguistics. Results show that the US seemingly still constructs climate change as a problem, whereas the UK focuses on finding solutions for the (established) problem of climate change. This linguistic and conceptual gap may hamper mutual understanding and the crafting of global climate change mitigation policies.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has often proved fruitful in providing insights into the relationship between language and ideology. However, CDA is not without its critics. Constructive criticism has been offered by Stubbs, who suggests bolstering CDA by using a large corpus as the basis on which to make reliable generalisations about language use. Taking up that suggestion, this paper reports on a study of a group of words semantically related to corruption. In the study, corpus methodology is used to manipulate the data: concordances and collocational tools are used to provide semantic profiles of the words and highlight connotational differences, and to identify the geographical locations that the words refer to. It is argued that words with a noticeably negative connotation tend to be used when referring to activities that take place outside of Britain, while less negative words are used when referring to similar activities in British contexts. CDA theory is drawn on to interpret the ideological significance of the findings.

批评话语分析重视语境在话语产生、传播中的作用,长期以来一直以定性研究为主,拘泥于对单个文本或文本片段的解读。语料库语言学的定量研究可以与批评话语分析的定性研究有机结合,为研究提供坚实的数据基础,有效减少研究者的偏见。

研究以英国主流报刊2000年以来关于低碳经济的报道为分析对象,采用语料库和话语研究相结合的方法,旨在考察不同时期英国主流报刊关于低碳话语的建构及其嬗变,揭示媒介化的政治话语所反映的社会现实。研究发现,媒介化的政治话语是政治与媒体两种不同的机构话语相结合的产物。这些主流报刊中设置的低碳经济议程有效地传递着英国政府的声音,并对形成公众的低碳意识产生重要影响。

自2012年习近平总书记提出“中国梦”以来,“中国梦”一直是国内外媒体关注的焦点.然而,西方新闻媒体视野中的“中国梦”到底是何形象？迄今为止,学界尚未对之展开实证研究.本文从“LexisNexis新闻数据库”中提取西方媒体对“中国梦”的英文报道,自建“中国梦”语料库,通过索引行、搭配网络等语料库分析手段,从实证角度探索西方媒体对“中国梦”的解读、评价和话语建构.研究发现,西方媒体对“中国梦”多持肯定态度,将其与“民族复兴”和“世界和平”相关联,但也不乏媒体对其持有否定和偏见,将其与“军事扩张”等相关联.本文还发现,西方媒体常将“中国梦”与“美国梦”、“欧洲梦”和“非洲梦”等进行比较,从而展现“中国梦”与其他地区人民梦想的联系.

批评话语分析旨在揭示语言、意识形态和权力之间的复杂关系，其局限性主要体现在对单篇或少量文本的定性研究。基于语料库的定量研究方法，对《纽约时报》中的金正日逝世报道进行语篇分析，通过生成主题词表、检索高频词、观察索引行等技术手段，可实现定量分析和定性分析的有机结合，并揭示在新闻语篇中意识形态对语言使用的影响。