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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 29:4 (2019) ► pp.545–570

Collocation analysis of news discourse and its ideological implications

ORCID logo | National Chengchi University

This study investigates the use of an ethnic term in news discourse from linguistic, discursive, and social-cultural aspects. A more rigorous computational procedure than hitherto used is employed to measure the collocational strength of collocates in news corpora. The results indicate diversified distributions of the collocates regarding their frequency, distance, and semantic connections. The findings enhance the meaning specificity of the term by revealing the characterized reference of this ethnic group, the trends in the choice of news topics, and the ideological representation of this ethnic group in a wider social-cultural context. The findings deepen an understanding of news discourse as the representations of the minority ethnicity in the news media are analyzed through three layers – the linguistic, the discursive, and the social-cultural context. A more precise method of analyzing news texts uncovers ideological effects brought about by media, in turn implying different construal of newsworthiness in news discourse.

Keywords: collocation strength, Hakka ethnic groups, news discourse, ideological representation, discursive
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Collocation analysis
  • 3.The data and methods
    • 3.1Materials
    • 3.2Procedure
      • Searching for the target node in the news corpora
      • Segmenting the text
      • Computing the strength of a collocation
      • Coding of verb collocates
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion and implications
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 21 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.17028.lai
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