CDA III: Use of corpora

2.6.1 Illuminating ‘big D’ Discourse

The advant ages of using big data have been exploited in CDA for the last 10–15 years (see, for example, Baker, et al. (2008); Hidalgo Tenorio (2009);

Mautner (2016); O’Halloran (2009). Large collec tions of texts from the same language – corpora – can provide relat ively conveni ent insight into ‘big D’

Discourse. By way of illus tra tion, consider Figure 2.3 originally from O’Halloran (2009). This consists of concord ance lines which are gener ated using corpus linguistic soft ware. Concordance lines allow research ers to compare how a word or expres sion is used across the differ ent texts of a corpus (the singu lar of ‘corpora’). Figure 2.3 consists of concord ance lines which feature the expres sions, ‘Eastern Europe’, ‘East European(s)’, ‘Eastern European(s)’ or ‘the East’ (where this referred to Eastern Europe). I searched for these expres sions in a corpus of all news texts published by the popular UK tabloid news pa per, The Sun, in six consec ut ive weeks from 20 March to 30 April 2004. The 37 concord ance lines in Figure 2.3 show the complete results of the search.

The reason I chose this six- week period is, on 1 May 2004, ten new coun-tries joined the European Union. Eight of these coun coun-tries are from Eastern Europe – Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. The European Union allows free move ment of its citizens across member states. So, citizens from these coun tries, from 1 May 2004, were eligible to live and work in the UK. Figure 2.3 thus high lights how The Sun recur rently treated the expres sions mentioned shortly before this key date. As the concord ance lines show, ‘East(ern) Europe(an(s))’ occurs in negat ive co- texts, e.g. ‘arres ted’, ‘crim inal scam’, ‘false pass port’, ‘suspec ted visa scam’, ‘under qual i fied doctors and nurses’, ‘vice girls’. Since ‘East(ern) Europe(an(s))’ is also recur rently asso ci ated with large numbers, the implic a-tion for regular readers of The Sun during this 6 week period is that large numbers of undesir ables would shortly be arriv ing. A key value of the concord ance lines is that they provide a conveni ent quant it at ive window on

‘big D’ Discourse. They show with preci sion how repeatedly biased The Sun was in its treat ment of prospect ive Eastern European immig ra tion shortly before 1 May 2004.

Figure 2.3 Thirty- seven concord ance lines for ‘east(ern) Europe(an(s))’ from The Sun’s news texts published six weeks before 1 May 2004.

March 12 : Ms Hughes reveals 25 , 000 east Europeans were let into Britain in a

Political Correspondent NEARLY 700 , 000 eastern Europeans arrived in Britain last rity stay under a month . Visitors from eastern Europe rose 23 per cent trom

masters . The men and warnen - all from eastern Europe - were arrested in dawn underqualified doctors and nurses fram Eastern Europe when their count ries join ber-stamping of bogus applications from eastern European count ries , but instead of

2.6.2 Addressing criti cisms of CDA

CDA has not escaped criti cism (e.g. Blommaert, 2005; Martin, 2004;

Stubbs, 1997; Widdowson, 2004). Probably its major critic has been Henry Widdowson. Two major criti cisms in Widdowson (2004) are as follows.

CDA can be:

• arbit rary: the analyst selects elements of a text which interests them or they find polit ic ally objec tion able. But another crit ical discourse analyst may home in on differ ent aspects of the text, perhaps on the basis of differ ent polit ical objec tions.

• circu lar: polit ical judge ments are made about the text at the outset and then rati fied by subsequent analysis instead of being derived from the analysis.

To be as convin cing as possible, it is in the interests of the crit ical discourse analyst to show rigor ously how they have separ ated out how their polit ical atti tudes might be direct ing what they notice as distor tion/obfus ca tion from distor tion/obfus ca tion which is in a text regard less of their polit ical atti-tudes. Indeed, it makes good prac tical sense for a crit ical discourse analyst to go to the trouble to reduce arbit rar i ness and circu lar ity as far as possible.

Otherwise, they are vulner able to the rather easy rebuke: ‘well, you would say that, you’re left- wing, liberal etc’. It is worth saying, also, that avoid ing arbit rar i ness and circu lar ity is hardly some thing that only crit ical discourse analysts should care about. Any convin cing text analysis should imple ment proced ures to check these things.

