CASS MA students' corpus research mini-conference
Abi Hawtin, Róisín Knight & Gillian Smith
CASS, Lancaster University
Three MA students from the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University will each give a short presentation about their current research in corpus linguistics.
Abi's abstract:
Construction of male and female identities by a misogynistic murderer: a corpus-based discourse analysis of Elliot Rodger's manifesto
On 23rd May 2014, Elliot Rodger killed 6 people and injured 13 others in California. He left behind an extreme and violently misogynistic 'manifesto' which outlined his views on women, and his plan to take revenge. I use corpus methods (collocation analysis) to analyse the ways in which Rodger constructs the identities of males and females in his manifesto in order to see if the way he views men and women represents a new, and more dangerous, type of misogyny than has previously been studied in detail.
Corpus methods have been used to analyse the representations of gender in language, with many studies finding that men are often represented in positions of power over women (Caldas-Coulthard and Moon, 2010; Pearce, 2008). However, there has been little corpus-based research into explicitly misogynistic texts. This corpus-based study of Rodger's manifesto addresses that gap in the research to date.
By conducting a collocation analysis for both words and semantic tags I found that the dominant way in which Rodger represented females was as extremely powerful and men as oppressed. This can be seen in the collocation of 'experience' with both males and females, where Rodger repeatedly talks about women as controlling which men get to have sexual experiences. It can also be seen in the semantic collocates 'undeserving' and 'able/intelligent', which show Rodger representing women as deeming him 'undeserving' and other men as 'able' to have experiences which he cannot. This is in contrast to the type of sexism found in previous research and represents what is often referred to as a 'new misogyny'. I suggest that this is the key difference between Rodger's (ultimately murderous) views and sexist views rooted in traditional patriarchy.
Róisín's abstract:
Tweet all about it: Public views on the UN's HeForShe campaign for gender equality
On 20th September 2014, Emma Watson gave a speech through which she formally launched the UN Women's HeForShe campaign. She reached out to men and asked them to be "advocates for gender equality"- to be the "he" for "she" (UN Women, 2014). In light of this speech, the purpose of this study is to investigate the public reaction to the campaign expressed on the social media website Twitter. A new corpus of 190,419 tweets, all containing the hashtag #HeForShe, was created. Through comparison to a reference corpus of a random collection of tweets, keywords were identified and grouped in order to identify discourses. This talk will detail the three main discourses found: the discourse of the HeForShe fight; the discourse of gender and the discourse of Emma Watson.
UN Women (2014). Emma Watson: Gender equality is your issue too. Retrieved from http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2014/9/emma-watson-gender-equality-is-your-issue-too, Accessed 16th December 2014.
Gillian's abstract:
Negativity, medicalization and awareness: a corpus-based discourse analysis of representations of mental illness in the British press (2011-2014)
A topic of recent interest has been the stigmatisation of mental illness. The British press have been accused of perpetuating this, providing the public with negative representations of mental illness based on misguided stereotypes (Bilić and Georgaca, 2007; Nawková et al., 2001; Stuart, 2003; Thornton and Wahl, 1996; Coverdale et al., 2002). Studies in this area, however, are often small-scale and psychiatrically-based, failing to address the linguistic manifestations of discourses. This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of representations of mental illness in the British press between 2011 and 2014, aiming to broaden the scope of earlier works, using a larger, more representative sample and revealing the three dominant media mental illness discourses. Whilst press representations tend to focus on negative and medicalized portrayals, they also discuss the need for wider understanding of mental illness and prejudiced attitudes, which suggests that, whilst the press portray mental illness in discriminatory ways, they attempt to change public opinion.