Research update: Charlotte Taylor

As we get ready for the new term starting in September, this is the first in a series of research news from your lecturers. If you’ve wondered what we get up to when we’re not with you, this is it… 

Charlotte Taylor 

In terms of actually doing research the academic year, 2017–2018 was a pretty quiet one for me because I was busy on maternity leave. But there was a lot going on with publications coming out from projects I’ve been working on over the last few years.

As some of you already know, my research falls into three broad (and interconnected areas): the analysis of mock politeness in interaction, representation of migration and migrants, and methodological issues of how we go about investigating discourses in meaningful ways. So, if we start with the first, I had an article published in Language and Gender titled Women are bitchy but men are sarcastic?: Investigating gender and sarcasm. What I really wanted to investigate here was the stereotypes that I was finding in both lay and academic discourse about how men and women do mock politeness. The analysis showed that gender has an influence on how we describe mock politeness – and not so much on who actually does it.

Moving on to the second thread, I published a book chapter in book on Representing the Other in European Media Discourses about Togetherness or othering?: community and comunità in the UK and Italian press. What got me started on this project was realising that these words have this seemingly positive and warm set of connotations but that when used in news articles talking about migration the connotations were very different: communities are never ‘us’ in this context.
 
In the third (and busiest) area, several projects came to fruition at the same time. First of all, I co-edited a special issue of the Journal for Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines with our own Roberta Piazza on the topic of multidisciplinary approaches to discourse. This came out of a very successful event we organised at Sussex. Watch this space for more in the series!

A book that I co-edited with Melani Schroeter from the University of Reading on Exploring Silence and Absence in Discourse: Empirical approaches came out with Palgrave. Melani and I have worked together before on a migration-related project and realised we had this shared interest in trying to uncover what doesn’t get said. This was a wonderful opportunity to pull together research from researchers working on the topics of silence and absence (e.g. what gets suppressed in news discourse about a particular topic) and we had fascinating chapters from contributors working in Australia, Denmark, France, Hungary, Italy, Nigeria, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, USA.

In 2018 I published another book, Corpus Approaches to Discourse: A critical review, co-edited with my colleague Anna Marchi and published with Routledge. For this book, we invited experts to contribute chapters on a set of topics that we considered key to taking a critical (insider) stance towards the combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. We’re hoping that it will be helpful for anyone starting out on a corpus & discourse project and wondering what they should be aware of before getting started. We were invited to give a plenary paper at the Corpus & Discourse Conference (#cadconf2018) held at Lancaster University in June 2018 on a related topic, and we talked about Blind spots and dusty corners: (self)-reflections on partiality in corpus & discourse studies.

My last publication for 2017–2018 is one that brings together teaching and research as it is a textbook on one of my favourite topics: political discourse. This book was co-authored with Alan Partington and is called The Language of Persuasion in Politics: An Introduction. The chapters in the book show how we can use linguistics to analyse and understand language used in politics, from speeches to tweets.