Presentations

Title: 'You're not supposed to be wearing tight jeans with that scarf'': Examining discourse, identity and young Muslim women in UK society

Author: Bróna Murphy, University of Edinburgh

Powerpoint presentation

This paper examines a small 13, 000 word sub-corpus of a larger emerging corpus of young Muslim discourse that is being compiled at the University of Edinburgh. The sub-corpus includes recordings of youth group committee meetings where young Muslim women discuss important issues relating to life, as a Muslim, in the UK. This paper uses corpus-based tools and methodologies to reveal insights into young Muslim identity by focusing on the top 10 keywords in the corpus. These include: mosque, pray, drink, women, interrogated, we, husband, police, community, and culture. The paper highlights, on the one hand, quite contemporary views of what it means to be a Muslim woman in UK society, while on the other, it displays evidence of important traditional values which are an integral part of the women's identity in contemporary UK society.

Author: Cinzia Bevitori, University of Bologna - Forlì, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in Languages, Translation and Culture (SITLeC), Faculty of Political Science "R. Ruffilli"

Powerpoint presentation

The paper builds on previous work concerned with corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the language used by MPs in parliamentary debates regarding the war in Iraq (Bevitori 2007, Bayley and Bevitori 2009). It deals with corpus-assisted study into speaker evaluation and stance in the specialized and typically adversarial domain of parliamentary debates (see Bayley ed. 2004), characterized by 'deliberate dispute' (Adams 1999). The data are drawn from the two legislative assemblies in the UK and the US: the House of Commons sub-corpus (CorDis HoC subcorpus), which amount to roughly 1,000,000 tokens, corresponding to about 120 hours of talk, and the House of Representatives (CorDis HoR subcorpus), amounting to roughly 1,395,000 token. Speakers in both Houses have been marked-up according to three variables: gender, party, and institutional role.

A preliminary investigation of the corpus of all the MPs who took the floor in all parliamentary events discussing the war in Iraq was first conducted. As far as the Commons is concerned, the breakdown by the variable of sex shows that out of the 413 MPs who took the floor during these parliamentary events, 57 were women - around 50% of all women MPs, out of which the Labour Back benchers represent 85 percent of the total female speakers. In the House of Representatives, out of 323 members who took the floor, 53 were women, which corresponds to 84 percent of the total of female representatives. However, a look at the combined variables of sex and party shows that while female Democrats intervening in the debate were 10 percent of the total speakers of the House, female Republicans made up only 4 percent of the total speakers (see Miller and Johnson 2009). Starting from the assumption that gender is not a fixed category but can be seen as a contextualized and dynamic practice, operating within constraints established by the discourse community (or community of practice), the paper is intended to investigate some linguistic (and discursive) resources that are deployed by female and male members in both Houses in order to legitimize or, conversely, contest the war.

Bayley P. (ed.) 2004, Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Parliamentary Discourse. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Bayley P., C. Bevitori 2009, 'Just War' or just 'war': Arguments for Doing the 'Right Thing', in: J. Morley and P. Bayley (eds.), Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies on the Iraq conflict. Wording the War, New York/London: Routledge (Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics), New York/London: Routledge, pp. 74 - 107.
Bevitori C. 2007, Engendering conflict? A corpus-assisted analysis of women MPs positioning on the war in Iraq, in M. Dossena and A. Jucker (eds.), (R)evolutions in Evaluation, Textus 20(1), pp. 137 - 158.
Miller D.R., J.H. Johnson 2009, Strict vs. Nurturant Parents? A Corpus-Assisted Study of Congressional Positioning on the war in Iraq, in: J. Morley and P. Bayley (eds.), New York/London: Routledge, pp. 34-73.

Auhors: Costas Gabrielatos and Eivind Torgersen, Lancaster University

Powerpoint presentation

We report on the use of indefinite article forms (a/an) in front of vowel sounds, as well as certain established and emerging pragmatic markers (PMs), in spoken London English. The study used the Linguistic Innovators Corpus (LIC; Gabrielatos et al., 2010), a 1.3 million word corpus comprising the data from the project, Linguistic Innovators: the English of adolescents in London (Kerswill et al., 2008a), and the Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT; Stenström et al., 2002).

