Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS) on UK Newspapers: an overview of the project
Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS) on UK Newspapers: an overview of the project
This overview aims to give an idea of what both corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) and MD-CADS involve, to provide some information about the newspaper corpora employed here, and to outline methodologies commonly followed in this area, including those exploited by the other contributors to this volume. Two sets of practical analyses are also presented. The first is inductive and bottom-up, derived from a close analysis of the comparative keywords generated by comparing the lists of items from the two parallel corpora from different time periods; the aim is to uncover changes over time both in language and in what social, political and cultural issues were considered worthy of attention. The second is more intuitive and hypothesis-driven; the hypothesis is that an examination of a certain term, namely moral panic, can shed some light on which issues writers thought did not merit all the attention they were receiving. I will conclude with brief sketches of the other papers in this issue, and reflections on the relevance of MD-CADS in both language research and teaching.
Keywords: corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, corpus-assisted discourse studies, keywords, language change, moral panics, newspaper discourse
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