Abstract
The integration of corpus linguistic methods in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has proven both promising and prolific, offering among other things a counter to criticisms of selectivity, political bias and the subjectivity of qualitative interpretation. Its conceptual basis has seemed quite stable for more than a decade, with familiar arguments being traded for and against such integration. With Posthumanism and Deconstructing Arguments, Kieran O’Halloran has changed the rules of the game by re-thinking or, rather, de-territorializing the field in the spirit of Deleuzian philosophy to suggest a promising new approach to pedagogical CDA in the form of deconstructing public sphere arguments using corpus linguistics.
Part 1 outlines basic considerations and concepts. Here, O’Halloran identifies challenges for the practical evaluation of arguments in pedagogical CDA and thus indicates where his approach might provide a beneficial alternative. The book proposes corpus-driven strategies to evaluate arguments in terms of their acceptability, relevance and sufficiency (specifically straw man fallacies). By exploiting the affordances of digital tools and corpora, this approach complements the pedagogical focus on argument in Isabela and Norman Fairclough’s (2012) analytical framework. The principal goal in this, while remaining dedicated to the CDA tenet of revealing distortion through language use, is to provide students and non-linguists with an easily accessible analytical approach based on ethical rather than political commitment. This aim is partly in response to criticisms of CDA as circular, arbitrary and reflective of the analysts’ own political convictions, but O’Halloran’s argument for an ethical approach also rests on the observation that students’ political outlook may not yet be so crystallized or different from the lecturer’s.
O’Halloran concludes this part of the book by introducing several concepts and techniques in corpus linguistics. The advantages of corpus methods regarding efficiency, data size and quantitative grounding of interpretation are convincing, but perhaps the crucial point is that corpus linguistics provides a view of language as consisting of semi-fixed, semi-abstract word patterns and the lexical priming they entail (Hoey, 2005), which affords a basis for deconstructive analysis: in studying, for example, a text that refers to ‘tried and tested science’, corpus evidence that ‘tried and tested’ does not normally collocate with ‘science’ but rather with ‘technology’ can thus be used to open up the text to deconstruction. However, due to the emphasis on the objectivity of findings generated by corpus linguistic methods, the researcher’s role in using them is neglected: choosing software, statistical operations and their settings all affect such findings. O’Halloran’s presentation of these methods as more objective and simpler to learn than other linguistic methods is thus somewhat misleading.
In the chapters of Part 2, O’Halloran outlines and demonstrates one strategy for deconstructing public sphere arguments by showing where they depart from ‘normal language use’ for a particular topic. Collocations obtained from a large general corpus are used to build a ‘discursive subjectivity’ that represents habitual discourse. Where the argument deviates from relevant patterns, ‘normal collocation’ is inserted into the text so that its ‘excess’ or ‘deficit meaning’ disturbs the text and facilitates deconstruction. While there are certain issues with the notion of ‘normal’ and how it might relate to the composition and availability of general corpora, this does provide a convincing short-hand way of identifying relevant absences in an argument. In Chapter 5, O’Halloran aptly demonstrates this strategy by deconstructing an argument in support of genetically modified agriculture. Chapter 6 extends the approach into semantic field cohesion to study the arguments supporting the US-led 2003 Iraq War, successfully showing how the approach can bypass traditional challenges of reconstruction.
The chapters of Part 3 present and demonstrate a second strategy in O’Halloran’s pedagogical CDA: compiling and using corpora to explore the absence, misrepresentation or criticism of minoritarian standpoints (especially those that challenge the socio-economic status quo) in public sphere arguments. Here, the Deleuzian influence is not just felt in terminology, but is an alternative conceptualization of CDA’s focus on ‘relatively powerless groups’, which are not necessarily ‘minorities’ but ‘minoritarian’. The analyst starts with the public sphere argument and then compiles a corpus of texts articulating the ‘standpoint subjectivity’ of the minoritarian group; corpus methods then help to identify whether that standpoint is adequately represented in the argument. As with the first strategy, familiarity with the minoritarian standpoint is not required, and O’Halloran even recommends that students choose unfamiliar groups. Significantly, this does not lead to a political critique as in most CDA but shows ‘digital hospitality to the Other’ – another crucial borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari (1987). In this sense, O’Halloran’s book proposes a dialectical and ethical ‘becoming-Other’ of the analyst rather than a re-affirmation of pre-existent political convictions. As in Part 2, this approach is exemplified in two case studies: a public sphere argument critiquing a campaign against the ‘page 3’ topless model in the British tabloid The Sun, and an argument contesting the ‘new atheism’ of Richard Dawkins.
Part 4 offers reflections on methodology and deterritorializations, acknowledging some limitations, such as the potential need to take account of expert voices, going beyond deconstructive reading strategies and the anti-contextual outlook of the Deleuze-inspired approach. Apart from the case studies, O’Halloran’s prose – while generally reader-friendly – is clearest here in highlighting the potential uses of the two reading strategies.
This bold and ambitious book is aimed primarily at university students, including a Glossary and an Appendix on corpus linguistic tools and will no doubt be valuable in pedagogical settings. Nonetheless, it may be best suited for readers with some research experience and prior knowledge or interest in Deleuzian thought. There are also some tensions with O’Halloran’s positioning both within and outside established CDA: his emphasis on ethical instead of political commitment seems to rest on a very narrow definition of what is political, given his claim that describing the world as ‘socially and economically unequal is not a political statement’ but a factual one (p. 270). Indeed, to see the world in such terms and to put this inequality at the heart of one’s analytical practice strikes me as deeply political, if perhaps in a broader sense.