‘Family in the UK – Risks, Threats and Dangers: A Modern Diachronic Corpus-assisted Study across Two Genres’.

Family in the UK ─ risks, threats and dangers: a modern diachronic corpus-assisted study across two genres Jane Helen Johnson University of Bologna The institution of ‘the family’ in Britain is undergoing considerable change, involving “the formation and dissolution of families and households, and the evolving expectations within individuals’ personal relationships” (Giddens 2001: 178). Changes may of course be positive but the family may be affected both externally and internally by factors which may be described as ‘risk’, perhaps determined by fundamental changes both in and to society. Particularly in the last few decades indeed the subject of risk has become increasingly significant and of topical interest (following Beck 1992). Though much research has focussed on risk within a sociological framework, not much cross-disciplinary work has been done which brings together risk sociology and linguistics (Zinn 2010). One notable exception is Hamilton et al (2007), who use a corpus of spoken discourse (CANCODE) to investigate the semantics, prosody and phraseology of risk in spoken British English. The special issue of Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines (2010: 4:2) also features research which makes use of corpus linguistics to examine risk (cf. Marko 2010; Grundmann and Krishnamurthy 2010; and Sandor 2010). Even more recent work includes Hardy and Colombini (2011) who use the Corpus of Contemporary American English (CoCA) to investigate the semantic prosody of risk across different genres in US English. The focus of this paper is instead to investigate risk in two specific genres and with reference to the particular reality of the family, bearing in mind that “risk is not inherent in any situation [....] but is created through discourses” (Pickard 2009: 69), since “discourse and society shape each other” (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Fairclough 1992: 9). Connections will thus be investigated between perception and expression of risk to the family, both in news discourse and in academic discourse focussing specifically on sociological issues. Reference will be made to sociological issues such as how the family is affected by ‘disembedding’ from traditional commitments and support relationships (Beck 1992: 128), as well as the ‘disembedding’ of social relations (cf. Giddens 2001) (Charles et al 2008). In order to do this, the study uses an MD-CADS approach (see Partington 2010) to investigate the semantic field of risk represented linguistically in relation to family through the lemmas RISK, THREAT and DANGER across two different genres. More specifically, we consider: • the genre of news (in a purpose-built corpus of British newspaper texts from the Guardian and the Daily Mail, ‘about’ the family and selected on the basis of the presence of the word family/families; • the academic genre of sociology articles, comprising: i. all the articles from the online version of Sociology, the journal of the British Sociological Association, between 2008 and 2012, consisting of 2 million tokens; ii. a subset of the aforesaid articles ‘about’ the family, selected on the basis of the presence of the word family/families in the article abstract. A diachronic element is provided by the collection of news articles from two separate time periods more than a decade apart, and more specifically: • the 1993 corpus: featuring 500 articles from the 1993 editions of the Guardian and 500 articles from the 1993 editions of the Daily Mail (total tokens 654,000); • the 2005+ corpus: featuring 500 articles from the Guardian published between 2005-2011 and 500 articles from the Daily Mail published between 2005-2011 (total tokens 532,000). A quantitative investigation of linguistic patterns around the lemmas RISK, THREAT and DANGER is made, focussing on concordances, collocates, frequency lists and keyword lists based on both single words and word clusters, followed by a qualitative analysis of particular stretches of discourse to build a comparative picture of how risk, threat and danger to the family is described both across genres and diachronically. Though previous research on a smaller scale (Johnson, 2011) suggested that political orientation would certainly condition what newspapers perceive as threat to the family (in the case of the Daily Mail between 2005 and 2011, for example, gay marriage, abortion, IVF and lesbians wanting to bear children not surprisingly all figured among threats to the traditional family), this study extends findings diachronically, across genres, and in greater linguistic depth. Specific research issues concern: the phraseology of wordforms of RISK and other near synonyms such as DANGER and THREAT in a family context; focus on the agents involved in causing the risk; and evaluation (Hunston 2004, 2011; Hunston and Thompson 2000) of the risks, danger and threats to the family. Investigation of these issues will help to build up a snapshot of risk to the family across genres and in different time periods. Keywords: family, risk, newspapers, sociology, MD-CADS References Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society. London: Sage. Berger, P.L. and Luckmann, T. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality. Garden City NY: Anchor Books. Charles, N., Davies, C. and Harris, C. 2008. Families in Transition: Social Change, Family Formation and Kin Relationships. Bristol: Policy Press. Fairclough, N. 1992. Introduction. In N. Fairclough (ed) Critical Language Awareness. London and New York: Longman. Giddens, A. 2001. Sociology. 4th ed. Cambridge: Polity Press. Grundmann, R. and Krishnamurthy, R. 2010. “The discourse of climate change. A corpus-based approach”. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines 4(2): 125-146. Hamilton, C., Adolphs, S. and Nerlich, B. 2007. “The meanings of ‘risk’: A view from corpus linguistics”. Discourse and Society 18 (2), 163–181. Hardy, D. E. and Colombini, C.B. 2011. “A genre, collocational, and constructional analysis of RISK*”. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 16(4): 462–485. Hunston, S. 2004. “Counting the uncountable: problems of identifying evaluation in a text and in a corpus”. In A. Partington, J. Morley and L. Haarman (eds.) Corpora and Discourse. Bern: Peter Lang, 157-188. Hunston, S. 2011. Corpus approaches to evaluation. Phraseology and Evaluative language. London: Routledge. Hunston, S. and Thompson, G. (eds). 2000. Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse. Oxford: OUP. Johnson, J.H. 2011. “Negotiating differences in the linguistic representation of the family in sociology texts: a corpus-assisted study”. Talk presented at the 38th International Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference, 25-29th July 2011, Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon, Portugal. Marko, G. 2010. “Heart disease and cancer, diet and exercise, vitamins and minerals: The construction of lifestyle risks in popular health discourse”. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines 4(2): 147-170. Partington, A. 2010. “Modern diachronic corpus-assisted discourse studies (MD-CADS) on UK newspapers: an overview of the project”. In A. Partington (ed). Modern Diachronic Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies on UK newspapers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 83-108. Pickard, S. 2009. “Governing Old Age: The ‘Case Managed’ Older Person”. Sociology 43(1): 67–84. Sandor, A. 2010. “Automatic detection of discourse indicating emerging risk”. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines 4(2): 171-179. Zinn, J.O. 2010. “Risk as discourse: interdisciplinary perspectives”. Critical approaches to discourse analysis across disciplines 4(2): 106-124.