Analysing aggression of social actors in political protests: combining corpus and cognitive approaches to discourse analysis

Date10 July 2017
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/JACPR-09-2016-0250
Pages178-194
Published date10 July 2017
AuthorMay L.-Y. Wong
Analysing aggression of social actors in
political protests: combining corpus and
cognitive approaches to discourse
analysis
May L.-Y. Wong
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the newspaper representations of the aggressive
behaviour of social actors in political protests and explore the benefits of integrating corpus linguistics and
cognitive approaches to a critical discourse analysis in analysing press reports.
Design/methodology/approach This paper uses methods from corpus linguistics and theoretical
constructs from cognitive linguistics to examine patterns of representation around Occupy Central, a recent
political protest in Hong Kong, in two corpora of English-language newspaper articles published in China
Daily and the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
Findings An analysis of the ten most frequent collocates of the word police showed that the China Daily
corpus articles typically index the presentation of police as vulnerable yet professional in their handling of
violent protesters, whereas in SCMP, police officers are often presented as aggressors. The analysis
subsequently considered three discursive strategies , namely structural configuration, framing and
identification that are mediated through conceptualisations that representations in text evoke.
Research limitations/implications In the proposed integrated approach, quantitative investigations of
corpus examples could be focussed and contextualised in such a way that particular linguistic instantiations
in discourse which are proved statistically salient can be further analysed in relation to conceptual
phenomena which serve specific ideological purposes.
Originality/value Hopefully, the study could serve as the first ever attempt to adopt an integrative
analytical framework in the study of aggression and conflict in news discourse.
Keywords Hong Kong, Cognitive linguistics, Conceptualisation, Corpus linguistics, News discourse,
Occupy central
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) can be described as a way of doing discourse analysis from a
critical perspective, which often focusses on theoretical concepts such as power, ideology and
domination(Baker et al., 2008, p. 273). Discourse, in essence, encodes and enacts social
structures and relations, both reflecting and reinforcing ideologies leading to social power,
dominance, abuse and inequality. From a socio-cognitive rather than purely critical perspective,
Van Dijk (1995) has argued for the pivotal role that structures in the mind play when it comes to
explaining the relationship between discursive and social practices, demonstrating that
ideologies actually consist in the socially shared system of mental representations and
processes of group members(p. 18). Cognitive linguistics, of course, has the potential to offer
such a system of theoretical constructs for mental representations, as it is based on a number of
premises that advocate a systematic relationship between language and conceptualisation
(Langacker, 1987, 1991; Talmy, 2000). The synergy between cognitive linguistics and CDA and
Received 8 September 2016
Revised 1 November 2016
18 February 2017
Accepted 19 February 2017
The author would like to thank the
audience at the Corpus Linguistics
2015 conference and the UK
Cognitive Linguistics 2016
conference who provided useful
comments on earlier drafts of this
paper. Special thanks to Professor
John Flowerdew at the City
University of Hong Kong who
kindly offered to read the authors
manuscript and gave constructive
feedback to the author, which
improved it considerably.
May L.-Y. Wong is an Honorary
Assistant Professor at the
School of English, University of
Hong Kong, Hong Kong
SAR, China.
PAGE178
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VOL. 9 NO. 3 2017, pp.178-194, © Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 1759-6599 DOI 10.1108/JACPR-09-2016-0250
the mutual benefits that it can provide have been addressed in several works (see e.g. Dirven
et al., 2007; Hart, 2010, 2011a, b, 2015a; Koller, 2014; Stockwell, 1999). This paper, then, is
specifically concerned with a cognitive approach to CDA which is used to examine both linguistic
and conceptual phenomena invoked in newspaper texts to shed light on their ideological nature.
In an attempt to counter claims of researcher subjectivity resulting in a biased analysis,
quantitative analytical procedures afforded by corpus linguistics have also been used to identify
what is linguistically frequent or salient in the press reports.
Many CDA researchers have also begun to seethe benefits that corpus linguisticsmethods bring in
a growing body of work, including Baker (2005, 2006), Baker and McEnery (2005, 2014),
Baker et al. (2008, 2012), Hardt-Mautner (1995), Koller and Mautner (2004), Mautner (2007),
OHalloran and Coffin (2004) and Orpin (2005). In particular, there have been research studies
applying combined CDA/CL methods to the analysis of newspapers (see e.g. Baker and Levon,
2015; Baker et al., 2008; Brindle, 2016; Gabrielatos and Baker, 2008). As Baker et al. (2008,
p. 297) point out, quantification can reveal the degree of generality of, or confidence in, the study
findingsand conclusions, thus guardingagainst over- or under-interpretation, making a convincing
case for the fusion of corpuslinguistics and CDA. I basically beginfrom a naïv eposition, allowing
the analysis to be largely dictated by whatever linguistic features emerge through an initial
quantitative investigation(Baker and McEnery, 2014, p. 466; see also Tognini-Bonelli, 2001).
The first aim of the present study is to explore the triangulation between corpus linguistics,
cognitive linguistics and CDA as a methodological innovation to reveal more precisely how
corpus-based CDA (which is already a relatively recent methodological innovation) can be greatly
enriched by a thorough and revealing analysis of conceptualisations inherent in the text afforded
by cognitive linguistics. In doing so, this study examines the media representations of a recent
political protest, Occupy Central, that took place in Hong Kong in 2014 as a case study, drawing
on tools and concepts from these disparate yet interconnected fields in the analysis. Second,
guided by this methodological innovation, the study aims to make the ways visible and
transparent in which discourse plays a role in perpetuating ideological beliefs as reflected in the
institutional stances and identities of newspapers by examining the media coverage of the
political event in both Hong Kong and Mainland China; as Wodak and Meyer (2001) insightfully
point out, CDA is discourse analysis with an attitude(p. 96), strongly suggesting that CDA is
crucial in unravelling how unequal language use can reflect underlying ideological differences in
the representation of social actors involved in a political context, especially how aggression or
aggressive behaviour of represented social actors is depicted in press coverage of political
protests (Cushion, 2007; Husting, 2006; Jansen, 2000; Otto et al., 2010). In the next section,
then, I briefly outline the protest and its key events. In Section 3, I discuss the cognitive linguistic
approach to CDA. In Section 4, I introduce my corpus data and methodology and in Section 5,
apply quantitative analytical techniques to the data to reveal any statistically significant patterns of
discursive practice. In Section 6, I present a cognitive-linguistic analysis of construals invoked in
China Dailys and South China Morning Posts(SCMPs) press reports of the political protest.
In Section 7, I draw some summative conclusions.
2. Overview of Hong Kongs occupy central protest
Inspired by the global Occupy movements (Rojo, 2014),[1] the Occupy Central political protest in
Hong Kong began on 28 September 2014 after a week of class boycotts by local students led by
activist groups[2] Scholarism and the Hong Kong Federation of Students as frustrations had been
mounting since Beijings ruling in August stated that voters would only be able to vote for their
chief executive in 2017 from a list of pre-approved candidates[3]. Thousands of pro-democracy
activists took to the streets demanding fully democratic elections for the citys chief executive and
demanding current Chief Executive C.Y. Leung to resign. That evening, riot police used tear gas
to disperse the crowds, prompting tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents to join the protest
every night through the following week, and effectively shutting down key parts of the city by
blockading several traffic junctions in the city, including Admiralty, Causeway Bay and Mong Kok.
Over the course of October, these protest sites turned into public exhibition spaces with artwork
immortalising symbols of the protest such as yellow umbrellas and ribbons. Despite all the
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