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This book investigates to what extent claims of common social science risk theories such as risk society, governmentality, risk and culture, risk colonisation and culture of fear are reflected in linguistic changes in print news media. The authors provide a corpus-based investigation of risk words in The New York Times (1987-2014) and a case study of the health domain.
The book presents results from an interdisciplinary enterprise which combines sociological risk theories with a systematic functional theory of language to conduct an empirical analysis of linguistic patterns and social change. It will be of interest to students and scholars interested in corpus linguistics and digital humanities, and social scientists looking for new research strategies to examine long term social change.
List of contents
1 Introduction.- 2. Conceptual Foundations.- 3. Research Design and Methods.- 4. Risk in the New York Times.- 5. Risk, Health and Medicine in The New York Times.- 6. Summary and Conclusions.
About the author
Jens O. Zinn is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences Research Centre at Lancaster University, UK and Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Daniel McDonald is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen, Germany.
Summary
This book investigates to what extent claims of common social science risk theories such as risk society, governmentality, risk and culture, risk colonisation and culture of fear are reflected in linguistic changes in print news media. The authors provide a corpus-based investigation of risk words in The New York Times (1987-2014) and a case study of the health domain.
The book presents results from an interdisciplinary enterprise which combines sociological risk theories with a systematic functional theory of language to conduct an empirical analysis of linguistic patterns and social change. It will be of interest to students and scholars interested in corpus linguistics and digital humanities, and social scientists looking for new research strategies to examine long term social change.
Additional text
“From the outset and throughout the book, readers are very well guided through the research process of conceptualisation, hypothesis formulation and discussion of empirical evidence. ... Moreover, it offers original insights on the study of diachronic developments of risk language and a fruitful empirical path for exploring connections between language and social change, thus opening new ground for further research.” (Maria Grazia Galantino, Health, Risk & Society, April, 2018)
Report
"From the outset and throughout the book, readers are very well guided through the research process of conceptualisation, hypothesis formulation and discussion of empirical evidence. ... Moreover, it offers original insights on the study of diachronic developments of risk language and a fruitful empirical path for exploring connections between language and social change, thus opening new ground for further research." (Maria Grazia Galantino, Health, Risk & Society, April, 2018)
