Changing Representations of Animals in Canadian English (1920s – 2010s)

This paper presents a diachronic study of the discursive representation of animals as it emerges from an electronic corpus of Canadian English, the Strathy Corpus. This corpus, developed by the Strathy Language Unit at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario), and available from the Brigham Young University (BYU) online platform, is considered to be the most suitable corpus of Canadian English to be used as a national corpus (Cook and Hirst 2012). The aim of this study is to track the main changes that have affected the use of the word “animal” and its related phraseologies in Canadian English over the course of the last century, specifically the period 1921-2011, using a critical discourse approach in which the corpus is used as a source of examples to investigate changing patterns of word context and usage. The focus is on Canadian English not only because of the key role animals play in the Canadian literary and cultural imagination (Fiamengo 2007; Bottez 2014; Banting 2015), but also in an attempt to extend studies on Canadian English beyond traditional academic debates on standardization, harmonization, and homogenization (Dollinger 2011: 8), to experiment with applying the set of critical discourse tools typically used to analyze the two dominant English standards, British and American, to a “non-dominant” (Dollinger 2011: 3), but still native and norm-providing dialect of English. Results show the enduring presence of “human/ animal” dichotomies, metaphors, and some animals consistently represented as symbols of Canada as a nation. Recent decades have also seen the emergence of entirely new patterns in discourse about animals, probably in response to climate change.