Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistics


Book Description

Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistics introduces and integrates key research concepts, principles and techniques in ecolinguistics and corpus-assisted discourse study, answering foundational questions for researchers new to the discipline and asserting the urgent need to expand its scope. Breaking new ground, the book analyzes under-explored environmental discourses that have a tangible impact on ecological wellbeing and sustainability by perpetuating harmful attitudes, practices and ideologies. Chapters present in-depth case studies, including an analysis of the evolving representations of wilderness, an eco-stylistic analysis of a popular novel, and an investigation of the use of humor in reports on animal escapes from slaughterhouses. The studies employ a range of corpus analysis techniques to show how ecological degradation and crisis have become normalized, and even trivialized, in popular discourse but also spaces where positive discourse practices are present. By applying tools from corpus linguistics to a diverse range of environmental discourses, this book makes a significant contribution to advancing the field of ecolinguistics.




Corpus Linguistics in Literary Analysis


Book Description

Corpus Linguistics and The Study of Literature provides a theoretical introduction to corpus stylistics and also demonstrates its application by presenting corpus stylistic analyses of literary texts and corpora. The first part of the book addresses theoretical issues such as the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in corpus linguistic analyses, criteria for the evaluation of results from corpus linguistic analyses and also discusses units of meaning in language. The second part of the book takes this theory and applies it to Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen and to two corpora consisting of: Austen's six novels; and texts that are contemporary with Austen. The analyses demonstrate the impact of various features of text on literary meanings and how corpus tools can extract new critical angles. This book will be a key read for upper level undergraduates and postgraduates working in corpus linguistics and in stylistics on linguistics and language studies courses. The editorial board includes: Paul Baker (Lancaster), Frantisek Cermak (Prague), Susan Conrad (Portland), Geoffrey Leech (Lancaster), Dominique Maingueneau (Paris XII), Christian Mair (Freiburg), Alan Partington (Bologna), Elena Tognini-Bonelli (Siena and TWC), Ruth Wodak (Lancaster), and Feng Zhiwei (Beijing). The Corpus and Discourse series consists of two strands. The first, Research in Corpus and Discourse , features innovative contributions to various aspects of corpus linguistics and a wide range of applications, from language technology via the teaching of a second language to a history of mentalities. The second strand, Studies in Corpus and Discourse , is comprised of key texts bridging the gap between social studies and linguistics. Although equally academically rigorous, this strand will be aimed at a wider audience of academics and postgraduate students working in both disciplines.




Ecolinguistics


Book Description

The increasingly rapid destruction of the ecological systems that support life is calling into question some of the fundamental stories that we live by: stories of unlimited economic growth, of consumerism, progress, individualism, success, and the human domination of nature. Ecolinguistics shows how linguistic analysis can help reveal the stories we live by, open them up to question, and contribute to the search for new stories. Bringing together the latest ecolinguistic studies with new theoretical insights and practical analyses, this book charts a new course for ecolinguistics as an engaged form of critical enquiry. Featuring: A framework for understanding the theory of ecolinguistics and applying it practically in real life; Exploration of diverse topics from consumerism in lifestyle magazines to Japanese nature haiku; A comprehensive glossary giving concise descriptions of the linguistic terms used in the book; Discourse analysis of a wide range of texts including newspapers, magazines, advertisements, films, nonfiction books, and visual images. This is essential reading for undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers working in the areas of Discourse Analysis and Language and Ecology.




Multimodality and Active Listenership


Book Description

Current corpora are invaluable resources for generating accurate and objective analyses of patterns of language use. However, spoken corpora are effectively mono-modal, presenting data in the same physical medium – text. The reality of a discourse situation is lost in its representation as text. Using multimodal data sets when conducting corpus-based pragmatic analyses is one solution. This book looks at multimodal corpora in some depth, using backchanneling as the conversational feature to be analysed. It provides a bottom-up investigation of the issues and challenges faced at every stage of multimodal corpus construction and analysis, as well as providing an in-depth linguistic analysis of a cross section of multimodal corpus data. The collaborative and co-operative nature of backchannels is highlighted in this book and an adapted pragmatic-functional linguistic coding matrix for the characterisation of backchanneling phenomena is presented. Dawn Knight also looks at possible directions in the construction and use of multimodal corpus linguistics.




