Cover not available
Article published In:
Corpus studies of language through time: Special issue of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 27:4 (2022)
Edited by Tony McEnery, Gavin Brookes and Isobelle Clarke
[International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 27:4] 2022
► pp. 399–427

Keywords through time

Tracking changes in press discourses of Islam

ORCID logo | Lancaster University
ORCID logo | Lancaster University
ORCID logo | Lancaster University | Xi'an Jiaotong University
This paper applies a new approach to the identification of discourses, based on Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), to the study of discourse variation over time. The MCA approach to keywords deals with a major issue with the use of keywords to identify discourses: the allocation of individual keywords to multiple discourses. Yet, as this paper demonstrates, the approach also allows us to observe variation in the prevalence of discourses over time. The MCA approach to keywords allows the allocation of individual texts to multiple discourses based on patterns of keyword co-occurrence. Metadata in the corpus data analysed (here, UK newspaper articles about Islam) can then be used to map those discourses over time, resulting in a clear view of how the discourses vary relative to one another as time progresses. The paper argues that the drivers for these fluctuations are language external; the real-world events reported on in the newspapers.
Keywords: keyword analysis, Multiple Correspondence Analysis, newspaper discourse, Islam, corpus-assisted discourse studies
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Islam in the press: Change over time
  • 3.Keywords and time
  • 4.Data and approach
    • 4.1The corpus
    • 4.2The MCA approach to keywords
    • 4.3Using keyword co-occurrence to explore changing discourse through time
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Dimension 2: War, terrorism, and conflict vs. everyday life
    • 5.2Dimension 3: Foreign affairs vs. domestic affairs
    • 5.3Dimension 4: Western political conflict vs. overseas conflict
    • 5.4Dimension 5: UK vs. US policy
    • 5.5Dimension 6: Globalisation vs. tribalism
    • 5.6Dimension 7: Corruption and human rights vs. the aftermath of terror attacks
    • 5.7Dimension 8: The rise of the far-right vs. rhe radicalisation of Muslims
    • 5.8Dimension 9: Political processes related to elections vs. security threats
    • 5.9Broad trends influencing multiple dimensions
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 29 August 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22011.cla
References (23)
References
Baker, P. (2004). Querying keywords: Questions of difference, frequency, and sense in keywords analysis. Journal of English Linguistics, 32 (4), 346–359. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, P., Brookes, G., Atanasova, D., & Flint, S. (2020). Changing frames of obesity in the UK press 2008–2017. Social Science and Medicine, 264 1: 113403. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., & McEnery, T. (2013). Discourse Analysis and Media Attitudes: The Representation of Islam in the British Press. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, P., & McEnery, T. (2019). The value of revisiting and extending previous studies: The case of Islam in the UK press. In R. Scholz (Ed.), Quantifying Approaches to Discourse for Social Scientists (pp. 215–249). Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Benzécri, J. P. (1979). Sur le calcul des taux d’inertie dans l’analyse d’un questionnaire [On the calculation of rates of inertia in the analysis of a questionnaire]. Cahiers de l’Analyse des Données, 4 (3) 377–378.Google Scholar
Brookes, G., & Baker, P. (2021). Obesity in the News: Language and Representation in the Press. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Burr, V. (2015). Social Constructionism (3rd edition). Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clarke, I. (2019). Functional linguistic variation in Twitter trolling. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, 26 (1), 57–84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clarke, I., McEnery, T., & Brookes, G. (2021). Multiple Correspondence Analysis, newspaper discourse and subregister: A case study of discourses of Islam in the British Press. Register Studies, 3 (1), 144–171. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dunning, T. (1993). Accurate methods for the statistics of surprise and coincidence. Computational Linguistics, 19 (1), 61–74.Google Scholar
Egbert, J. & Biber, D. (2019). Incorporating text dispersion into keyword analyses. Corpora, 14 (1), 77–104. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fairclough, N. (2000). New Labour, New Language? Routledge.Google Scholar
Gabrielatos, C. (2018). Keyness analysis: Nature, metrics and techniques. In C. Taylor & A. Marchi (Eds.), Corpus Approaches to Discourse: A Critical Review (pp. 225–258). Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gabrielatos, C., McEnery, T., Diggle, P., & Baker, P. (2012). The peaks and troughs of corpus-based contextual analysis. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 17 (2), 151–175. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Husson, F., Josse, J., Le, S., & Mazet, J. (2020). FactoMineR: Multivariate Exploratory Data Analysis and Data Mining (Version 2.4). [URL]
Marchi, A. (2018). Dividing up the data: Epistemological, methodological and practical impact of diachronic segmentation. In C. Taylor & A. Marchi (Eds.), Corpus Approaches to Discourse: A Critical Review (pp. 174–196). Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McEnery, T. (2005). Bad Language, Purity and Power from 1586 to the Present. Routledge.Google Scholar
Partington, A. (2010). Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS) on UK newspapers: An overview of the project. Corpora, 5 (2), 83–108. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Partington, A., Duguid, A., & Taylor, C. (2013). Patterns and Meanings in Discourse: Theory and Practice in Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies (CADS). John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
R Core Team. (2020). R: A language and environment for statistical computing (Version 4.0.3) [Computer software]. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. [URL]
Scott, M. (1996). Wordsmith Tools (Version 1.0) [Computer software]. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wall, L., Christiansen, T., & Orwant, J. (2000). Programming Perl. O’Reilly Media.Google Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Brookes, Gavin, Tony McEnery & Isobelle Clarke
2023. The Representation of Islamism in the UK Press. In Media Language on Islam and Muslims, ► pp. 57 ff. DOI logo
Gillings, Mathew, Gerlinde Mautner & Paul Baker
2023. Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies, DOI logo
Poole, Robert & Qudus Ayinde Adebayo
2023. Lexical change and stability in 100 years of English in US newspapers. Applied Corpus Linguistics 3:3 ► pp. 100073 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.