Papers by Cinzia Bevitori
Artemide eBooks, 2015
This chapter makes a diachronic study of the word 'security' as used in State of Union ad... more This chapter makes a diachronic study of the word 'security' as used in State of Union addresses from 1790 to 2014, through a corpus assisted discourse analysis of meaning-making. It illustrates variations in relative frequencies over time and identifies four semantic categories of security: financial, national, international and social. Moreover it oberves the increase in the construal of hybrid categories of securit
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Routledge eBooks, 2009
The chapter makes a linguistic analysis of the discourse of the House of Commons proceedings rela... more The chapter makes a linguistic analysis of the discourse of the House of Commons proceedings relating to the Iraq war, with particular reference to speeches and interventions made by members of the government. Methodologically, it combines corpus-assisted discourse analysis (Haarman, Morley, Partington, 2003, Bayley 2004, 2005, Miller 2006) with appraisal analysis (Martin & White 2005, White 2002, 2003, Martin & Rose 2003, Martin 2000), and involves both quantitative analysis of corpus data and qualitative analysis of texts. The chapter compares and contrasts the government\u2019s positioning on war with that of Clare Short, a dissenting Labour MP who did vote with the government on March 18th but subsequently resigned her cabinet-level position as Secretary of State for International Development on 12th May 2003 in protest over the war. It first makes a analysis of the discourse of members of the British government, as they sought to justify and legitimate military action in the House of Commons in 2003, drawing on the House of Commons sub-section of the CorDis corpus, in order to investigate the extent to which their arguments corresponded with, or diverged from, notions of just war. It subsequently investigates Clare Short\u2019s positioning on the war in Iraq in 2003 as it emerges from the analysis of the same corpus, tracing her arguments chronologically from when she was a member of the government to her position after her resignation. Chouliaraki (2005) has argued that the quest for legitimacy and credibility in the justification to enter the war in Iraq was strongly motivated by the \u201chumanitarian argument\u201d; or, in other words, to liberate the Iraqi people from dictatorship. We claim that the humanitarian argument was largely absent in the discourse of the government while it was foregrounded and recontextualised in the discourse of Clare Short
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Variation in Time and Space, 2020
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Department of English and Languages (DEL), Coventry University, 2014
Although our past corpus research has been based on the proposition that \u201cA corpus [\u2026] ... more Although our past corpus research has been based on the proposition that \u201cA corpus [\u2026] is a treasury of acts of meaning which can be explored and interrogated from all illuminating angles, including in quantitative terms.\u201d (Halliday 1996: 406), it is right to stop and take stock of just what we have done and what we have failed to do and take cognizance of what may have emerged as the limits of such interrogation. Perhaps, in short, it is time to engage more seriously with the assertion of Martin (2003: 177) that \u201cIt is texts that mean, through their sentences and the complex of logogenetic contingencies among them \u2013 they do not mean as a selection from, or a sum of, or worse, an average of, the meanings within the clause.\u201d Or, one might add, within the conventional concordance line\u2019s 9-word window. There have been many recent valuable attempts to reconcile corpus data and methods with a needed concern with how texts mean within specific cultural contexts (e.g., Partington, Morley & Haarman (eds.), 2003, Bayley (ed.) 2004; Morley J. and P. Bayley (eds.) 2009; Thompson & Hunston 2006), but can we in good faith say the same about a concern with how they mean in extended co-text? Have we, in other words, given too-short-shift to the notion of logogenesis: \u201c[\u2026] the unfolding of the act of meaning itself: the instantial construction of meaning in the form of a text [\u2026] in which the potential for creating meaning is continually modified in the light of what has gone before [\u2026].\u201d (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999: 18, our emphasis). Has the \u2018woods vs. trees\u2019 conflict, which Thompson and Hunston (2006: 3-4) elegantly suggest might be somehow circumvented, truly been adequately resolved? Do we need to accept that \u2018high level\u2019 semantic analysis can only be performed manually; is the trade-off between volume and richness ever a judicious and advantageous one (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 48-49)? These and related thorny issues will be tackled by the contributers to the colloquium as follows: Donna R. Miller: Prologue Miller introduces the colloquium issues outlined above, exempifying these from her own series of \u2018ticklish\u2019 corpus-assisted, \u2018register-idiosyncratic\u2019 appraisal studies of US congressional speech (e.g. Miller & Johnson, to appear) and also engaging with what Thompson (under review) calls \u201cthe \u2018Russian Doll\u2019 dilemma\u201d, particularly problematic for quantitative appraisal analysis. Paul Bayley & Cinzia Bevitori: In search for meaning: what corpora can/cannot tell Over the last decade or so there has been an ever-growing interest in the combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis (e.g. Baker 