City University of Hong Kong
Department of English and Communication
Research Seminar Series, Semester B 2006/2007
Press talk - the UK Press and Refugees
Presented by
Presented by
Prof Tony McEnery
Time : 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm
Venue : New Media Laboratory (Y7544), Lift 4, 7/F, Yellow Zone, Academic Building
Abstract
Refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants (henceforth RASIM), coming into the UK have attracted increased press attention (Greenslade, 2005). As their representation in the press can construct their identity (Duffy and Rowden, 2005: 6, in Greenslade, 2005: 7), the discourses surrounding these groups have been the focus of linguistic studies (e.g. ter Wal, 2002).
This talk reports on a project, 'Representation of refugees and asylum seekers in UK newspapers 1996-2005'. Although the project combines critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics approaches, the talk aims to exemplify the contribution of corpus research to discourse analysis (cf. Koller & Mautner, 2004; Orpin, 2005; Sotillo & Wang-Gempp, 2004). The study used a corpus of 140 million words, comprising 175,000 articles from 15 UK newspapers, spanning 1996-2005. Specifically, the paper reports on the collocational analysis, which adopted the methodology in Baker & McEnery (2005) and McEnery (2006). An added methodological notion, akin to key keywords (Scott, 2004: 115), is that of consistent collocates, i.e. words which are collocates in at least seven out of the ten annual sub-corpora.
Collocates can contribute to "a semantic analysis of a word" (Sinclair, 1991:115-116). Also, as "they can convey messages implicitly and even be at odds with an overt statement" (Hunston, 2002: 109), they are a suitable vehicle for the discoursal presentation of a group (Baker, 2006). The analysis also makes use of the related notions of semantic prosody (Louw, 1993: 157), semantic preference (Stubbs, 2001: 65), and discourse prosody (ibid.: 65-66). The examination of collocation patterns has revealed systematic semantic associations, which map onto the CDA notions of topos (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001: 74-76) and topic (Sedlak, 2001: 129-130), as well as metaphors commonly employed in racist discourse (van der Valk (2000: 234). Arguably, these patterns reveal elements of the underlying discourses relating to RASIM.
This talk reports on a project, 'Representation of refugees and asylum seekers in UK newspapers 1996-2005'. Although the project combines critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics approaches, the talk aims to exemplify the contribution of corpus research to discourse analysis (cf. Koller & Mautner, 2004; Orpin, 2005; Sotillo & Wang-Gempp, 2004). The study used a corpus of 140 million words, comprising 175,000 articles from 15 UK newspapers, spanning 1996-2005. Specifically, the paper reports on the collocational analysis, which adopted the methodology in Baker & McEnery (2005) and McEnery (2006). An added methodological notion, akin to key keywords (Scott, 2004: 115), is that of consistent collocates, i.e. words which are collocates in at least seven out of the ten annual sub-corpora.
Collocates can contribute to "a semantic analysis of a word" (Sinclair, 1991:115-116). Also, as "they can convey messages implicitly and even be at odds with an overt statement" (Hunston, 2002: 109), they are a suitable vehicle for the discoursal presentation of a group (Baker, 2006). The analysis also makes use of the related notions of semantic prosody (Louw, 1993: 157), semantic preference (Stubbs, 2001: 65), and discourse prosody (ibid.: 65-66). The examination of collocation patterns has revealed systematic semantic associations, which map onto the CDA notions of topos (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001: 74-76) and topic (Sedlak, 2001: 129-130), as well as metaphors commonly employed in racist discourse (van der Valk (2000: 234). Arguably, these patterns reveal elements of the underlying discourses relating to RASIM.
*******
Tony McEnery is Professor of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. He is the author, with Andrew Wilson, of Corpus Linguistics (EUP, 1997) as well as a number of other books in the area of corpus linguistics. His most recent work, Corpus-Based Language Studies, written with Richard Xiao and Yukio Tono was published by Routledge in 2006.
~ All are Welcome ~
For enquiries, please call 2788 8870
http://www6.cityu.edu.hk/en/events/eventsdetail.asp?id=114