A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2019'Richly evocative and entertaining.' Guardian'A delightful read.' Tatler'An essential book for anyone who wants to Polari Bona!' AttitudePolari is a language that was used chiefly by gay men in the first half of the twentieth century. It offered its speakers a degree of public camouflage and a means of identific...

The Language of Patient Feedback provides a unique insight into a diverse range of issues related to healthcare. Through the comprehensive and detailed interrogation of 29 million words of online patient feedback on the NHS in England, as well as 11 million words of responses to the feedback from NHS providers, this book:Uses a combination of computer-assisted and human analysis (Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis) to examine the extent to which characteris...

When gays had to be closeted, ships were the only places where homosexual men could not only be out but also camp. And on some liners to the sun and the New World, queens and butches had a ball. They sashayed and minced their way across the world's oceans.Never before has the story been told of the masses. These are the thousands of queer seafarers, mainly stewards, who sometimes even outnumbered the straight men in the catering departments of ships that were household names and th...

How do violent jihadists use language to try to persuade people to carry out violent acts? This book analyses over two million words of texts produced by violent jihadists to identify and examine the linguistic strategies employed. Taking a mixed methods approach, the authors combine quantitative methods from corpus linguistics, which allows the identification of frequent words and phrases, alongside close reading of texts via discourse analysis. The analysis compares language use across t...

This Element explores approaches to locating and examining social identity in corpora with and without the aid of demographic metadata. This is a key concern in corpus-aided studies of language and identity, and this Element sets out to explore the main challenges and affordances associated with either approach and to discern what either approach can (and cannot) show. It describes two case studies which each compare two approaches to social identity variables – sex and age – in a corpus o...

Is the British press prejudiced against Muslims? In what ways can prejudice be explicit or subtle? This book uses a detailed analysis of over 140 million words of newspaper articles on Muslims and Islam, combining corpus linguistics and discourse analysis methods to produce an objective picture of media attitudes. The authors analyse representations around frequently cited topics such as Muslim women who wear the veil and 'hate preachers'. The analysis is self-reflexive and multidisciplina...

On 23 May 1988, Paul Baker sat down with his family to eat cake on his sixteenth birthday while The Six O’Clock News played in the background. But something was not quite right. There was muffled shouting – ‘Stop Section 28!’ – and a scuffle. The morning papers would announce: ‘Beeb Man Sits on Lesbian’.The next day Section 28 passed into law, forbidding local authorities from teaching ‘the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. It would send sh...

How can you carry out discourse analysis using corpus linguistics? What research questions should I ask? Which methods should you use and when? What is a collocational network or a key cluster?Introducing the major techniques, methods and tools for corpus-assisted analysis of discourse, this book answers these questions and more, showing readers how to best use corpora in their analyses of discourse. Using carefully tailored case studies, each chapter is devoted to...

The Mounted Infantry had a short life spanning from the mid 1880’s until disbanded in 1913. To continue the camaraderie of the corps, past surviving members formed the M.I Club and in 1936 decided to publish a short history based on Regimental records and personal reflections. An appeal elicited responses and work was begun by Major Tomlin. The manuscript was almost complete at the start of the Second World War when an enthusiastic cull of papers by Tomlin’s family during a “wastepaper sal...

Polari is a secret form of language mainly used by homosexual men in London and other cities during the twentieth century. Derived in part from the slang lexicons of numerous stigmatised and itinerant groups, Polari was also a means of socialising, acting out camp performances and reconstructing a shared gay identity and worldview among its speakers. This book examines the ways in which Polari was used in order to construct 'gay identities', linking its evolution to the changing status of ...

Paul Baker has experienced many ups and downs in his life, but it's how he dealt with these moments and learned from them that really sets his story apart. He is accustomed to failure, having learned how to turn negative experiences into positive outcomes, and he continues to remain focused on his ambitions by continually setting himself new goals. Covering themes such as ambition, determination, and the importance of mindset and exercise when it comes to personal growth, Finding Fame illu...

This Element reports on the creation and analysis of a 1.5-million-word corpus consisting of a year's worth of UK national press news articles about Islam and Muslims, published between December 2022 and November 2023. The corpus also contains 8,546 image files which have been automatically tagged using Google's Vertex AI. Analysis was carried out on three levels a) written text only, b) images only, c) interactions between written text and images. Using examples from the analyses, the aut...