Analysing aggression of social actors in political protests: combining corpus and cognitive approaches to discourse analysis

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the newspaper representations of the aggressive behaviour of social actors in political protests and explore the benefits of integrating corpus linguistics and cognitive approaches to a critical discourse analysis in analysing press reports. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses methods from corpus linguistics and theoretical constructs from cognitive linguistics to examine patterns of representation around Occupy Central, a recent political protest in Hong Kong, in two corpora of English-language newspaper articles published inChina Dailyand theSouth China Morning Post(SCMP). Findings An analysis of the ten most frequent collocates of the word police showed that theChina Dailycorpus articles typically index the presentation of police as vulnerable yet professional in their handling of violent protesters, whereas inSCMP, police officers are often presented as aggressors. The analysis subsequently considered three discursive strategies, namely structural configuration, framing and identification that are mediated through conceptualisations that representations in text evoke. Research limitations/implications In the proposed integrated approach, quantitative investigations of corpus examples could be focussed and contextualised in such a way that particular linguistic instantiations in discourse which are proved statistically salient can be further analysed in relation to conceptual phenomena which serve specific ideological purposes. Originality/value Hopefully, the study could serve as the first ever attempt to adopt an integrative analytical framework in the study of aggression and conflict in news discourse.

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