What happens when we combine corpus lexicography and critical discourse analysis? This talk demonstrates a novel implementation of Hanks' (2013) Corpus Pattern Analysis technique in a critical discourse analysis task. The language of animal-killing is taken as a case study, drawing on two corpora for evidence: the original British National Corpus and the animal-themed ‘People’, ‘Products’, ‘Pests’ and ‘Pets’ corpus (Sealey and Pak, 2018). The findings suggest that a corpus-lexicographical discourse analysis is one with a strong theoretical basis, whose transparency and systematicity can empower the analyst to make precise and persuasive arguments.

Meet the speaker

Emma Franklin is a corpus linguist and a research associate on the Leverhulme-funded project, Framings of Insects in Communication and Their Effects on Urban Public Perceptions.

After completing a PhD in Linguistics at Lancaster University on the language of animal-killing, Emma worked as a research associate for the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Sheffield, where she co-created practical guidance on communications around plastics and developed scholarly initiatives around posthumanist sustainability. Following this, she was a lecturer in Corpus-Based Digital Humanities at the University of Wolverhampton's Responsible Digital Humanities Lab, and then a lecturer in English Linguistics at Birmingham City University.