Discurso y

comunicación
en inglés – Unit 3 –
week 1
Grado en estudios ingleses
2020
 Units
• TEMA 0. What is discourse analysis? 30 January
• TEMA 1. Approaches to discourse analysis 4 & 6 Feb
• TEMA 2. Corpora and discourse analysis 11 & 13, 18 & 20, 25 & 27 Feb
• TEMA 3. Discourse, media and minorities 3 & 5, 10 & 12, 24 & 26 March
• TEMA 4. Discourse and politics 31 March & 2 April, 21 April
• Essay predentation 23, 28, 30 April, 5 & 7 May
 Corpus
linguistics
^^^^

Approaches to discourse analysis

Introducing representation research: religion
& Muslim identities

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRz6PBDHJqc
The concept of representation

• The media present information about world events to masses of

individuals. As it is never possible to present a completely impartial,
accurate and full account of an event, instead the media offer
representations of events, through the use of language (spoken or
written) and/or images (still or moving). Such representations are
often restrained by space and time limitations; journalists need to
prioritise particular events, as well as certain people’s perspectives or
opinions, over others.
The concept of representation

• Additionally, summaries of events may be coloured by the political

priorities of newspapers or the abilities of the journalists who are
writing for them. In the United Kingdom, national newspapers
function as more than mere ‘mirrors’ of reality. Instead, they have the
role of constructing ideologically motivated versions of reality, which
are aimed at persuading people that certain phenomena are good or
bad, leading John Richardson (2004: 227) to describe journalism as an
‘argumentative discourse genre’.
The concept of representation
• Thus, British national newspapers attempt to exert (often
successfully) social and political influence, though, as discussed below,
newspapers must also balance this aim with reflecting the views of
audiences.
• As Gerbner et al. (1986) have shown, the media have a long-term
effect on audiences, small at first, but compounding over time as a
result of the repetition of images and concepts.
The concept of representation & how to
analyse it
• Although our main goal is to examine how language is used to
represent Muslims and Islam, more specific aims involve focusing on
whether there have been changes in representation over time, and
whether there are differences between newspapers.
• We are also interested in identifying the various techniques or
strategies that newspapers employ in order to legitimate or justify
certain representations, particularly those that may be controversial
or would otherwise result in people complaining about the
newspaper.
British press
•  The British press is composed of a wide range of different types of
newspapers, distinguished by frequency of appearance (daily, Sunday,
weekly), political stance (left-leaning, right-leaning, centrist or
‘independent’), style (broadsheet, tabloid or ‘middle-market’) and
coverage (national, regional).
 (Please note that these
results exclude those who
said they didn’t know what
the newspaper’s ideology
was – a rate of between 39%
and 49% for each
newspaper)

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2017/03/07/how-left-or-right-wing-are-uks-newspapers
Total accountability
• Understand your data
• Understand your sources:
https://www.newsworks.org.uk/titles-at-a-glance
Search terms in your corpus
As expected, the overall frequencies of the words under examination are higher in the daily
broadsheets (The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Independent), while the two
newspapers that appear weekly (The People and The Business) have very small frequencies. The
Observer, which also appears only once a week, has frequencies that are closer to some of the daily
tabloids, reflecting the fact that this newspaper contains much more text per issue than a tabloid.
For each newspaper, the frequencies of the four terms are pretty similar: Muslim is the most
frequent, followed by Islam, then Muslims, then Islamic.
The exceptions to this pattern are the three weekly newspapers: The People, The Observer and The
Business. The People has the order Muslim, Muslims, Islam, Islamic, The Observer has Muslim,
Islamic, Islam, Muslims, while The Business has Islamic, Muslim, Muslims, Islam. It is notable, then,
that the Sunday tabloid tends to place more emphasis on the people who practise the religion
rather than the religion itself, while this seems to be the opposite case for The Business. However,
all the frequencies in these two newspapers are relatively small, so perhaps the most salient point is
that readers of such papers will rarely come across articles about Muslims or Islam.
Understanding the planes
•  While the analysis so far tells us about which newspapers favour
which terms, it does not reveal anything about the different sorts of
contexts Muslims and Islam are written about. In order to do this
we need to use another technique, called keyword analysis.
•  Statistical tests can be used to determine which words have a
significant difference in frequency between two corpora. If the Islam
corpus is Split into two, with all the broadsheet articles comprising
one section, and all the tabloid articles comprising the other, then we
can obtain lists of words that are key in one section when compared
against the other.
Baker (2006) Chapter 5 (pp. 119-120)
Understanding the planes
 To give an example of the difference in frequencies involved, the word
terror  occurs 22,188 times in the tabloids and 22,032 times in the
broadsheets. This may not appear to be a particularly large difference,
but consider that the broadsheet part of the corpus contains almost
103 million words while the tabloid part contains only 40 million words
and the difference is put more clearly into perspective: the tabloids
refer to the word terror  more than twice as often as the broadsheets.
Sorting keyword categories
• When creating categorisations and assigning words to them,
ideological issues are often raised. It was particularly difficult to make
distinctions between the final four categories (Islamic political groups,
terror/extremism, crime and conflict) as these concepts overlapped.
We acknowledge, therefore, that the categorisation system is not
definitive, and should be intended more as a guide to the different
sorts of topics that distinguish tabloids and broadsheets
Keywords
•  In terms of words that specifically refer to religion, it is notable that the broadsheets have two
keywords, Shia  and Sunni , that refer to different branches of Islam. The presence of these
keywords suggests that the broadsheets  are more likely to make distinctions within Islam, rather
than simply using a broader term such as Muslims .
•  Another tabloid focus seems to be on extremism, with the word fanatics occurring as key in
these newspapers. This word suggests a particular way of positioning Muslims who are seen to
have extreme beliefs, and provided an early reason for examining this word, along with other
words that focused on the type and strength of belief that Muslims hold . Additionally, four
names associated with extremism were key in the tabloids: Osama Bin Laden , (Omar) Bakri ,
(Anjem) Choudary  and (Abu) Hamza . A related keyword, hook , referred almost exclusively to
the prosthesis on the right hand of Abu Hamza. While Osama Bin Laden is globally known as the
architect of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, Choudary, Bakri and Hamza are perhaps less
familiar names internationally. All three lived in the United Kingdom, and are described by the
tabloids as ‘hate preachers’; they were often pilloried for being in receipt of benefits.
Spelling
Analyses of keywords: 12 rounds
Analyses of keywords: 12 rounds
•  An examination of the unique keywords is revealing about the
different preoccupations of each newspaper. It should be noted that
these words are not unique in the sense that they never occur in any
of the other newspapers’ articles, but they are unique to the top 100
keywords list for each newspaper and are therefore a good indicator
of topics and concepts that a particular newspaper is concerned with.
Some of them, when explored in more detail, help to reveal
ideologies.
The Guardian ’s relatively frequent use of
Islamist 
•  One interpretation of The Guardian ’s relatively frequent use of
Islamist  is that it is an attempt at ‘responsible’ reporting, which tries
to avoid attributing extremism, terrorism and militancy to the more
generalising Islamic , or the personalising Muslim . We understand the
term Islamist  to refer to someone who advocates the ideology that
Islam is not only a religion but a political system. However, the term
does not appear to be explained in the corpus, and its close
orthographical similarity to Islam  and Islamic  might mean that some
readers do not grasp the distinction.
Time series