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...

'My dear, she's on fire!' DAMIAN BARR'A snappy guide to an all-conquering aesthetic' Financial Times'The following things have seemed impossibly camp to me at one point or another: a doll whose body acts as a cover for a toilet roll, a tantrum over wire coat hangers, a 1950s muscle magazine featuring a photo of a young man dressed as a gladiator, and a rat underneath a silver serving platter'An essential re...

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...

Is British English becoming more like American English? If so, why, and in what ways? This book compares examples of American and British language data from the 1930s, 1960s, 1990s and 2000s, to track the most important ways that both varieties are changing over time, and compares the extent to which they are following similar paths using a mixture of computer and human analysis. The analysis is carried out across several levels, including spelling differences (such as colour vs color), vo...

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...