Use of corpora in CDA has helped to improve meth od o lo gical rigour by address ing charges of arbit rar i ness and circu lar ity and, in turn, to mitig ate attack from critics. Let me illus trate by return ing to O’Halloran (2009). In this paper I examined a partic u lar Sun text, published on 1 May 2004, which announced the acces sion of ten coun tries to the European Union. As mentioned, I knew from corpus analysis that the categor ies of ‘East(ern) Europe(an(s))’ were negat ively eval u ated in many texts published by The Sun in the six weeks leading up to 1 May 2004. Interestingly, ‘Eastern European’ was employed in the 1 May text in a neutral way. But because I had know ledge of relev ant ‘big D’ Discourse here, I could make the follow ing

‘inter pret a tion stage’ analysis (Figure 2.2) with a certain robust ness: even though ‘Eastern European’ was neutral in the text, for a regular and compli ant reader of The Sun this expres sion poten tially triggered, in their

‘little d’ discourse activ a tion from the 1 May 2004 text, a ‘big D’ Discourse around immig ra tion which is biased against Eastern Europeans. Crucially, going to the corpus released me from inter pret at ive arbit rar i ness and circu-lar ity. I did not locate in the text things that I objec ted to or was intrigued by that day. Instead, I was direc ted to some thing in the text by empir ical

evid ence outside the text. This meant I was able to focus in a non- arbit rary manner on how ‘Eastern European’ was used in this text, using quant it at ive results from the corpus analysis to provide a non- circu lar qual it at ive inter pret a tion.

2.6.3 ‘Data- driven CDA’ and pedago gical utility

When corpora have been used in CDA, the approach is often referred to as

‘corpus- based CDA’ (e.g. de Beaugrande, 2001). Using ‘corpus- based’ as a pre- modi fier is a fairly stand ard way of refer ring to foci and discip lines which employ corpus linguistic method (‘corpus- based soci o lin guist ics’;

‘corpus- based trans la tion’, etc.). Saying a research method is ‘corpus- based’

(‘corpus- assisted’ or ‘corpus- informed’ are altern at ives) does not mean you must only use corpus linguist ics. Indeed, corpus- based CDA has used quant-it at ive analysis to supple ment qual quant-it at ive text descrip tion such as wquant-ith SFG (e.g. Coffin and O’Halloran, 2006). But, as I just showed, crit ical text analysis which both relies on and is direc ted by the results of corpus mining can be performed without detailed qual it at ive meta lin guistic descrip tion.

What might instead be called corpus- driven CDA is entirely possible.¹⁶ Indeed, I think that a data- driven approach has the poten tial to open up parti cip a tion in CDA to non- linguists and be used in other discip lines in the human it ies and social sciences. This is because a data- driven CDA enables a less arbit rary and circu lar inter pret a tion of a text without the labour- intens ive ness of compre hens ive text descrip tion. Learning a metalan guage requires consid er able time and effort which students on non- linguistic degree programmes are under stand ably much less likely to want to invest.

In contrast, corpus linguistic tools can be learned straight for wardly (see Chapter 4). You don’t need to be a linguist to exploit them. Corpus linguist ics is concept- light too relat ive to other approaches in linguist ics.

Finally, just so the reader is clear, I am not dimin ish ing the value of metalan-guage, such as for explain ing in detail how d/Discourse can do ideo lo gical work. I am saying though that detailed meta lin guistic text descrip tion in CDA is not always neces sary – it depends on your goals.

2.6.4 Other points

Concordance analysis of media texts usefully provides a ‘window’ on ‘big D’ Discourse – but the window may not always provide the most panor amic view, espe cially for pervas ive ‘big D’ Discourse such as types of reli gious discourse. After all, such ‘big D’ Discourse will circu late not only in newspaper texts (which are easy to aggregate into a corpus), but in conver-sa tions in homes and places of worship, where the data is harder to access.

One other thing to bear in mind is that a ‘big D’ Discourse may be plural and inter sect ing. For example, the anti-Eastern European Discourse in The

Sun could also be linked to a Discourse of British national iden tity. In other words, when one is being anti-Eastern European in the UK, one might be affirm ing one’s national iden tity also.

Another point. Henry Widdowson’s criti cisms of CDA, in partic u lar, have influ enced my think ing about CDA. While he didn’t pull his punches, I read him as trying to get CDA to raise its game rather than decim ate it.

Besides, you can’t decim ate CDA. It’s not, or shouldn’t be, a polit ical move-ment but an intel lec tual space for the study and reflec tion of how language use can contribute to the sustain ing of social and economic inequal ity.

Figures will come and go, the methods, concepts and theor ies may change, the name may change, but the focus will remain so long as there are schol ars inter ested in the rela tion ship between language, power and ideo logy. This is how I see CDA at least. Reflecting Christopher Hitchens’ dictum that ‘there can be no progress without head- on confront a tion’ (Hitchens, 2004:173), and given the quality of Widdowson’s contest a tion, it was clear these were criti cisms worth think ing about.