Goes beyond available research which focusses on particular risks such as climate change, GM-food, or terrorismExamines long term change in the usage of the risk semantic across different social domains and risksUtilizes corpus based research strategies from computational linguistics to examine long term social change on risk

Autorentext

Jens O. Zinn is Marie Skodowska-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.

Zusammenfassung

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.

Inhalt
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.