Paul Baker

"The growing availability of large collections of language texts has expanded our horizons for language analysis, enabling the swift analysis of millions of words of data, aided by computational methods. This edited collection contains examples of such contemporary research which uses corpus linguistics to carry out discourse analysis. The book takes an inclusive view of the meaning of discourse, covering different text-types or modes of language, including discourse as both social practice and as ideology or representation. Authors examine a range of spoken, written, multimodal and electronic corpora covering themes which include health, academic writing, social class, ethnicity, gender, television narrative, news, Early Modern English and political speech. The chapters showcase the variety of qualitative and quantitative tools and methods that this new generation of discourse analysts are combining together, offering a set of compelling models for future corpus-based research in discourse"--

"Is the British press prejudiced against Muslims? In what ways can prejudice be explicit or subtle? This book uses a detailed analysis of over 140 million words of newspaper articles on Muslims and Islam, combining corpus linguistics and discourse analysis methods to produce an objective picture of media attitudes. The authors analyse representations around frequently cited topics such as Muslim women who wear the veil and 'hate preachers'. The analysis is self-reflexive and multidisciplinary, incorporating research on journalistic practices, readership patterns and attitude surveys to answer questions which include: what do journalists mean when they use phrases like 'devout Muslim' and how did the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks affect press reporting? This is a stimulating and unique book for those working in fields of discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, while clear explanations of linguistic terminology make it valuable to those in the fields of politics, media studies, journalism and Islamic studies."--Publisher's website.

"Is British English becoming more like American English? If so, why, and in what ways? This book compares examples of American and British language data from the 1930s, 1960s, 1990s and 2000s, to track the most important ways that both varieties are changing over time, and compares the extent to which they are following similar paths using a mixture of computer and human analysis. The analysis is carried out across several levels, including spelling differences (e.g. colour vs color), vocabulary (truck vs lorry), and a range of morphological, grammatical, semantic and pragmatic features. Baker explores the changing aspects of American and British society which help to explain the findings"--

Paul Baker examines approaches to carrying out discourse analysis using techniques that are grounded in corpus linguistics. He looks a number of methodologies including collocations, keyness, concordances and dispersion plots and illustrates them with real-life examples.

How do we learn what it means to be a man? And how do we learn to question what it means to be a man? This collection comprises a set of original interdisciplinary chapters on the linguistic and cultural representations of queer masculinities in a range of new and older media: television, film, online forums, news reporting, advertising and fiction. This work examines new and emerging forms of gender hybridisation in relation to complex socialisation and immigration contexts including the role of EU institutions in ascertaining asylum seekers' sexual orientation, and the European laws on gender policy. The book employs numerous analytical approaches including critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, multimodal analysis, literary criticism and anthropological and social research. The authors show how such texts can disrupt, question or complicate traditional notions of what it means to be a man, queering the idea that men possess fixed identities or desires, instead arguing that masculinity is constantly changing and negotiated through the cultural and political overlapping contexts in which it is regularly produced.

"The Language of Patient Feedback examines the language that patients use to represent and evaluate their experiences of the National Health Service in England, as well as the language that providers use to respond to their comments, to provide a unique insight into a diverse range of issues related to health care. Through the comprehensive and detailed interrogation of 29 million words of online patient feedback on the NHS in England, as well as 11 million words of responses to the feedback from NHS providers, this book: - uses a combination of computer-assisted and human analysis (Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis) to examine the extent to which characteristics like age and gender result in different types of evaluation; - investigates why nurses, doctors, dentists and receptionists are associated with very distinct types of feedback; - demonstrates the ways that NHS staff respond to comments and what this reveals about underlying institutional ideologies and practices; - concludes with suggestions for key recommendations that the NHS could act upon to improve the overall level of care it provides, as well as reflecting on what patient evaluation can actually tell us. The Language of Patient Feedback is key reading for anyone undertaking research within corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and health communication"--

"Corpus linguistics uses specialist software to identify linguistic patterns in large computerised collections of text - patterns which then must be interpreted and explained by human researchers. This book critically explores how corpus linguistics techniques can help analysis of language and gender by conducting a number of case studies on topics which include: directives in spoken conversations, changes in sexist and non-sexist language use over time, personal adverts, press representation of gay men, and the ways that boys and girls are constructed through language. The book thus covers both gendered usage (e.g. how do males and females use language differently, or not, from each other), and gendered representations (e.g. in what ways are males and females written or spoken about). Additionally, the book shows ways that readers can either explore their own hypotheses, or approach the corpus from a "nai;ve" position, letting the data drive their analysis from the outset. The book covers a range of techniques and measures including frequencies, keywords, collocations, dispersion, word sketches, downsizing and triangulation, all in an accessible style"--