RSSReview: Patterns and Meanings in Discourse
Jan 08
AUTHOR: Alan Partington
AUTHOR: Alison Duguid
AUTHOR: Charlotte Taylor
TITLE: Patterns and Meanings in Discourse
SUBTITLE: Theory and practice in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS)
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Corpus Linguistics 55
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2013
REVIEWER: Alessia Bianchini, Università degli Studi di Pavia
SUMMARY
”Patterns and Meaning in Discourse. Theory and Practice in Corpus-assisted
Discourse Studies (CADS)” aims to provide researchers and students interested
in Corpus Linguistics (CL) with a variety of methodologies that can be applied
successfully to discourse analysis. Each chapter of the book presents a case
study that delves into a particular topic/area of CADS; some of the chapters
(namely Chapters Four, Five, Six, Nine, Ten and Eleven) feature reworked
articles and contributions the authors have published in the last decade on
the topic of CADS, however, since CL has matured considerably in the last
years, materials and data from previous works here have been updated and
extended as well.
The Introduction gives a useful outline of the book, describing its structure
and, most importantly, presenting its theoretical premise and its aim. The
research rests on the assumption that human language seems to behave according
to the Sinclairian ”idiom vs. open choice theory” (Sinclair 1996; 1998),
which the authors argue is in fact the expression of specific cognitive/mental
processes. Assuming this theoretical premise, the authors then aim to prove
that communicative discourse is organized along these same lines; the
following chapters of the book, each of which dedicates itself to a case
study, investigate the instantiation of the aforementioned hypothesis.
Furthermore, the Introduction also gives a brief overview of CL and CADS,
defining the former as ”that set of studies into the form and/or function of
language which incorporate the use of computerized corpora in their analysis”
(p. 5) and the latter as “that set of studies into the form and/or function of
language as communicative discourse which incorporate the use of computerized
corpora in their analysis” (p. 10). Finally, it presents the set of corpora
on which the research is based (mainly the Siena-Bologna Modern Diachronic
Corpus, available through the Sketch Engine interface, Kilgarriff, Rychly,
Smrz, Tugwell 2004) and the WordSmith Tool (Scott 2008) employed to work the
corpora. All corpora, resources and software used in the book are accurately
listed in the Appendix.
Chapter One focuses on the aforementioned Sinclairian Theory. The authors
present both the ”idiom principle” and the ”open-choice principle” (known
as ”phraseological tendency” and ”terminological tendency”, in Sinclair’s
words, Sinclair 1996, 2004): the former refers to the idea that language (and
therefore discourse) is largely composed by (semi) preconstituted blocks of
lexical items (e.g. multi-words units, schemas, templates, …), going from
collocations such as ”roaring fire” to set phrases such as ”as a matter of
fact”; the latter refers instead to the ability of language to generate new
meanings from pre-existing rules. Based on Sinclair’s theory, the authors
argue that language organization behaves according to the interaction of these
two principles. Moreover, they sustain that the idiom principle and the
open-choice principle parallel two cognitive/psychological processes: the
first process makes it possible for human beings to learn to behave socially
through the imitation of acquainted social behaviors (Hoey’s “Lexical Priming
Theory”, which is another important reference point for this book, extends
this hypothesis to the linguistic field, Hoey 2005); the second process
instead concerns the role of memory in learning, insisting that human beings
tend to recall regularities (or ”patterns”) in events and use them to make
predictions and forecasts. Note that, as clearly stated by the authors, the
debate over whether language is a form of cognitive processing or whether it
is the other way around is beyond the scope of the book (p. 30); instead, its
aim is to test the hypothesis that language organization and cognitive
processing share some similarities.
Chapter Two focuses on evaluative discourse (Hunston 2010) and presents the
first case study of the book, which is on using concordance evidence to
identify hidden evaluative polarity and evaluative prosody (also known as
”semantic prosody”, Sinclair 1987, 1991; Louw 1993, 2000; Stewart 2010,
among others, or ”discourse prosody”, Tognini-Bonelli 2001; Stubbs 2001).
