The paper provides a thorough review of the corpus-linguistic approach to critical discourse analysis. It briefly presents the core of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and examines the possibilities of applying corpus tools to it. In the next step, critical commentaries on CDA are summarized and at the same time, possible corpus-linguistic solutions are offered. The final part offers an illustrative application of corpus-assisted CDA focusing on language ideologies in the Czech parliamentary discourse.
This paper describes the development of a discursive image of the Děkujeme, odcházíme (‘Thank you, we are leaving’) initiative — a movement which was trying to draw attention to the problems of Czech health care system and achieve their solutions in the years 2010–2011. In the public sphere, there emerged a conflict of two groups represented by doctors on the one side and the Ministry of Health on the other side. The media played key role in this conflict, which shaped the discourse by their interpretation of the doctors’ requirements and presented the discourse image to the public. Using some elements of the theoretical frame of Discourse-Historical Approach to critical discourse analysis, the study analyzes the means of labelling and characterizing the main actors and also some other discourse strategies such as criminalization, threat of crisis or thematization of PR campaign. The subject of analysis is a sample of eighty media texts. The analysis shows how closely related is a change of public support to the Děkujeme, odcházíme initiative and a thematic transformation of discourse, particularly narrowing the affair only to a problem of money. The study points out that although the doctors accomplished their demands and won factually, they failed discursively.
CS
Příspěvek popisuje vývoj diskurzivního obrazu iniciativy Děkujeme, odcházíme, jež se v letech 2010–2011 snažila poukázat na problémy českého zdravotního systému a dospět k jejich řešení. Ve veřejném prostoru vznikl konflikt dvou skupin zastoupených lékaři na jedné straně a ministerstvem zdravotnictví na straně druhé. V tomto konfliktu hrála média ústřední úlohu, neboť svou interpretací požadavků lékařů utvářela diskurz a prezentovala jej čtenářům. S oporou o některé prvky diskurzivně- historického přístupu tato studie zkoumá způsoby reprezentace hlavních aktérů a zároveň další diskurzivní strategie, například kriminalizaci, hrozbu krizí nebo tematizaci PR kampaně. Předmětem analýzy je 80 mediálních textů. Analýza odhaluje, že změna ve veřejné podpoře iniciativy Děkujeme, odcházíme a tematická proměna diskurzu, zejména v zúžení problému na otázku financí, jsou úzce propojeny. Studie ukazuje, že i když lékaři dosáhli svých požadavků a fakticky zvítězili, boj o diskurz prohráli.
The paper deals with the standardization process of the regnal name of the new King Charles III in Czech. It documents the fact that leading Czech internet media at first referred to the new king in the original form, Charles III, but very soon began to call him Karel III, using the Czech form of the English name Charles. The paper places this process into the broader context of translating foreign personal names into Czech and investigates whether European Monarchs are usually referred to by their original names or a translated form of their names in contemporary written Czech (as evidenced by the SYN corpus series). The central focus of the paper lies in the hour-byhour detailed reconstruction of how it happened that the Czech internet media ceased quite suddenly to call the new king Charles III, beginning to call him Karel III. The paper proceeds to discuss this process in the context of language standardization theories, showing that although authorities (linguists, predominantly from the Czech Language Institute) explicitly refused to recommend (“from above”) either the original, or a translated variant of the name, internet media representatives interpreted their statements in favour of the translated version and started to call the new king Karel III in Czech.
The paper is devoted to a critical analysis of the discourse on Autonomní sociální centrum Klinika (Autonomous Social Centre Klinika) that was of high relevance in the Czech public sphere in 2014–2019. The Klinika centre was founded in Prague by a group of civic activists in a building owned by the Czech state which had long fallen into ruin. In 2014 they entered it without the owner’s consent. Both demonstrations in support of the centre and repeated police interventions attracted intense media attention, while control over identities, meanings and relations was disputed until the police clear-out in 2019. We aimed to discover what discourse strategies were chosen by particular social actors and what meaning configurations were created in their texts. Based on a) a set of qualitative analyses of nomination and predication strategies (Wodak, 2001; Wodak & Reisigl, 2009) in five initial discourse phase texts and b) frequency analysis of two large corpora representing Klinika supporters and media mainstream, we carried out a detailed concordance analysis of the relation between the activists’ group and the citizen category. Using the methods of corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis (e.g., Baker, 2006; Baker et al., 2008), we focused on the question of to what extent, in which contexts and via which discourse processes Klinika ended up outside or inside the ingroup. The main finding is that by keeping control over the concept of citizen, Klinika’s final displacement in January 2019 did not mean its discursive defeat. In fact, activists managed to keep their story about a civic opposition against an incompetent power. State violence terminating the existence of the Klinika centre only confirmed its discursive victory
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