Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies

This volume contains a collection of papers pertaining to the SiBol corpora, which consist of British broadsheet newspapers from the years 1993 and 2005. In order to examine diachronic variation, the papers compare the two sets of corpora using techniques such as keyword analyses, and targeted searches of terms like moral, ethics and science. The papers are from the field of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) which combines a quantitative, statistical approach with a more qualitative approach typical of discourse analysis. Using such large corpora, the authors are able to study not only grammatical developments over time but also variations in lexical and phrasal preferences. This enables us to observe changes in newspaper prose style over the period (which reflect shifting relationships between newspapers and their readerships as well as perhaps overall changes in language) and also perform various sorts of content analyses, that is, examine new - and older - attitudes to social cultural and political phenomenon, as construed and projected by the mainstream UK quality (or 'blacktop') press. Alan Partington is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Modern languages and Foreign Literatures at the University of Bologna.