The corpus-based research shows how lexical elements expressing a positive or
negative polarity may be nested and embedded (and therefore, not immediately
obvious) within preconstructed phrases, as well as how preconstructed phrases
expressing polarity may have their evaluative value altered when in
combination with certain discourse structures. The case study shows how
extracting concordances for a certain target item (e.g. ”of some
stature/standing”, p. 48, ”end up” + [preposition] + place, p. 59) may be
useful to identify hidden evaluative meanings. The chapter ends with a section
on ”Suggestions for Further Research”, in which the authors challenge the
readers with a couple exercises that may be useful to get acquainted with the
methodology illustrated.
Chapter Three reinforces the points raised in Chapter Two: evaluative items
interact in the text; and CADS methodologies may be useful to shed light on
this interaction. Chapter Three’s case study focuses on an analysis of the
notion of ”control”; as it emerges from the corpus-based inquiry, usually
the concept of control (or of lack of control) conveys an evaluative polarity,
even if the lexical item ”control” does not actually appear in the text.
Moreover, the examination of a variety of lexical items (e.g. ”set in”,
”sit through”, ”orchestrate” and ”true feelings”, among others) shows
that what seems to be crucial to the realization of a certain evaluative value
is in fact the speaker’s point of view, since positive or negative evaluation
are found according to ”the extent to which the speaker or writer is in
control of events” (p. 94).
In the subsequent Chapters, Four, Five and Six, the authors present evidence
of how writers and speakers can subvert the regularities in language (and
therefore the arisen expectations) by means of specific rhetorical figures,
namely: irony, metaphor and figurative expressions, and the so-called
”creative collocational inappropriateness”, which is the process by which
collocational expectations are denied by the unusual co-occurrence of certain
items (e.g. ”deliberately love this girl”, where “deliberately” collocates
unexpectedly with a positive entity, ”love”).
Chapter Seven presents a cross-linguistic case study about the representation
of migrants in the Italian and English press (Gabrielatos and Baker 2008;
Taylor 2009). In line with the aim of the book, a specific CADS methodology is
applied to the topic. The research presented in the chapter is structured as
follows: in the first phase, items conveying a racist or xenophobic meaning
are concordanced to analyze how they appear in the newspapers; in the second
phase, a few specific items (namely: ”refugees”, ”asylum seekers”,
”immigrants” and ”migrants”, with their Italian equivalent) are thoroughly
investigated; finally, the outcomes of the linguistic research are compared
with ”real-world” statistical data in order to identify any mismatch between
the number of migrants per country and the related amount of media attention.
Again, the chapter concludes by providing readers with a series of exercises.
Chapters Eight and Nine come back to the evaluation topic, but this time the
attention is focused on spoken discourse. Chapter Eight begins giving an
overview of studies based on corpora of spoken language and then presents a
couple of related case studies, each of which concerns a peculiar type of
interaction, conflict. In the authors’ opinion, in fact, some of the most
interesting types of discourse are those in which participants find themselves
in an adversarial situation, since here, the strategic use of language can be
best studied (Montgomery 2007). As for the case studies, Chapter Eight
presents a CADS approach to J. W. Bush and Obama’s press conference briefings,
and to the Hutton Inquiry. Chapter Nine still focuses on conflict, but it
specifically delves into the phenomenon of (im)politeness. First, an overview
of CL approaches to (im)politeness is given (Watts, Ide and Elich 1992), and
then, as a case study, three different institutional discourse types (namely,
a subset from the House of Commons debates; the Hutton Inquiry; a subset from
the BBC TV show ”Breakfast with Frost”) are presented in order to show how
CADS’ approach to (im)politeness proves to be a useful tool to unmask
deliberate (yet hidden) mocking strategies. Both Chapters Eight and Chapter
Nine conclude with a ”Suggestions for Further Research” section as well.
Chapters Ten and Eleven respectively introduce and focus on ”modern
diachronic CADS” (MD-CADS), a particular subfield of CADS which focuses on
diachrony. Although the preferential use of CADS’ methods is the analysis of
synchronic data, a diachronic approach to discourse seems to be worthy of
attention since it may unveil interesting linguistic changes over (brief
periods of) time. To serve its scope, MD-CADS needs ”ad hoc” corpora to be
as comparable as possible. As for the case studies illustrated in Chapters Ten
and Eleven, they are based on SiBol and Port corpora, which comprehensively
contain newspaper texts from 1993, 2005 and 2010. The case study in Chapter
Ten aims to underline some (general) diachronic variation in the English
language/discourse within the period 1993-2010 (e.g. the apparent increase in
the salience of the first personal pronoun ”I”, at the expense of other
personal pronouns). Chapter Eleven presents two case studies: the first one
focuses on how the concept of antisemitism is expressed in the press; and the
second one focuses on the use of the items ”boy/girl”.
