Corona-Komposita und ‚Corona‘-Konzepte in der Medienberichterstattung in Standardsprache und in Leichter Sprache

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-368
Author(s):  
Julia Fuchs
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Semantic Relations ◽  
Standard Language ◽  
Corpus Linguistic ◽  
Additional Question ◽  
The Media ◽  
Open Question ◽  
Linguistic Approach

Abstract First linguistic studies have paid attention to the influence of the current corona pandemic on language use in the German media coverage. They have revealed, amongst other things, that compounds beginning with corona are very productive and frequent. Against this background, the questions arise how frequent these compounds de facto are, what their morphological and graphematic characteristics look like, which second constituents can be observed, which semantic relations between the constituents exist and what their referents are. However, not only people being able to read texts in standard language need information concerning the pandemic; individuals lacking this capacity also need to know which rules apply to public life and social interaction. Therefore, information on the corona pandemic is also available in German Easy Language. But translators are faced with several dilemmas regarding the translation of compounds into Easy Language. It is thus an open question whether compounds beginning with corona, recently observed in the media coverage in standard language, also occur in the media coverage in Easy Language and, if present, what their characteristics are in comparison to the relevant compounds in standard language. An additional question is how the referents of compounds beginning with corona in standard language are designated in Easy Language in those cases where no comparable compound beginning with corona is used for this purpose. The present study uses a corpus linguistic approach to address these questions.

Within-concept similarities in a taxonomy: a corpus linguistic approach

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
STIJN STORMS ◽  
DIRK SPEELMAN ◽  
DIRK GEERAERTS ◽  
GERT STORMS
Keyword(s):  
Vector Space ◽  
Similarity Measure ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Corpus Linguistic ◽  
Context Vector ◽  
Vector Space Models ◽  
Linguistic Approach ◽  
Basic Level ◽  
Semantic Domains

abstractThis paper looks at a hitherto unexplored aspect of taxonomically organized concepts which has to do with word distributions in corpora of actual language use. In parallel to the psychological informativeness claim of the differentiation explanation, the question is addressed if concepts are internally more similar than their higher-ranked taxonomical relatives. This internal similarity is measured by making use of token-based vector space models. For each occurrence of a concept in the corpus a context vector can be calculated, which then serves as input for the internal similarity measure. Experiments are conducted for taxonomies taken from the Dutch counterparts of the English semantic domains animal and means of transportation. Results do not wholeheartedly agree with the imposition of a strict taxonomical order, but give rise to a new behavioural measure of the basic level.

English ants are digging holes in the Chinese levee

2013 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yan Xi
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Language Ideology ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Standard Language ◽  
Chinese Media ◽  
The Media ◽  
Linguistic Purism ◽  
Standard Language Ideology

The media have become a key site for the production and reproduction of language ideologies in modern societies. This is typically reflected in language ideological debates in 2010 in the Chinese media. In 2009, an article entitled “English ants are digging holes in the Chinese levee” got wide media coverage and aroused much controversy in the Chinese media in the following year. The crusade for linguistic purism ended with the promulgation of new regulations banning China’s media organizations and publishers from randomly mixing foreign languages with Chinese in publications. The present study aims to explore the inherent language ideologies naturalized in the debates of Chinese linguistic purism and various strategies adopted for the construction of the ideologies. The findings reveal that the ideology of “one nation and one language” and standard language ideology play an important role in the sociolinguistic imagination of a homogeneous Chinese society and protection of “pure” Chinese against English invasion. It is hoped that the present study will contribute to language ideology studies and shed new light on Chinese sociolinguistic studies.

scholarly journals Skandalisierung korpuslinguistisch. Ein empirisch-linguistischer Blick auf die Berichterstattung zur "Wulff-Affäre"

2014 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Noah Bubenhofer
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
The Political ◽  
German Politics ◽  
Corpus Linguistic ◽  
Language Pattern ◽  
The Media ◽  
Linguistic Methods ◽  
Private Loan ◽  
German Newspapers

Abstract What kind of language is typical of the mass media coverage of a scandal? Which linguistic means have the effect of scandalizing a public person like a politician? The study presented in this paper uses corpus linguistic methods to investigate a specific scandal in recent German politics: Federal President Christian Wulff was accused by the media of not having informed transparently about a private loan he had taken out. Further allegations of corruption presented by the media resulted in his resignation after only two months. The paper shows how automatic language pattern analyses of a corpus of articles about Wulff in two leading German newspapers reveal the typical patterns used in a discourse of scandalization. Additionally, also characteristic grammar features like tempus forms are incorporated in the analysis. The texts scandalizing a person use more patterned language than other news texts on politics. The patterns reflect the characteristic speech acts of scandalizing like accusing, informing, or speculating on the political future of the scandalized person, but also speech acts like defending and regretting. The use of tempus shows that scandalizing texts are more dynamic and vivid compared to other political coverage.