New Trends in Corpora and Language Learning


Book Description

This book provides an up-to-date snapshot of recent research and developments in the use of corpora for language learning and teaching. It is divided into three parts. Part I focusses on innovative uses of corpora by language teachers and learners. These cover the world's first corpus-based TV program for the teaching of English conversation, as well as corpus-based approaches to the teaching of EAP, cultural studies and translation. Part II focuses on new corpus-based tools for LSP learning. Part III illustrates research findings from corpora consisting of language learner data and discusses their implications for language teaching and learning. It will appeal to scholars in both language teaching and learning and corpus and computational linguistics.




Working with Spanish Corpora


Book Description

The main focus of this book is the investigation of linguistic variation in Spanish, considering spoken and written, specialised and non-specialised registers from a corpus linguistics approach and employing computational updated tools. The ten chapters represent a range of research on Spanish using a number of different corpora drawn from, amongst others, research articles, student writing, formal conversation and technical reports. A variety of methodologies are brought to bear upon these corpora including multi-dimensional and multi-register analysis, latent semantics and lexical bundles. This in-depth analysis of using Spanish corpora will be of interest to researchers in corpus linguistics or Spanish language.




Academic Writing


Book Description

Contemporary research into written academic discourse has become increasingly polarised between two approaches: corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. This volume presents a selection of recent work by experts in academic written discourse, and illustrates how corpus linguistics and discourse analysis can work as complementary approaches. The overall introduction sets the volume against the backdrop of current work in English for Academic Purposes, and introductions to the each section draw out connections between the chapters and put them into context. The contributors are experts in the field and they cover both novice and expert examples of EAP. The book ends with an afterword that provides an agenda-setting closing perspective on the future of EAP research. It will appeal to reserachers and postgrduates in applied linguistics, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and EAP.




Corpus, Discourse and Mental Health


Book Description

Situated at the interface of corpus linguistics and health communication, Corpus, Discourse and Mental Health provides insights into the linguistic practices of members of three online support communities as they describe their experiences of living with and managing different mental health problems, including anorexia nervosa, depression and diabulimia. In examining contemporary health communication data, the book combines quantitative corpus linguistic methods with qualitative discourse analysis that draws upon recent theoretical insights from critical health sociology. Using this mixed-methods approach, the analysis identifies patterns and consistencies in the language used by people experiencing psychological distress and their role in realising varying representations of mental illness, diagnosis and treatment. Far from being neutral accounts of suffering and treating illness, corpus analysis illustrates that these interactions are suffused with moral and ideological tensions sufferers seek to collectively negotiate responsibility for the onset and treatment of recalcitrant mental health problems. Integrating corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis and health sociology, this book showcases the capacity of linguistic analysis for understanding mental health discourse as well as critically exploring the potential of corpus linguistics to offer an evidence-based approach to health communication research.




Idioms and Collocations


Book Description

This book demonstrates how corpus-based research can advance the understanding of linguistic phenomena in a given language. By presenting a detailed analysis of collocations and idioms in a digital corpus of English and German, the contributors to this volume show how the use of collocations and idioms has changed over time, and suggests possible triggers for this change. The book not only examines what these collocations and idioms are, but also what their purpose is within languages. Idioms and Collocations is divided into three sections. The first section discusses the construction, composition and annotation of the corpus. Chapters in the second section describe the methods for querying the corpus, the generation and maintenance of the example subcorpora, and the linguistic-lexicographic analyses of the target idioms. Finally, the third section presents the results of specific investigations into the syntactic, semantic, and historical properties of collocations. This book presents original work in corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, theoretical linguistics and lexicography. It will be useful for researchers in academic and industrial settings, and lexicographers.




Ecological Communication and Ecoliteracy


Book Description

This open access volume is a call for ecological awareness and action through communication. It offers perspectives on how we, as humans, posit ourselves in relation to, and as part of, the environment in both verbal and non-verbal discourse. The contributions investigate a variety of situated communicative practices and how they instantiate and potentially influence our actions. Through the frameworks of ecolinguistics, multimodal studies and ecoliteracy, the book discusses how the environmental crisis is communicated as an urgent global and local issue in a variety of media, texts and events. The contributions present a wide range of case studies (including news articles, institutional websites, artwork installations, promotional texts, signposting, social campaigns and other), and they explore how communicative actions can help meet the challenges of ecologically-oriented change. The focus is on the impact that linguistic and multimodal communication can have on acting in, with and towards the environment seen as living ecosystems, or 'lifescapes'. The chapters offer a reflection on the way we experience, endorse, reframe and resist value systems in ecological communication, and propose alternative and healthier perspectives to respect and preserve the common and nurturing lifescapes through awareness and action. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.