2006) and SFL studies (Thompson and Hunston, eds, 2006). Procedures have been glossed through metaphors such as \u2018trawling\u2019 the corpus and \u2018shunting\u2019 back and forth between corpus and text. However, it still remains to be seen to what extent the use of very different approaches to the study of language can contribute to an understanding of how texts mean what they do in socially situated contexts (beyond the simple concept of \u2018aboutness\u2019). This presentation will reflect on what can be achieved through a reconciliation of corpus and discourse studies and what, perhaps, cannot, based on an ongoing study of a diachronic corpus of over 220 years of messages from US Presidents to Congress. Sabrina Fusari: The potential and drawbacks of annotation: what taggers can/ cannot do Fusari elaborates on a previous study of the institutional and newspaper discourse of the EU sovereign debt crisis (presented at 23rd ESFLCW) which was performed on an unannotated corpus. In this second step of her study, Fusari explores the potential offered by some SFL-specific annotation tools (UAM Corpus Tool and the Halliday Centre Tagger). The analysis focuses on Transitivity, with special attention paid to Relational, Mental and Behavioural processes, which the previous step of this study identified as playing a crucial role in the construction of ideology. The pros and cons of this \u201cvery expensive and time-consuming\u201d but \u201cparticularly important\u201d (Wu, 2009: 142) procedure are evaluated, with a view to showing what results SFL annotation on a specific tool can deliver in comparison with fully manual methodologies. Antonella Luporini: Grammatical metaphor in Business English and Italian \u2013 to what extent does the corpus assist the researcher? Luporini selects results from her PhD thesis, in which she uses corpus methodologies to investigate the use of grammatical metaphor (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 586-658; Thompson 2004: 219-239) in construing the 2008 global crisis in the British and the Italian specialised press. Two ad hoc, tree-tagged corpora, specifically designed for this research and composed of articles from The Financial Times and Il Sole 24 Ore…
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Edizioni Q, 2011
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The reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) was much wished for both by committed Euro... more The reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) was much wished for both by committed Europeans and by human rights advocates more generally. Ideally, the European Union (EU) would have developed a single asylum system with equal criteria applying to all Member States and full recognition of the international protection status everywhere in the Union. This would have taken care of the primary concern of the Member States, that is, the prevention of asylum seekers' secondary movements. The abandonment of the nation-specific prerogatives would also have allowed for a focus on the asylum seekers' needs. However, the proposals issued by the European Commission between 2015 and 2016 in no way suggest that a uniform asylum system is on the way. This paper examines the implications of some of these proposals for the governance of asylum and for the understanding of international protection as the guarantee of specific rights to foreign citizens in need. It further assesses t...
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The paper is a by-product of a recent, cross-disciplinary research project, aiming at exploring l... more The paper is a by-product of a recent, cross-disciplinary research project, aiming at exploring linguistic and discursive patterns broadly construing 'justice' in a highly influential institutional setting of political discourse, i.e. the British House of Commons, as regards one of the most complex issues facing today's society: im/migration. Parliamentary language may, in fact, provide a privileged terrain for analysing the relationship between social practices and discourse, especially as regards the discussion of key, highly contested issues such as immigration. Moving from the assumption that justice' is a "human construction" (Walzer 1986; Eriksen 2016) embedded in specific systems of value and beliefs, and that immigration is "indeed a matter of justice" (Miller 2013: 5), the research investigates select patterns of 'orientational meanings' (Lemke 1992; Miller 1999), or evaluative and intersubjective stance (Martin and White 2005; Th...
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Text & Talk, 2022
Building on our previous work investigating discourses of climate-induced mobility in the UK and ... more Building on our previous work investigating discourses of climate-induced mobility in the UK and US press, this paper addresses the overarching theme of environmental issues and the anthropocene by looking into representations of migration as adaptation in the context of climate change. In particular, drawing on corpus-assisted discourse analysis methodologies, the paper will focus on, and critically explore, meaning patterns of “risk” and “resilience” in a purpose-built diachronic corpus of quality newspapers from the Global North and the Global South between 2010 and 2017. Risk and resilience may in fact be regarded as the defining – though problematic – terms of our anthropogenic era. The investigation focuses on whether and how any significant discursive shifts may be identified in newspaper discourse across the globe and the extent to which the mainstream press reflects this problematicity. Our main findings show that not only is mention of risk more frequent in the Global Nort...
