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

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.

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.

List of Concordances List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgments Introduction: A description of CorDis , John Morley 1. The making of the CorDis Corpus: compilation and mark-up, Letizia Cirillo, Anna Marchi and Marco Venuti 2. Strict vs. Nurturant Parents? A Corpus-Assisted Study of Congressional Positioning on the War in Iraq, Donna R. Miller and Jane H. Johnson 3. ‘Just War', or just ‘war’: Arguments for doing the ‘right thing’, Paul Bayley and Cinzia Bevitori 4. White House press briefings as a message to the world, Giulia Riccio 5. Positioning and stance in TV news reporting of the 2003 Iraq war: the anchor on CBS and the news presenter on BBC, Linda Lombardo 6. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’: how UK and US television news reported the 2003 Iraq conflict, Caroline Clark 7. Editorials and Opinion Articles in the CorDis corpus: a transversal study, Amanda C. Murphy 8. Interacting with conflicting goals: Facework and impoliteness in hostile cross-examination, Charlotte Taylor 9. Insistent Voices: Government messages, Alison Duguid 10. Evaluating evaluation and some concluding thoughts on CADS, Alan Partington List of Contributors Bibliography Index