In the case of a before vowel-initial words (a+vowel), the speakers' sex was a significant predictor of use, albeit the weakest compared to the other social factors (Gabrielatos et al., 2010). In terms of frequency of use, male speakers were almost twice as likely as female speakers to use a+vowel. Young male speakers were twice as likely to use the pattern, whereas among old speakers there was no significant difference between male and female speakers. However, the inverse picture emerges when the proportion of speakers using the a+vowel pattern is considered. A further notable observation is that, when the extent of use of male and female speakers is compared within age groups (both within LIC and between LIC and COLT), the usage of young male and female speakers appears to be converging.

Patterns more characteristic of male or female speakers were also evident in the use of pragmatic markers (Torgersen et al., under review). More extensively used by male speakers were the emerging PM, you get me, two out of three high frequency PMs (innit, yeah), and the low-frequency PM, right. More extensively used by female speakers were the low-frequency simple PM, ok, and two out of three low-frequency multi-word ones (do you know what I mean, do you know what I'm saying). The rest of the PMs, that is, the high-frequency, you know, and the low-frequency multi-word PM if you know what I mean, showed comparable extent of use in male and female speakers. Although sex was not a very strong predictor (ethnicity and place of residence emerged as the strongest predictors), it was the male non-Anglo speakers who were the most innovative PM users, particularly of innit and you get me. This is at variance with Andersen's (2001) findings in COLT, namely, that female speakers had the highest frequency of innit, and, therefore, were identified as the innovators. Overall, our findings show a complex interaction between sex and ethnicity in high-contact speech communities: male non-Anglo speakers have the highest use of innovative features. This has also been found in other studies of grammatical and phonological features in London, using the same data (e.g. Kerswill et al., 2008b).

References

Andersen, Gisle. 2001. Pragmatic markers and sociolinguistic variation. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Gabrielatos, Costas, Torgersen, Eivind, Hoffmann, Sebastian and Fox, Sue. In press. A corpus-based sociolinguistic study of indefinite article forms in London English. Journal of English Linguistics.
Kerswill, Paul, Torgersen, Eivind and Fox, Sue. 2008a. Reversing 'drift': Innovation and diffusion in the London diphthong system. Language Variation and Change 20: 451-491.
Kerswill, Paul, Cheshire, Jenny, Fox, Sue and Torgersen, Eivind. 2008b. Linguistic innovators: The English of adolescents in London. Final report submitted to the Economic and Social Research Council.
Stenström, Anna-Brita, Andersen, Gisle and Hasund, Kristine. 2002. Trends in teenage talk. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Torgersen, Eivind and Gabrielatos, Costas. 2009. A corpus-based study of invariant tags in London English. Paper presented at Corpus Linguistics 2009, University of Liverpool, 21-23 July 2009. [Available online: http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/26837/]

Author: Paul Baker, Lancaster University

Powerpoint presentation

This paper aims to address the research question - to what extent has sexism or male bias in written standard English changed in recent decades. The research thus compars four equal equal sized and equivalently sampled corpora containing British English in a range of written genres (press, fiction, general prose, learned writing), from 1931, 1961, 1991 and 2006.

Taking a corpus-based approach, a number of gender-marked terms were investigated, using the online corpus search tool CQPweb in order to investigate changing frequency. Additionally, the terms were subjected to qualitative analyses via concordances, to examine context of usage in more detail. Terms that were investigated included male and female pronouns, man, woman, boy and girl, gender-related profession and role nouns such as chairman, spokesperson and policewoman, and terms of address such as Mr and Ms.

The paper reports on the results, relating them to issues concerning the perpetuation of stereotypes, issues of equality of representation vs. frequency of representation, and linguistic strategies that have been successful (or not) in moving towards more equal representation of gender in language.

Author: Mike Pearce, University of Sunderland.