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Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies
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More than ten years after Bell\u2019s characterization of climate change as a \u201chigh profile ... more More than ten years after Bell\u2019s characterization of climate change as a \u201chigh profile issue of the global environment\u201d (1994:33), his words may sound or, better, resound even more appropriate today. However, if at the time of Bell\u2019s publication, climate change covered issues such as the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain and global warming (see also Hayer 1994, Hayer and Versteeg 2005, Carvahlo and Burgess 2005), the debate is partly being shifted into new territories (Bevitori 2010). The paper aims at investigating the semantic area/s of RESPONSIBILITY, which turned out of some interest for my recent study of a corpus of British and American press coverage of climate change, and related phenomena, over a well-defined span of time in 2007 (Climate Change Corpus). The year 2007, in fact, coincided with some key events, such as the release of the Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, the publication of The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, which was commissioned by the British government and the UN Climate Change Conference held in Bali on closing of the year. Drawing on Gerbig (1997), the semantics of RESPONSIBILITY shall be discussed with reference to our specialized domain of analysis. An examination of the ways in which the lemma is used reveals partially overlapping but distinct senses of the term which, in turn, may lead to uncover traces of the diverging or concurring ideological positionings of the news outlets under investigation. In particular, the paper aims at exploring what meanings of RESPONSIBILITY in the Climate Change discussions are construed by the different newspapers, as well as in what ways \u201cresponsibility/ies\u201d are mediated to their readership. The methodological framework will make use of the tools of corpus linguistics with a discourse analytical perspective grounded on Systemic Functional Linguistics, whose combination has been proved to be a productive terrain of analysis in previous research on specialised corpora (Morley and Bayley eds. 2009)
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Corpora and Discourse Studies
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This data set contains data of five European case studies of narratives of migration and their em... more This data set contains data of five European case studies of narratives of migration and their embedded justice claims within the European Union Migration System of Governance (EUMSG), analyzed within the framework of project GLOBUS. The analysis focuses on the way national newspapers have covered and discussed key political events related to European politics and migration dynamics between 2014 and 2018. The results of this analysis have been published in a special issue of The International Spectator (2019, volume 54, issue 3, pp. 1-106). A corpus of several Italian, French, Hungarian, UK and Norwegian newspapers has been examined. For each national case study data were collected from two weeks before to one week after three key political events between January 2014 – January 2018: • the 2014 European Parliament elections (22-25 May 2014); • the EU-Turkey Statement/agreement/deal (18 March 2016); • a key 'national moment' related to migration within the designated timespan...
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The paper is a by-product of a recent, cross-disciplinary research project, aiming at exploring l... more The paper is a by-product of a recent, cross-disciplinary research project, aiming at exploring linguistic and discursive patterns broadly construing ‘justice’ in a highly influential institutional setting of political discourse, i.e. the British House of Commons, as regards one of the most complex issues facing today's society: im/migration. Parliamentary language may, in fact, provide a privileged terrain for analysing the relationship between social practices and discourse, especially as regards the discussion of key, highly contested issues such as immigration. Moving from the assumption that justice' is a “human construction” (Walzer 1986; Eriksen 2016) embedded in specific systems of value and beliefs, and that immigration is “indeed a matter of justice” (Miller 2013: 5), the research investigates select patterns of ‘orientational meanings’ (Lemke 1992; Miller 1999), or evaluative and intersubjective stance (Martin and White 2005; Thompson and Hunston 2006) being typic...
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Among the puzzles British politics has offered lately is a somewhat unexpected collapse in people... more Among the puzzles British politics has offered lately is a somewhat unexpected collapse in people’s concern about (im)migration since the Brexit referendum; starting in June 2016, a steadily decreasing number of poll respondents consider (im)migration one of their biggest political concerns, whereas the share had ranged between a quarter and a half of the interviewees for the previous fifteen years, in spite of other important issues such as the economy during the recession (Blinder and Richards 2018). Of note is that there has been only a modest decline in immigration levels since the referendum, and no major change in migration policy. This once again raises the question of the relationship between the ‘facts’ of migration and the way we perceive and make sense of them. Despite the diminishing salience of migration-related concerns among the population, most national and foreign newspaper readers would probably get the impression that British people are intrinsically hostile to im...
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While climate change has gradually and crucially become a ‘defining symbol’ of our mutual relatio... more While climate change has gradually and crucially become a ‘defining symbol’ of our mutual relationship with the environment, an investigation of its role in complex, multi-causal phenomena of human mobility has emerged as a salient policy-making issue only during the last years, with the period between the Cancun negotiations of the UNFCCC in 2010 and the 2015 Paris negotiations representing a crucial moment in policy making as regards the climate change and migration nexus. The purpose of the article is to explore representations of migration and displacement in the context of anthropogenic climate change in newspaper discourse through a critical diachronic corpus-assisted discourse analytical perspective. For the purpose of this study, a diachronic, domain-specific corpus of newspaper articles from a selection of UK and US broadsheets has been gathered through the Nexis online searchable database. Particular attention is placed on whether any significant discursive shifts may be i...
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Papers by Cinzia Bevitori