Media Representation of the Pandemic: a Metaphorical Image of War (based on American Newspapers)

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (8) ◽  
pp. 69-83
Author(s):  
N. S. Dankova ◽  
E. V. Krekhtunova
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Media Representation ◽  
Martial Law ◽  
War Zone ◽  
Mass Consciousness ◽  
The Media ◽  
Coronavirus Infection ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

The article is devoted to the study of the media representation features of the situation of coronavirus infection spread. The material was articles published in American newspapers. It is shown that the metaphorical model "War" is widely used in media coverage of the pandemic. The relevance of the work is due to the ability of the media to influence the mass consciousness. The methodological basis of the research is formed by critical discourse analysis, which establishes the connection between language and social reality. The article provides an overview of works devoted to the study of metaphor. The theoretical foundations for the study of metaphorical modeling are given. In the course of the analysis, the linguistic means of updating the metaphorical model "War" were revealed. The authors note that this metaphorical model is represented by such frames as “War and its characteristics”, “Participants in military action”, “War zone”, “Enemy actions”, “Confronting the enemy”. It is shown that modern reality is presented in the media as martial law, the coronavirus is positioned in the media as a cruel and merciless enemy seeking to take over the world, the treatment of the disease is represented as a fight against the enemy. It is concluded that the use of the metaphorical model "War" is one of the ways to conceptualize the spread of coronavirus.

scholarly journals “The Looming, Crazy Stalker Coronavirus”: Fear Mongering, Fake News, and the Diffusion of Distrust

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 237802312110247
Author(s):  
Alexandrea J. Ravenelle ◽  
Abigail Newell ◽  
Ken Cai Kowalski
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Media Consumption ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Compensatory Control ◽  
The Media ◽  
Good For ◽  
Fear Mongering ◽  
One Year

The authors explore media distrust among a sample of precarious and gig workers interviewed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although these left-leaning respondents initially increased their media consumption at the outset of the pandemic, they soon complained of media sensationalism and repurposed a readily available cultural tool: claims of “fake news.” As a result, these unsettled times have resulted in a “diffusion of distrust,” in which an elite conservative discourse of skepticism toward the media has also become a popular form of compensatory control among self-identified liberals. Perceiving “fake news” and media sensationalism as “not good” for their mental health, respondents also reported experiencing media burnout and withdrawing from media consumption. As the pandemic passes its one-year anniversary, this research has implications for long-term media coverage on COVID-19 and ongoing media trust and consumption.

scholarly journals A multi-task approach to argument frame classification at variable granularity levels

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Philipp Heinisch ◽  
Philipp Cimiano
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Important Task ◽  
Coarse Grained ◽  
Media Frames ◽  
Task Setting ◽  
Variable Level ◽  
The Media ◽  
Variable Granularity

Abstract Within the field of argument mining, an important task consists in predicting the frame of an argument, that is, making explicit the aspects of a controversial discussion that the argument emphasizes and which narrative it constructs. Many approaches so far have adopted the framing classification proposed by Boydstun et al. [3], consisting of 15 categories that have been mainly designed to capture frames in media coverage of political articles. In addition to being quite coarse-grained, these categories are limited in terms of their coverage of the breadth of discussion topics that people debate. Other approaches have proposed to rely on issue-specific and subjective (argumentation) frames indicated by users via labels in debating portals. These labels are overly specific and do often not generalize across topics. We present an approach to bridge between coarse-grained and issue-specific inventories for classifying argumentation frames and propose a supervised approach to classifying frames of arguments at a variable level of granularity by clustering issue-specific, user-provided labels into frame clusters and predicting the frame cluster that an argument evokes. We demonstrate how the approach supports the prediction of frames for varying numbers of clusters. We combine the two tasks, frame prediction with respect to media frames categories as well as prediction of clusters of user-provided labels, in a multi-task setting, learning a classifier that performs the two tasks. As main result, we show that this multi-task setting improves the classification on the single tasks, the media frames classification by up to +9.9 % accuracy and the cluster prediction by up to +8 % accuracy.

scholarly journals Personalized Cancer Medicine in the Media: Sensationalism or Realistic Reporting?

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 741
Author(s):  
Katherine Hicks-Courant ◽  
Jenny Shen ◽  
Angela Stroupe ◽  
Angel Cronin ◽  
Elizabeth F. Bair ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Personalized Medicine ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Disease Risk ◽  
Federal Drug Administration ◽  
Personalized Cancer Medicine ◽  
The Media ◽  
Cancer Medicine ◽  
Media Reports ◽  
Personalized Cancer ◽  
Standard Tests

Background: Given that media coverage can shape healthcare expectations, it is essential that we understand how the media frames “personalized medicine” (PM) in oncology, and whether information about unproven technologies is widely disseminated. Methods: We conducted a content analysis of 396 news reports related to cancer and PM published between 1 January 1998 and 31 December 2011. Two coders independently coded all the reports using a pre-defined framework. Determination of coverage of “standard” and “non-standard” therapies and tests was made by comparing the media print/broadcast date to the date of Federal Drug Administration approval or incorporation into clinical guidelines. Results: Although the term “personalized medicine” appeared in all reports, it was clearly defined only 27% of the time. Stories more frequently reported PM benefits than challenges (96% vs. 48%, p < 0.001). Commonly reported benefits included improved treatment (89%), prediction of side effects (30%), disease risk prediction (33%), and lower cost (19%). Commonly reported challenges included high cost (28%), potential for discrimination (29%), and concerns over privacy and regulation (21%). Coverage of inherited DNA testing was more common than coverage of tumor testing (79% vs. 25%, p < 0.001). Media reports of standard tests and treatments were common; however, 8% included information about non-standard technologies, such as experimental medications and gene therapy. Conclusion: Confusion about personalized cancer medicine may be exacerbated by media reports that fail to clearly define the term. While most media stories reported on standard tests and treatments, an emphasis on the benefits of PM may lead to unrealistic expectations for cancer genomic care.

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