The hate that dare not speak its name?

Abstract

This paper uses corpus-based methods to explore how British Parliamentary arguments against LGBT equality have changed in response to decreasing social acceptability of discriminatory language against minority groups. A comparison of the language of opposition to the equalisation of the age of consent for anal sex (1998)(1999)(2000) is made to the oppositional language in debates to allow samesex marriage (2013). Keyword, collocation and concordance analyses were used to identify differences in overall argumentation strategies, assessing the extent to which previously explicit homophobic speech (e.g. homosexuality as unnatural) has been replaced by more indirect strategies (e.g. less use of personalised argumentation via the pronoun I). We argue that while homophobic language appears to be on the decrease in such contexts, there is a mismatch between words and acts, requiring analysts to acknowledge the presence of more subtle indications of homophobic discourse in the future.

A war or merely friction? Examining news reports on the current Sino-U.S. trade dispute in The New York Times and China Daily

“…Instead, corpus methods take as a prerequisite a sizable collection of texts, and thus stand to increase representativeness of research samples and at the same time minimize researcher subjectivity. Moreover, corpus techniques such as concordance, collocation, and keyword analysis enable researchers to work in a bottom-up fashion to extract nuanced language patterns likely to go unnoticed with mere eyeballing, and thus may provide new perspectives on data already familiar to the analyst (Baker et al, 2008;Hunston, 2002;Love & Baker, 2015). However, as the name 'corpus-assisted' suggests, fully automatic calculation and pattern extraction by corpus software need to be complemented by human interpretations of the data.…”

Opposition as victimhood in newspaper debates about same-sex marriage

“…In his own analysis of civil partnership debates, Bachmann (2011) argues that 'equality is not a keyword' in the corpus sense, but rather 'the semantic field of "equality" is highly frequent and would be a "key semantic field"' (p. 101). However, we also follow Love and Baker (2015) in adopting a combination of corpus-driven (using frequency information to identify saliency) 7 and corpus-based (examining words or patterns deemed to be of relevance) approaches. In their work on homophobic discourses in same-sex marriage debates, Love and Baker (2015) not only calculate keywords but also select words for analysis based on their perceived relevance; we mirror their assertion that this dual focus results in 'a more thorough analysis' (p. 8).…”

Discourses of (hetero)sexism in popular music

“…Within critical approaches to discourse, the use of corpus linguistic methods for the analysis of gender and sexual identity is a burgeoning area (for example Baker 2014; Baker & Levon 2016; Coffey-Glover 2015; Findlay 2017; Love & Baker 2015;Motschenbacher 2018;Taylor 2016). This can be attributed to the fact that the post-structuralist conceptualisation of gender as performative (Butler 1990(Butler , 1993 aligns well with the incremental focus of corpus linguistics; for instantiations of gender to become recognisable, they have to be reiterated, and corpus linguistics works on the basis of collecting numerous examples of an idea, which allows the researchers to see its cumulative effect.…”