Powerpoint presentation

In this paper, I examine the representation of men and women in the British National Corpus by focussing on the collocational and grammatical behaviour of the noun lemmas MAN and WOMAN (i.e., the nouns man/men and woman/women). Using the online corpus query tool Sketch Engine http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/, I explore the functional distribution of the target lemmas, and reveal the structured and systematic nature of the differences in the way these terms interact with other word forms in different grammatical relations. What emerges from the data are patterns which reflect gender differences in relation to particular domains, such as power, deviance, social categorisation, personality, mental capacity, appearance and sexuality.

Name: Bandar Al-Hejin, Lancaster University

Pdf file of powerpoint presentation

In this presentation I will report on my research into the representations of Muslim women (MW) in BBC News and Arab News website texts (Arab News is one of the most widely read English-speaking newspapers in the Middle-East). The presentation describes the analysis of two purpose-built corpora, based on the semantic categories MUSLIM and FEMALE spanning the years 2001-2007. The first is a 1.9 million word corpus of BBC texts (3,269 articles). The second is a 2.3 million word corpus of Arab News texts (3,111 articles).

I will begin with a brief explanation of the procedures involved in building the two corpora. Next, I will compare and contrast the macrostructures most often associated with MW in the two news organisations. Corpus linguistic tools such as statistical keyword and collocation analyses reveal those topics and contexts which tend to bring MW into news discourse; detailed concordance analyses provide further qualitative insight into the ways MW tend to be predicated in various news (cont)texts.

Findings suggest that representations of MW were largely restricted in terms of geography and topic. MW were more likely to appear in contexts of war and crime as passive victims of Islamic 'militancy', 'fundamentalism' and 'extremism' perpetuated by their male counterparts. In such contexts, agency was hardly ever attributed to MW with the rare exception of female suicide bombers - a relatively new dimension to MW's identity in news discourse, which was often linked to security concerns over full-face veils in Western public spheres. The veil, along with its negative discourse prosody, remains a nodal discourse surrounding MW in both news sources, but more so in the BBC.

Arab News, like the BBC, also reported on the grievances of MW, especially the obstacles they face as a result of local norms and regulations, but it usually dissociated such practices from Islam. Islamic discourse was in fact appropriated to argue against regulations that restrict MW from fully participating in society. Keyword analysis revealed an overuse of deontic modality (obligation) in Arab News as there was more to say about what ought to be done about the restrictions. It also revealed more 'positive' news stories relating to MW than the BBC in areas such as education and employment.

Name: Tony McEnery, Lancaster University

Powerpoint presentation

In this talk I wish to return to work I have previously published on swearing in British English and extend the work to encompass a comparison between swearing in British and American English. In doing so I will focus in particular on the role that gender may have to play in determining the selection of i.) particular bad language words (BLWs); ii.) categories of BLW words and iii.) strength of BLWs. My overall aim will be to explore whether, in accordance with my previous work on this subject, a common cultural heritage leads to broadly similar behaviour across the two language varieties or whether the differences between the interaction between gender and BLW use in the two varieties of English is such that a modified historical/social explanation of patterns of BLW use in English is required.

Name: Louise Mullany, University of Nottingham

Louise was not able to attend the event, but has included her power point presentation.

This paper explores the integration of corpus linguistic techniques with qualitative discourse analysis in order to investigate how speakers in the Cambridge and Nottingham Business English Corpus (CANBEC) talk about gender and sexuality in everyday workplace interactions. CANBEC is a one-million word dataset of spoken business discourse, consisting of meetings, office talk and telephone conversations from a number of commercial organisations based in a range of geographical locations.

The analysis commences with a quantitative, survey approach, utilising corpus linguistic tools. Word frequencies of lexical tokens which directly index gender are examined, followed by a concordance analysis. These techniques pinpoint particular stretches of discourse which are then analysed qualitatively. The linguistic analysis focuses in particular upon how participants in UK-based companies perform their gendered, sexual and professional identities in workplace interactions.