Search

Press representations of autism and autistic people both reflect and help shape public attitudes towards autism and neurodiversity and may establish critical barriers to social integration for autistic individuals. This study examined such representations in UK newspapers in the period 2011–2020 using a corpus-based approach. It also considered how press representations changed over time and differed with regard to reporting style (tabloids vs broadsheets) and political orientation (left- vs right-leaning). We created the Autism UK Press Corpus, which included all documents (~24K) referring to autism in 10 national newspapers. We used document counts (normalised by newspaper size) to assess the 'newsworthiness' of autism. We also employed a synergy of corpus-based and critical-discourse-analysis methodologies to study lexicogrammatical patterns and uncover explicit and implicit attitudes towards autism. Our results showed that the coverage of autism increased slightly over time, especially in broadsheets and left-leaning newspapers. Newspapers emphasised adversities associated with autism, often used negative language, and tended to focus on boys. These representations shifted gradually towards more difference-based descriptions and included more diverse age/gender groups, especially in broadsheets and left-leaning newspapers. We discuss the broad implications of these findings for the autism community and those interested in a more inclusive society. Any thriving society must recognise, accept and celebrate all of its diverse talent. But how accepting is British society towards autism and autistic people? This research addressed this question through the lens of the press since the press both reflects and helps shape public attitudes towards various social categories. We used specialised 'corpus-based' methods to carry out a large-scale study, which examined all articles referring to autism or autistic people in 10 national British newspapers in the period 2011–2020. We first investigated how often newspapers referred to autism. We found that the coverage of autism increased slightly over the years, suggesting that autism was becoming an increasingly newsworthy topic. Furthermore, the rise in autism coverage differed considerably between individual newspapers: it was more pronounced in the broadsheets than tabloids, and in left-leaning than right-leaning newspapers. But what was the focus of these articles? We found that newspapers emphasised the adversities associated with autism and portrayed autism with a lot of negative language. Newspapers also tended to focus on autistic children, and particularly on boys. There were some signs of change in more recent years, with some newspapers now representing autism as a difference and, in addition, referring to more diverse groups of autistic people. However, these changes tended to be confined to broadsheets and left-leaning newspapers. Our findings suggest that representations of autism in the contemporary British press are skewed towards stereotypically negative views, which may well hinder the acceptance of autism and the fostering of a more inclusive society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has often been claimed that conditionals have a special relation to modality. This study tests this claim empirically by examining the frequency of modal marking in a number of conditional and non-conditional structures using a corpus-based approach. It then seeks to provide explanations for the emerging frequency patterns in light of the tenets of two linguistic theories: Lexical Grammar and Construction Grammar. This juxtaposition was motivated by the substantial overlap in their tenets: both take into account meaning (semantic and pragmatic), as well as lexical and grammatical factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses methods from corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis to examine patterns of representation around the word Muslim in a 143 million word corpus of British newspaper articles published between 1998 and 2009. Using the analysis tool Sketch Engine, an analysis of noun collocates of Muslim found that the following categories (in order of frequency) were referenced: ethnic/national identity, characterizing/differentiating attributes, conflict, culture, religion, and group/organizations. The ‘conflict’ category was found to be particularly lexically rich, containing many word types. It was also implicitly indexed in the other categories. Following this, an analysis of the two most frequent collocate pairs: Muslim world and Muslim community showed that they were used to collectivize Muslims, both emphasizing their sameness to each other and their difference to ‘The West’. Muslims were also represented as easily offended, alienated, and in conflict with non-Muslims. The analysis additionally considered legitimation strategies that enabled editors to print more controversial representations, and concludes with a discussion of researcher bias and an extended notion of audience through online social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses upon two issues. Firstly, the question of identifying diachronic trends, and more importantly significant outliers, in corpora which permit an investigation of a feature at many sampling points over time. Secondly, we consider how best to combine more qualitatively oriented approaches to corpus data with the type of trends that can be observed in a corpus using quantitative techniques. The work uses a recently completed ESRC-funded project as a case study, the representation of Islam in the UK press, in order to demonstrate the potential of the approach taken to establishing significant peaks in diachronic frequency development, and the fruitful interface that may be created between qualitative and quantitative techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on work carried out as part of the project Analysis of Spoken London English Using Corpus Tools, namely, an analysis of the use of indefinite article forms in spoken London English in a corpus of transcribed interviews, combining methodologies from sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics.The authors find a relatively high frequency of a before words beginning with a vowel, where Standard English will have an. Social factors, in particular speakers’ age, ethnicity, and place of residence, are more important than linguistic factors affecting the use of a before vowels. The authors argue that the indefinite article a before vowels forms part of Multicultural London English, along with other phonological and grammatical features that have previously been documented. The indefinite article a before vowels seems to have undergone a process of reallocation in which its status has been realigned, possibly because of an increase in social acceptance of nonstandard forms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the discursive construction of refugees and asylum seekers (and to a lesser extent immigrants and migrants) in a 140-million-word corpus of UK press articles published between 1996 and 2005. Taking a corpus-based approach, the data were analyzed not only as a whole, but also with regard to synchronic variation, by carrying out concordance analyses of keywords which occurred within tabloid and broadsheet newspapers, and diachronic change, albeit mainly approached from an unusual angle, by investigating consistent collocates and frequencies of specific terms over time. The analyses point to a number of (mainly negative) categories of representation, the existence and development of nonsensical terms (e.g., illegal refugee), and media confusion and conflation of definitions of the four terms under examination. The paper concludes by critically discussing the extent to which a corpus-based methodological stance can inform critical discourse analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]