The last chapter of the book is a conclusion that sums up the most relevant
issues encountered in previous chapters.
Finally, the book features a complete bibliography and a useful author index.
EVALUATION
The purpose of ”Patterns and Meaning in Discourse. Theory and Practice in
Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies (CADS)” is to provide readers interested in
CL with a series of methodologies that may be useful for the analysis of
language and, in particular, of discourse. More precisely, the aim of the book
is to show, through a collection of specific case studies, “the eclecticism”
(p. 328) and the potential of CADS research. This purpose is achieved, since
the authors were able to provide a broad overview of the possible applications
of CADS methodologies. Additionally, as a further product of this area of
research, each case study illustrated in the book provides data, ideas and
considerations that are both linguistic and extra-linguistic in nature.
As the book is designed to offer a wide-ranging introduction to corpus
techniques, one of the main considerations emerging from it is the necessity
of ”tailoring the research procedure to the particular researches questions
and aims” (p. 328). In fact, what is well-pointed out by this variegated work
is that the researcher should always keep in mind that there is no “best
methodology” per se, but that the most suitable procedure has to be chosen
depending on the goal of the research itself.
Also, this work draws attention to the need for an integrated approach to
discourse analysis. The case studies presented in fact show the importance of
the comparison of linguistic data and extra-linguistic data (e.g. the case
illustrated in Chapter Seven, dedicated to the representation of migrants and
in Chapters Ten and Eleven, concerning the concept of antisemitism and
gender), since language is mainly a social factor. Moreover, the authors
underline the importance of taking into account well-known issues from other
linguistic fields, such as translation in the case of cross-linguistic CADS.
As for the book’s organization, its structure is very linear and consistent.
The Introduction provides the reader with a useful overview of the topics that
will be covered in the following chapters, and Chapter Twelve, devoted to the
conclusions, summarizes the main points of the research in a concise yet
effective way. Also, although each chapter of the book is in fact research in
its own right, the book does not lose its internal coherence.
REFERENCES
Gabrielatos C. and Baker P. 2008. ”Fleeing, sneaking, flooding: A corpus
analysis of discursive constructions of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK
press (1996-2005)”. Journal of English Linguistics 36(1): 5-38.
Hoey M. 2005. ”Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language”. London:
Routledge.
Hunston S. 2010. ”Corpus Approaches to Evaluation: Phraseology and Evaluative
Language”. London: Routledge.
Kilgarriff A., Rychly P., Smrz P., Tugwell D. 2004. ”The Sketch Engine”. In
”Proc. EURALEX 2004, Lorient, France”, pp 105-116.
Louw W. 2000. ”Contextual prosodic theory: Bringing semantic prosodies into
life”. In C. Heffer and H. Staunton (eds.), ”Words in Context” 48-95.
Birmingham: Univ. of Birmingham.
Montgomery M. 2007. ”The Discourse of Broadcast News: A Linguistic
Approach”. London: Routledge.
Sinclair J. 1996. ”The search for units of meaning”. Textus 9(1): 75-106.
Sinclair J. 1997. ”The nature of evidence”. In J. Sinclair (ed.), “Looking
Up”, 150-159. London: Routledge.
Sinclair J. 1998. The lexical item. In ”Contrastive Lexical Semantics”, E.
Weigand (ed.), 1-24. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sinclair J. 2004. ”Trust the text: Language, Corpus and Discourse”. London:
Routledge.
Stewart D. 2010. ”Semantic Prosody: A Critical Evaluation”. London:
Routledge.
Stubbs M. 2001. ”Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics”.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Taylor C. 2009. ”The representation of immigrants in the Italian press”.
CirCap Occasional Papers 21. Siena: University of Siena.
Tognini-Bonelli E. 2001. ”Corpus Linguistics at Work”. Amsterdam: John
Benjamin.
Watts R., Ide S. and Ehlich K. 1992. Politeness in Language: Studies in its
History, Theory and Practice. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Alessia Bianchini is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Pavia
(Italy). Her research interests include Corpus Linguistics and Computational
Linguistics and particularly the interface syntax-semantics.
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