Abstract Summary
I will undertake a contrastive analysis of the use, semantics and framing of lexemes in English and in German referring to ´disability´ within DM (Twitter) with methods of DA. This study is corpus-assisted as I will examine n-grams and collocations recurrently appearing in the context of ´disability´.
Abstract :
[Discourse Analysis], [Frame Semantics], [Corpus Linguistics]
Only few studies have been written on 'disability' and 'illness' (eg. Gwyn, 2002; Devlin, McAskill & Stead, 2007; Grue, 2014) in respect to evaluative strategies in public discourses.
My lecture will cover the representation and framing of 'disability' and of humans living with disability in Austrian, German and Swiss political parties' statements within social media. The corpus consists of PD led on inclusion of handicapped children in education.
My sample shows that stigmatization still plays a role in talking about children living with disabilities. My leading hypothesis is that populists often show a lack of differentiation in language use as there is no accurate reference considerable to the different types of disabilities. In addition, handicapped children are only characterized as an agentive group when they are stigmatized as distracting at regular schools, apart from that they are verbalized by non-agentive deep cases (e.g. objective, benefactive).
This talk will pursue an integrative approach which combines methods of discourse analysis (eg. Reisigl & Wodak, 2001; Fairclough, 2003; Hart, 2019), corpus linguistics, frame semantics and cognitive grammar (e.g. deep cases, information structure).
Also, I will present the outcome of neurolinguistic tests on the cognitive impact of strategies used by populists in online discourses on 'disability'.
References
Devlin, E., MacAskill, S., & Stead, M. (2007). ‘We’re still the same people’: developing a mass media campaign to raise awareness and challenge the stigma of dementia. International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, 12, 47–58.
Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London.
Grue, J. (2014): Disability and Discourse Analysis. London.
Gwyn, R. (2002). Communicating Health and Illness. London.
Hart, C. (Eds.) (2019): Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Text and Discourse. Edinburgh.
Reisigl, M., & Wodak, R. (2001). Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism. London.
