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This overview aims to give an idea of what both corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) and MD-CADS involve, to provide some information about the newspaper corpora employed here, and to outline methodologies commonly followed in this area, including those exploited by the other contributors to this volume. Two sets of practical analyses are also presented. The first is inductive and bottom-up, derived from a close analysis of the comparative keywords generated by comparing the lists of items from the two parallel corpora from different time periods; the aim is to uncover changes over time both in language and in what social, political and cultural issues were considered worthy of attention. The second is more intuitive and hypothesis-driven; the hypothesis is that an examination of a certain term, namely moral panic, can shed some light on which issues writers thought did not merit all the attention they were receiving. I will conclude with brief sketches of the other papers in this issue, and reflections on the relevance of MD-CADS in both language research and teaching.

In this chapter, WordSmith Tools 5.0 (Scott, 2008) and Xaira are employed to examine the prefix anti, its collocates, contexts and quantitative profile in the SiBol corpus. First, the problems involved in investigating a prefix are discussed, followed by an examination of the anti prefix itself. Although the overall proportion of anti prefixing has remained fairly similar over time, (unlike pro which has decreased), there are key changes in the stems or ‘targets’ of the prefix which reflect changes in social and political concerns. Among the findings are changes in the way that antibiotics are talked about, and an increase in the discourse about products designed to deal with age-related problems. The study also examines co-texts and contexts of anti terms expressing opposition to groups distinguished by their nationality, religion or ethnic origins, and differences in the ways such opposition is constructed. The analysis illustrates how modern diachronic corpus-assisted discourse studies (MD-CADS) can contribute to research into socio-cultural and political language and highlights the value of investigating prefixes.

This chapter contains an analysis of the changing rhetorical role of science in UK broadsheet newspapers from 1993 and 2005, and conclude that there have been noteworthy changes. First, science, and more specifically, the formulation the science, is increasingly employed as a model of authority, appealing to ethos rather than logos; the authority is asserted but relatively rarely justified, and this may be considered the most significant change in that it drives several others. At the same time, there has been a popularisation of the science in the newspapers as it becomes an ‘add on’ to popular stories. Furthermore, there is evidence that science is being progressively fitted into the news story format, which demands recency as a news value, as opposed to features-style reports. Finally, science appears to have shifted from its earlier place in opposition to art and culture, to a paradigm in which its primary alter, or opposition, is religion.

In this chapter, a diachronic approach is adopted in the analysis of the two large SiBol newspaper corpora, in order to examine and compare the expression of evidentiality (Bednarek, 2006; Dendale and Tasmowski, 2001; and Chafe, 1986) – that is, how the writer's knowledge is marked as having been ‘seen’ or ‘heard’, etc., how the knowledge is attributed, and how it is passed on to the reader. Findings show an increased use of evidential markers over the thirteen-year period studied, and, at the same time, a shift in reporter usage of evidentiality towards hearsay evidence and the reporting of knowledge acquired by speculation. This is in keeping with other observations regarding an increased ‘vagueness’ in contemporary journalism (see Duguid [a], this volume),which is counterbalanced at times with an elevation of the newsworker's presence.