Construing justice
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Cinzia Bevitori
Abstract
The chapter investigates the construal of ‘justice’ within a specialized domain of British politics, i.e. the British House of Commons. As a quintessentially abstract concept, justice is very challenging area to investigate empirically through the lens of corpora. By bringing together the methodological and theoretical tools of (critical) discourse analysis and corpus linguistics (Baker 2006, Bayley & Morley (eds) 2009, Baker & McEnery (eds) 2015, Miller et al. 2014), the chapter engages with this challenge by examining patterns of evaluative orientation and intersubjective positioning (Martin & White 2005, Thompson & Hunston 2006) in a diachronic corpus of British parliamentary debates on the issue of (im)migration. The purpose is to further research into the speakers’ construal of justice as a complex interplay of discursive, socio-political, and socio-cultural (Silverstein 2004) dimensions of what is ‘right’, vis-a-vis strategies of persuasion and legitimation (van Leeuwen 1996, Reyes 2011). In particular, this study focuses on the analysis of the evaluative construction it is * right as a key contested rhetorical terrain through which the members in this powerful and influential institutional setting position themselves to construe ‘justice’ in quite distinct ways.
Abstract
The chapter investigates the construal of ‘justice’ within a specialized domain of British politics, i.e. the British House of Commons. As a quintessentially abstract concept, justice is very challenging area to investigate empirically through the lens of corpora. By bringing together the methodological and theoretical tools of (critical) discourse analysis and corpus linguistics (Baker 2006, Bayley & Morley (eds) 2009, Baker & McEnery (eds) 2015, Miller et al. 2014), the chapter engages with this challenge by examining patterns of evaluative orientation and intersubjective positioning (Martin & White 2005, Thompson & Hunston 2006) in a diachronic corpus of British parliamentary debates on the issue of (im)migration. The purpose is to further research into the speakers’ construal of justice as a complex interplay of discursive, socio-political, and socio-cultural (Silverstein 2004) dimensions of what is ‘right’, vis-a-vis strategies of persuasion and legitimation (van Leeuwen 1996, Reyes 2011). In particular, this study focuses on the analysis of the evaluative construction it is * right as a key contested rhetorical terrain through which the members in this powerful and influential institutional setting position themselves to construe ‘justice’ in quite distinct ways.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Introduction 1
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I Meaning in time and space
- Digital discourse and its discontents 9
- Text, intertext and meaning 37
- Hic sunt dracones 65
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II Variation in time
- Presenting knowledge of the world 89
- Interpreting the world of late modern English medical writing 113
- A corpus-based analysis of grammarians’ references in 19th-century British grammars 133
- Construing justice 173
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III Variation in space
- Variation in the complementiser choice between if and whether 203
- Using intensifier-adjective collocations to investigate mechanisms of change 231
- There’s different types 257
- Academic prose across countries 283
- A corpus-based study of metadiscoursal boosters in applied linguistics dissertations written in Thailand and in the United States 321
- Patterns and meanings of hedging verbs in English-medium research articles by Chinese and Western scholars 351
- The EMI campus as site and source for a multimodal corpus 377
- Index 403
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Introduction 1
-
I Meaning in time and space
- Digital discourse and its discontents 9
- Text, intertext and meaning 37
- Hic sunt dracones 65
-
II Variation in time
- Presenting knowledge of the world 89
- Interpreting the world of late modern English medical writing 113
- A corpus-based analysis of grammarians’ references in 19th-century British grammars 133
- Construing justice 173
-
III Variation in space
- Variation in the complementiser choice between if and whether 203
- Using intensifier-adjective collocations to investigate mechanisms of change 231
- There’s different types 257
- Academic prose across countries 283
- A corpus-based study of metadiscoursal boosters in applied linguistics dissertations written in Thailand and in the United States 321
- Patterns and meanings of hedging verbs in English-medium research articles by Chinese and Western scholars 351
- The EMI campus as site and source for a multimodal corpus 377
- Index 403
