1st Edition

Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies on the Iraq Conflict Wording the War

Edited By John Morley, Paul Bayley Copyright 2009
    352 Pages
    by Routledge

    352 Pages
    by Routledge

    This volume seeks to illustrate the fundamental role of language in political action, focusing on the war in Iraq. It combines quantitative methods, based on a sophisticated modular corpus that was queried through special software with the aim of identifying regularly occurring lexical and semantic patterns, with classical discourse analysis, which seeks to investigate naturally occurring language in the context in which it is produced. Interpreting the field of politics quite widely, to include news reporting and a quasi-judicial inquiry into the behavior of politicians and journalists, discourses in the USA and the UK are considered. The central purpose of the volume is to gain insights not just into language, and the ways in which we can investigate it through a corpus, but also into the ways in which political action is realized through discourse.

    1. The CorDis Project 

    John Morley

    2. The making of CorDis : corpus compilation and mark-up

    Letizia Cirillo, Anna Marchi and Marco Venuti

    3. Evaluation, speaker-hearer positioning and the Iraq war: A corpus-assisted study of Congressional argument

    Donna R. Miller and  Jane Johnson

    4. For the good of the people. Arguments for and against a "just war"

     Paul Bayley and Cinzia Bevitori

    5. White House Press Briefings as a message to the world

    Giulia Riccio 

    6. Dialogistic positioning and intersubjective stance in TV news reporting of the 2003 war on Iraq in the US and Britain 

    Linda Lombardo

    7. Which war did we watch? How UK and US television news reported the 2003 Iraq conflict

    Caroline Clark

    8. Distinguishing between two discourse types: Editorials and Opinion Articles in the CorDis corpus.

    Amanda Murphy

    9. Interacting  with  conflicting  goals: face-work and impoliteness   in  hostile  cross-examination.

     Charlotte Taylor

    10. Talking (about) the talk

    Alison Duguid

    11. Fierce fighting on the home front: the epideictics of reporting the reporting

    Alan Partington

    Author index

    Subject index

    Biography

    Paul Bayley is Professor of English Linguistics and teaches at the Faculty of Political Science "Roberto Ruffilli" of the University of Bologna at Forlì.

    John Morley holds the chair of English Linguistics in the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Siena.