This Element explores approaches to locating and examining social identity in corpora with and without the aid of demographic metadata. This is a key concern in corpus-aided studies of language and identity, and this Element sets out to explore the main challenges and affordances associated with either approach and to discern what either approach can (and cannot) show. It describes two case studies which each compare two approaches to social identity variables – sex and age – in a corpus of 14-million words of patient comments about NHS cancer services in England. The first approach utilises demographic tags to group comments according to patients' sex/age while the second involves categorising cases where patients disclose their sex/age in their comments. This Element compares the findings from either approach, with the approaches themselves being critically discussed in terms of their implications for corpus-aided studies of language and identity.

Corpus Linguistics for Health Communication provides an accessible and practical introduction to the use of corpus linguistics methods to analyse health-related language use across various contexts and genres. Offering a critical review of the field, discussion of extended case studies, and practical exercises based on spoken, written, and digital language data, this book: introduces the fields of health communication and corpus linguistics and critically reviews cutting-edge studies in the burgeoning area of corpus-based health communication; describes the processes involved in planning a corpus linguistics study of health communication, including designing and building a corpus, selecting tools, and implementing techniques of analysis; demonstrates how corpus linguistics methods can – and have – been applied to the study of spoken, written, and digital health communication, offering critical reflections and suggesting areas for future development. Corpus Linguistics for Health Communication is essential reading for those working at the interface of corpus linguistics and health communication. Both those with a little or a lot of experience in either field will find value in its pages.

The breadth and spread of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) indicate its usefulness for exploring language use within a social context. However, its theoretical foundations, limitations, and its epistemological implications must be considered so that we can adjust our research designs accordingly. This Element focuses on important meta-level questions around epistemology, while also offering a compact guide to which corpus linguistic tools are available and how they can contribute to finding out more about discourse. This Element will appeal to researchers both new and experienced, both within the CADS community and beyond.

This book brings together a collection of case studies that explore the relationship between health and masculinity. It covers various topics related to health, such as mental health, sexual health, eating disorders and coronavirus, and offers health-based perspectives on issues such as migration and gender identity, as these relate to masculinities. In exploring these themes, this book addresses a wide range of communicative contexts, including online forums, interviews, advertising, sex education materials, migrant integration classes, and suicide notes. This book will appeal to linguists interested in health and gender (particularly masculinities), as well as scholars in fields such as psychology, media studies, cultural studies, and other humanities and social science disciplines with a focus on discourse.

Why is language so important to the ways that we make sense of anxiety? This book uses corpus assisted discourse analysis to examine twenty-three million words of text posted to a forum for people with anxiety. It shows how linguistic techniques like catastrophisation and anthropomorphisation can result in very different conceptualisations of anxiety, as well as how aspects of identity like age, sex and cultural background can impact on understandings of anxiety and how it ought to be managed. It tracks the changing identities of posters, from their first posts to their last, and incorporates a range of corpus-based techniques to examine the language data, enabling consideration of interaction between participants and features associated with online forms of communication like emoji. It ultimately provides a step towards a better understanding of different responses to anxiety and aims to promote further engagement with this topic in the field of applied linguistics.

This Element provides a systematic overview and synthesis of corpus-based research into collocations focusing on the learning and use of collocations by second language (L2) users. Underlining the importance of collocation as a key notion within the field of corpus linguistics, the text offers a state-of-the-art account of the main findings related to the applications of corpora and corpus-based measures for defining, identifying and analysing collocations as related to second language acquisition. Emphasising the quality of L2 collocation research, the Element illustrates key methodological issues to be considered when conducting this type of corpus analysis. It also discusses examples of pertinent research questions and points to representative studies treated as models of good practice. Aiming at researchers both new and experienced, the Element also points to avenues for future work and shows the relevance of corpus-based analysis for improving the process of learning and teaching of L2 collocations.

This Element offers intermediate or experienced programmers algorithms for Corpus Linguistic (CL) programming in the Python language using dataframes that provide a fast, efficient, intuitive set of methods for working with large, complex datasets such as corpora. This Element demonstrates principles of dataframe programming applied to CL analyses, as well as complete algorithms for creating concordances; producing lists of collocates, keywords, and lexical bundles; and performing key feature analysis. An additional algorithm for creating dataframe corpora is presented including methods for tokenizing, part-of-speech tagging, and lemmatizing using spaCy. This Element provides a set of core skills that can be applied to a range of CL research questions, as well as to original analyses not possible with existing corpus software.

This Element explores relationships between collocations, writing quality, and learner and contextual variables in a first-year composition (FYC) programme. Comprising three studies, the Element is anchored in understanding phraseological complexity and its sub-constructs of sophistication and diversity. First, the authors look at sophistication through association measures. They tap into how these measures may tell us different types of information about collocation via a cluster analysis. Selected measures from this clustering are used in a cumulative links model to establish relationships between these measures, measures of diversity and measures of task, the language background of the writer and individual writer variation, and writing quality scores. A third qualitative study of the statistically significant predictors helps understand how writers use collocations and why they might be favoured or downgraded by raters. This Element concludes by considering the implications of this modelling for assessment.

Language, Health and Culture brings together contributions by linguistic scholars working in the area of health communication in Asia—in particular, in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Singapore, Japan and Taiwan. Olga Zayts-Spence and Susan M. Bridges, along with the contributors, draw on a diverse range of authentic data from different (primary, secondary, digital) healthcare contexts across Asia. The contributions probe empirical analyses and meta-reflections on the empirical, epistemological and theoretical foundations of doing research on language and health communication in Asia. While many of the medical and technological advances originate from the ‘non-English-dominant’/‘peripheral’ contexts, when it comes to health communication, there is a strong tendency to downplay and marginalize the scope and the impact of the ripe research tradition in these contexts. The contributions to the edited volume problematize the hegemony of dominant (Anglocentric) traditions in health communication research by highlighting culture- and context-specific ways of interpreting different health realities through linguistic lenses.

Many people believe that the evil in the world is caused by external forces, while others use the same argument to say that this proves that there is no God or evil, but simply human nature and that evil is a part of it. But in Unacknowledged: The Hidden Impact of Negative Emotions on Mental Health, you will understand that both options are irrelevant because the true source of evil can be identified and explained. You will also realize that evil is a choice that many people make, and that if more people were educated and aware of this information, evil wouldn't exist. Although acts of cruelty can be found throughout human history, they persist largely due to the rationalization and general acceptance of such acts by the masses and their unwillingness to choose other paths. As a result, depression and loneliness have also become part of our lives, and not many people believe that they can naturally overcome these emotional states. Unacknowledged aims to replace the confusion that still shadows the world with clarity, giving multiple examples of what makes a person evil and how to stop such individuals, but also teaching how we can find our own peace of mind in such a world. It challenges the views of many religions in a way that is more genuine, honest, scientific, and essentially practical. It also gives you hope for a world with more justice, forgiveness, harmony, and dignity.