Kieran O'Halloran

Posthumanism and Deconstructing Arguments: Corpora and Digitally-driven Critical Analysis presents a new and practical approach in Critical Discourse Studies. Providing a data-driven and ethically-based method for the examination of arguments in the public sphere, this ground-breaking book:Highlights how the reader can evaluate arguments from points of view other than their own;Demonstrates how digital tools can be used to generate ‘ethical subjectivities’ from large numbers of dissenting voices on the world-wide-web;Draws on ideas from posthumanist philosophy as well as from Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari for theorising these subjectivities;Showcases a critical deconstructive approach, using different corpus linguistic programs such as AntConc, WMatrix and Sketchengine.Posthumanism and Deconstructing Arguments is essential reading for lecturers and researchers with an interest in critical discourse studies, critical thinking, corpus linguistics and digital humanities.

Posthumanism and Deconstructing Arguments: Corpora and Digitally-driven Critical Analysis presents a new and practical approach in Critical Discourse Studies. Providing a data-driven and ethically-based method for the examination of arguments in the public sphere, this ground-breaking book:Highlights how the reader can evaluate arguments from points of view other than their own;Demonstrates how digital tools can be used to generate ‘ethical subjectivities’ from large numbers of dissenting voices on the world-wide-web;Draws on ideas from posthumanist philosophy as well as from Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari for theorising these subjectivities;Showcases a critical deconstructive approach, using different corpus linguistic programs such as AntConc, WMatrix and Sketchengine.Posthumanism and Deconstructing Arguments is essential reading for lecturers and researchers with an interest in critical discourse studies, critical thinking, corpus linguistics and digital humanities.

This edited collection is about the application of English grammar and specialises in 'functional' and'corpus' approaches, approaches which are increasingly recognised as providing significant insights into English language in action. It aims to stimulate interest and understanding of grammar as an applied tool not just for grammarians or language learners, but for all those interested in how language is organized to shape our view of events in the world.As the chapters in this book show, functional and corpus approaches allow us to make observations that would not be amenable through more traditional forms of grammatical analysis. They also illustrate how researchers can fruitfully bring together corpus and functional approaches to reveal how grammar and lexis create and transmit values, identities and ideologies. Research in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has a long tradition of drawing on functional grammar but has only relatively recently begun to draw on corpus linguistics. As such, the book is unusual in presenting work on CDA which draws on corpus linguistics. But not only that, it is also unique in presenting work in CDA which brings together the methodologies of corpus linguistics and functional grammar, demonstrating their combined potential for illuminating ideological perspectives, particularly in media texts.Given this focus and given the increasing value of empirical data, the book will be of interest to those in a range of disciplines including the humanities and media and cultural studies.Chapters comprise both newly commissioned and previously published works that illustrate the two methodological approaches to grammatical analysis and how they can be applied to deepen our understanding of language.

Digital Literary Studies presents a broad and varied picture of the promise and potential of methods and approaches that are crucially dependent upon the digital nature of the literary texts it studies and the texts and collections of texts with which they are compared. It focuses on style, diction, characterization, and interpretation of single works and across larger groups of texts, using both huge natural language corpora and smaller, more specialized collections of texts created for specific tasks, and applies statistical techniques used in the narrower confines of authorship attribution to broader stylistic questions. It addresses important issues in each of the three major literary genres, and intentionally applies different techniques and concepts to poetry, prose, and drama. It aims to present a provocative and suggestive sample intended to encourage the application of these and other methods to literary studies. Hoover, Culpeper, and O’Halloran push the methods, techniques, and concepts in new directions, apply them to new groups of texts or to new questions, modify their nature or method of application, and combine them in innovative ways.

Digital Literary Studies presents a broad and varied picture of the promise and potential of methods and approaches that are crucially dependent upon the digital nature of the literary texts it studies and the texts and collections of texts with which they are compared. It focuses on style, diction, characterization, and interpretation of single works and across larger groups of texts, using both huge natural language corpora and smaller, more specialized collections of texts created for specific tasks, and applies statistical techniques used in the narrower confines of authorship attribution to broader stylistic questions. It addresses important issues in each of the three major literary genres, and intentionally applies different techniques and concepts to poetry, prose, and drama. It aims to present a provocative and suggestive sample intended to encourage the application of these and other methods to literary studies. Hoover, Culpeper, and O’Halloran push the methods, techniques, and concepts in new directions, apply them to new groups of texts or to new questions, modify their nature or method of application, and combine them in innovative ways.

This edited collection is about the application of English grammar and specialises in 'functional' and'corpus' approaches, approaches which are increasingly recognised as providing significant insights into English language in action. It aims to stimulate interest and understanding of grammar as an applied tool not just for grammarians or language learners, but for all those interested in how language is organized to shape our view of events in the world.As the chapters in this book show, functional and corpus approaches allow us to make observations that would not be amenable through more traditional forms of grammatical analysis. They also illustrate how researchers can fruitfully bring together corpus and functional approaches to reveal how grammar and lexis create and transmit values, identities and ideologies. Research in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has a long tradition of drawing on functional grammar but has only relatively recently begun to draw on corpus linguistics. As such, the book is unusual in presenting work on CDA which draws on corpus linguistics. But not only that, it is also unique in presenting work in CDA which brings together the methodologies of corpus linguistics and functional grammar, demonstrating their combined potential for illuminating ideological perspectives, particularly in media texts.Given this focus and given the increasing value of empirical data, the book will be of interest to those in a range of disciplines including the humanities and media and cultural studies.Chapters comprise both newly commissioned and previously published works that illustrate the two methodological approaches to grammatical analysis and how they can be applied to deepen our understanding of language.

An interdisciplinary study of issues of language manipulation, this book explores the interpretation stage of critical discourse analysis (CDA) for students in areas such as English language, media studies and applied linguistics, as well as practitioners in the field. It also offers a new way forward for highlighting manipulative language, accomplishing this through the innovation of a model of reading for gist. The model is an original synthesis of elements from four contemporary cognitive frameworks: connectionism, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistic evidence on inference generation, and relevance theory. Significantly, Kieran O'Halloran also shows how each of these frameworks challenges current notions of cognition in CDA and he carefully works through the implications of this for how CDA highlights manipulative language. Features: *Shows clearly how more systematic and reliable prediction can be made as to whether a news text is likely to manipulate someone reading for gist *Provides accessible outlines of connectionism, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistic research on inference generation, relevance theory, which assume no previous knowledge *Brings together contemporary linguistic and cognitive approaches which usually do not communicate *Provides a useful overview of how language cognition is understood in CDA, revealing tensions in this understanding. In offering novel criticism of some key aspects of CDA and in suggesting ways in which critical analyses of news texts can be improved, this book is likely to be both topical and controversial.